AN NCS PREMIERE: TORTURERS’ LOBBY — “REPTILIAN HIDE”

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Apr 152024
 

One look at the cover art for the debut album from Tampa-based Torturers’ Lobby tells you that the music is likely to be disturbing but unconventional. It’s not easy to decipher what we’re seeing. Though skeletal remains and a vulture’s head appear to be part of the scene, the ghastly greenish hues and running veins create a twisted image of an old desecration.

It turns out (thankfully) that the music is also disturbing and unconventional, even more so than the cover art, the result of a willfully free-wheeling hybridizing of influences that follows only its own twisted logic but (also thankfully) doesn’t come off as “different for the sake of being different,” cohesion be damned.

We should quickly add that the music’s intensity is often so overpowering and shattering that it might leave you bug-eyed and slack-jawed.

As evidence of these conclusions we have two songs from the album to spotlight today, one of which has previously surfaced and one of which we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s June 14th release by Caligari Records and Ixiol Productions. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VRYKOLAKAS — “BILATERAL VENOMOUS ASSAULT

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Apr 152024
 

As you can see, today we’re premiering a song from a new album, Nocturnal Dominion of Death, by the veteran Singaporean death-dealers Vrykolakas. It’s the second song from the album to be revealed so far. Together, those two tracks bring to mind the boxing terminology for the “one-two punch”, the devastating combination of blows that leaves an opponent sprawled on the canvas.

So let’s take up the first punch first. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CONSTRUCT OF LETHE — EXCERPTS FROM “A KINDNESS DEALT IN VENOM”

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Apr 122024
 

The concept behind Construct of Lethe‘s new album A Kindness Dealt In Venom is challenging, and frankly, very disturbing. The music is also challenging, frequently so wildly unconventional that it could be branded “experimental death metal”, and in its extravagant twists and turns and instrumental spectacles, some disturbing and others exuberantly delirious, it creates a transfixing union with the concept.

The music is meant to be heard as one continuous song, 44 minutes in length, which follows the shattering conceptual narrative. However, it does include separate segments as it proceeds along its traumatic course, and we have two of those for you today — two that are among the most head-spinning episodes in the stunning pageant that the album creates. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AS THE SUN FALLS — “AURORA”

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Apr 122024
 

For the sake of As the Sun Falls and the people who filmed the video you’re about to see, we hope they pulled it off in one take so as to avoid frostbite. The expansive snowbound setting (filmed against the backdrop of Nummela, Finland) is dramatic, and the band’s members are heavily bundled and throwing themselves into the performance in a way that surely got their blood rushing — but it still looks icy cold.

Yet with a song named “Aurora” and a band who make their home in “the frozen heart of Finland”, the setting was a natural choice. And the video well-suits the music itself, which gets the heart pounding, creates a bitter and desolate chill, and beautifully but hauntingly shimmers like the aurora borealis. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CROWN OF ASTERIA — “CYPHER”

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Apr 112024
 

We don’t know who first coined the term “atmospheric black metal”, but it has obviously stuck. Its meaning, however, despite its wide usage, is somewhat vague. It suggests music that is more geared toward the creation of mood or visions kindled in the imagination than, well, music based more centrally on riffs and riots. But that still leaves a lot un-defined.

The vagueness of the term makes it a big umbrella, or a big tent, or whatever you want to call a canopy that covers a lot of people and the different things they’re doing, including people whose activities spill them outside the covering.

Which brings us to Michigan-based Crown of Asteria, the distinctive solo project of the musically prolific Meghan Wood. Now more than 10 years into its existence, Crown of Asteria has amassed a lengthy discography, one that has exhibited as much experimentation as it has been threaded with through-lines.

But while no year has passed since Crown of Asteria‘s inception without something new from the project (and usually several or many somethings), it’s been more than five years since the last full album — a span that will be closed on April 12th with Fiadh Productions‘ release of a new Crown of Asteria album named Cypher, which is the subject of today’s premiere. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MOTHER OF ALL — “GLOBAL PARASITIC LEVIATHAN”

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Apr 102024
 

I have no competent statistical evidence to back up this assertion, but it seems like the way most metal bands work is that the music comes first and then the vocalist, who may or may not be an instrumental performer, comes up with lyrical themes and words that might have no connection to whatever the other songwriters were feeling and thinking when they cooked up the music.

That is probably not the way things have worked in Mother of All. This band is the brainchild of Danish musician Martin Haumann, and although he has surrounded himself in Mother of All‘s recordings with some very talented instrumental performers to augment his own prodigious talents, it’s he who is the lyricist and the songwriter, and the lyrical themes have been crafted with such conceptual focus and adamance of belief that it seems unlikely they were an afterthought. More likely, those themes were in mind when much of the music was written.

On the other hand, the music on Mother of All‘s new album Global Parasitic Leviathan, which we’re premiering today just days from its April 12 release, is so fantastically exhilarating that it may create a disconnect in the minds of listeners from what the album is about. But let’s begin with what the album is about…. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DOGTAG REMAINS — “HILL 731”

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Apr 092024
 

Dogtag Remains are a death metal band from Greece, and their debut album Forgotten Battlefields is now set for co-release by Satanath Records (Georgia) and Australis Records (Chile) on April 25th.

As both the band’s name and the new album’s title suggest, the band have focused the subject matter of their music on war and all its madness, terror, and destruction — and the music itself renders those themes with devastating power and electrifying intensity, while also oppressively dragging listeners into the sinkholes of agony and hopelessness that inflict warfare’s victims.

Many of the new album’s 8 songs are apparently based upon historical events that the band wish us to remember, and that includes the one we’re premiering today — “Hill 731“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VERITERAS — “THE DARK HORIZON”

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Apr 082024
 

Sometimes a relatively new band’s love for a relatively old and well-established brand of music is so evident that it runs the serious risk of having nothing new to say. The risk exists even when the love is genuinely earnest and not a cash grab (though about the only cash-grabbing most underground metal bands are capable of achieving is by looking for lost coins in the crevices of couches).

The relatively new Seattle band Veriteras wear their love for old-school Scandinavian melodic death metal on their sleeves, and it is clearly an earnest and genuine love, with the influence of such bands as early In Flames, Dark Tranquillity, and Kalmah reverently embroidered on such sleeves.

So, the question arises: Do they have something new to say, and if so, what is it? The answer arrives in their second album, The Dark Horizon, which we’re premiering today in advance of its April 11th release. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WARDRA — “SATURN’S CUTTING BLADES”

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Apr 052024
 

Seven years have passed since the Russian black metal band Wardra released their debut album Небо медного цвета, but at last a second one is on the way, now set for an April 17 release by Satanath Records (Georgia) and Onism Productions (UK). The name of this one is Страж звёздных склепов (“Warden Of The Stellar Crypts“).

While the band’s first album could be considered an amalgam of traditional black metal and primitive mysticism, they’ve moved in a different direction on their new release — a movement into the endless darkness of space. As they describe it:

This is a story about the death of worlds on the endless fields of nuclear harvest and about a silent witness who will endlessly wander through the carpet of fragments of time, waiting for the beginning of a new world that writhes in endless convulsions of sleep, without hope of awakening. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SWELLING REPULSION — “SULLEN LIGHT OF EXPIRED STARS”

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Apr 052024
 

We decided to begin our introduction to this song premiere by displaying the phenomenal artwork by The Masked Observer that adorns the cover of the album that includes the song, un-interrupted by the band’s logo or the album title. Gazing at it, you can surely understand why.

The choice of this cover art is the first clue that the style of death metal crafted by Swelling Repulsion on their album Fatally Misguided is itself unusually colorful and engaging, one that takes a familiar landscape soundscape and morphs it into something that the releasing label (Transcending Obscurity) rightly calls a “quirky hidden gem” unearthed from the underground.

But we have an even better clue about what this multi-national trio have done in their forthcoming second album, a clue provided by the song you’re about to hear — “Sullen Light of Expired Stars” — whose title is almost as intriguing as the artwork. Continue reading »

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