AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GOLIATHAN — “ABERRATION” (LIVE)

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Dec 182020
 

 

Regular visitors to our site know that I spend a tremendous amount of time focusing on music premieres, at least one premiere of some kind every day. It’s time that could easily be spent in other ways, but one big reason I’m so devoted to doing them is because of how often they’ve introduced me to appealing bands who had flown under my radar. Of course, maybe this in turn leads to you discovering music you weren’t aware of either. Which leads me to the L.A. band Goliathan.

Until being invited to host the premiere of the live performance video you’re about to see and hear, that’s a name I hadn’t heard before, other than as the title to a Weedeater album from five years ago. After being completely captivated by this video from my first exposure to it, I learned that Goliathan launched their recording career with two EPs — their 2017 debut, Awakens, and a 2018 follow-up, Albion. The song featured in the video, “Aberration“, is off that Albion EP.

More recently the band also released Artifact, a collection of recordings that date back to 2006, documenting the band’s earliest incarnation, with the music remixed by Toshi Kasai (Melvins, Red Sparowes, Helmet) and mastered by Gene Grimaldi (Failure, Fantômas).

I mention all this because “Aberration” is pulling me toward all of those releases like a strong magnetic force, and maybe the same will be true for you if you’re also a newcomer to Goliathan’s brand of instrumental doom-metal-meets-post-rock. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SATANIZE — “LUCIFERIAN THRONES OF DEVASTATION”

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Dec 162020
 

 

I got big smiles from the press materials for Baphomet Altar Worship, the new album by the Portuguese bestial black metal band Satanize. The biggest smile arrived when I saw that the PR material likened the listening experience to a form of Zen. But by then I had already listened to some of the album — and I actually understood the point, hence the smile.

Make no mistake, just as the album art so vividly portrays, the music on the new album is hellish and iron-fisted. It gives no quarter and yields to nothing in its single-minded channeling of demonic malice and slaughtering barbarity. And yet, and yet, the music does surprisingly have the capacity to induce a fugue state. As unhinged as it is, something about the viper-ous melodies and the jet-speed rhythms produces a strangely mesmerizing effect.

Or maybe I should just speak for myself. You be your own judge. Which you’ll be able to do by listening to “Luciferian Thrones of Devastation“, the song we’re premiering today in advance of the album release by Helter Skelter and Regain Records on January 20th. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ABIOTIC — “SMOLDERED”

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Dec 142020
 

 

In the early years of this site, I closely watched and wrote about the meteoric rise of a South Florida band named Abiotic, who quickly vaulted from a couple of singles and a 2011 EP to the release of their 2012 debut album Symbiosis on the Metal Blade label. In considering that album I did my best (at length) to wrestle its mind-boggling escapades into words, but probably failed. With elements that appealed to fans of both tech-death and deathcore, and probably many people committed to mental asylums, the music (I wrote) was “intricately constructed and capably executed — a full-bore onslaught of brain-twisting technical pyrotechnics, munitions-grade explosiveness, and eerie atmospherics”.

Abiotic followed up Symbiosis with 2015’s Casuistry, which was a crusher, and still displayed lots of technical adventurousness but also moved in the direction of more melodic and catchier songs. And then Abiotic went silent on the recording front, a silence that has lasted for more than five years. But the silence has ended, because on February 12th the band’s third album Ikigai will be released by The Artisan Era — and it’s our pleasure to bring you a track from it today, a song named “Smoldered“, which is presented through a fascinating music video. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: XENO OOZE — “DEUS EX MACHINOOZE”

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Dec 112020
 

 

“Imagine what would happen if you could buy bags of death metal, crust, grindcore, and powerviolence at your local market, throw big handfuls of all that stuff into a blender, liberally lubricate it with alien blood fresh from the refrigerators at Area 51, spice up the mix with amphetamines and lysergic acid, puree the shit out of it, and then chug it straight down without breathing. Sound good? Actually, you don’t have to tax your imaginations, you just have to listen to Parasligm Shift, the debut album by the deviant three-piece Phoenician band Xeno Ooze.”

And with those words, roughly one year ago, we introduced our premiere of a track from that insane album, Paradigm Shift. And now we get to do this again, because Xeno Ooze have a new EP named Slimewave that’s destined for detonation on December 18th via Bloody Scythe Records. What we get to do is throw your brain into the blender again, through our premiere of a lyric video for the song “Deus Ex Machinooze“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BACCHUS — “BACCHUS”

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Dec 112020
 

 

Bacchus was the name adopted by the Romans for the older Greek god Dionysus. He was a complex deity — a god of winemaking and wine, of fertility and festival, and of ecstasy, insanity, and ritual madness. Another name used by the Romans for him was Liber — “free” — because of the freedoms his cult represented for its followers from the norms and dictates of repressive powers. In the states of possession induced by Bacchanalian rites, they cast off the chains that bound their minds and emotions to the rigid expectations and oppressive demands of conventional society.

We have no special insight into why the French atmospheric black metal band Bacchus adopted that name for themselves, beyond what we can hear in their self-titled debut album, which we’re premiering today in advance of its December 30 release by Solar Asceticists Productions. However, listening to it is very much like partaking in chthonic mysteries that induce elysian visions and unexpected epiphanies. It creates its own form of possession, casting an irresistible spell, one which is both seductive and frightening, carnal and unearthly, mesmerizing and profoundly menacing.

And it does have the effect of freeing the listener from worldly cares and mundane preoccupations. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HERIDA PROFUNDA — “HUNTERS WILL BE HUNTED”

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Dec 102020
 

 

Since Herida Profunda‘s inception in 2012 in Poland, they’ve amassed a host of gigs throughout Europe, including numerous festival appearances, and have assembled a discography that includes a self-titled debut release in 2013, a 2015 split with UK’s Hellbastard, a 2017 split with UK’s Hello Bastards, and In Fear We Trust — a three-way split with Psychoneurosis and Suffering Quota in 2019. Obviously, the relocation of the band’s vocalist Edi to the UK in 2014 didn’t prove to be an obstacle.

The band are now at the point of completing work on a new album named Power To the People, which will be released on tape and vinyl in early 2021 via 783punx (UK), 7DegreesRecords (GER), Heavy Metal Vomit Party (SLO), To Live A Lie Records (USA), and Give Praise Records (USA). What we’ve got for you today is the premiere of a lyric video for a single from the new album named “Hunters Will Be Hunted“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DUSKWALKER — “THE CRAWLING TONGUE”

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Dec 102020
 

 

H.P. Lovecraft never knew, nor could have imagined, what sumptuous source material his twisted storytelling would become for extreme metal bands half a century (and onward) after his death. But so it is, and that symbiosis shows no sign of ever diminishing. Across a wide range of genres and bands, his ghastly supernatural tales continue to exert a magnetic attraction, which inspired the heavyweight Canadian group Duskwalker when they wrote “The Crawling Tongue“, the song that’s the subject of official video we’re premiering today.

The track comes from Duskwalker’s 2019 album All They Know Is Fear, which was released by CDN Records. It’s the first full-length under the name Duskwalker, but is actually the band’s second album (the first one being released under the group’s previous name, The Offering). The album as a whole delves into themes of myth, conspiracy, and horror, and channels influences that range from Morbid Angel and Carcass to Cannibal Corpse and Pantera, blending traditional metal, old school death, and thrash. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MERGER REMNANT — “ALL-OUT VIOLENCE UPON LIFE”

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Dec 092020
 

 

Before listening to the song you’re now about to hear, I had some expectations about what it might sound like, but the expectations were based solely on the previous musical output of one of this new Swedish band’s members rather than any advance descriptive information about the music — of which there was none. What I found turned out to be an electrifying surprise.

The band is Merger Remnant, and it’s a collaboration between Björn Larsson (who performs vocals, guitars, bass, and drums) and his friend Jonas Ström (keys, samples, ambience, guitars). Larsson is best-known to me and to many others as a member of the death metal bands Mordbrand and God Macabre, and that’s what formed the early expectations. Ström, on the other hand, doesn’t seem to have any kind of metal pedigree.

What they’ve created together, as represented on their debut EP Dregs, is difficult to pin down in genre terms. Based on the song we’re premiering from the EP today — “All-out Violence Upon Life” — death metal is in the mix, but so are strains of black metal, doom, and ambient music, and the song also has a powerful and multi-faceted atmospheric quality. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: RAAT — “AURORA”

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Dec 092020
 

 

I’ve been closely following the progress of the Indian band Raat since the 2018 release of the projects’s debut EP (Once). The work of a single Delhi-based creator, S.R., who has been in involved in other solo endeavors, including Nightgrave, Raat’s music has displayed persistent connections to black metal, but without being hemmed in by black metal conventions. And so S.R. has also drawn upon other styles, some of which go beyond the bounds of metal altogether, to better channel the emotions that have inspired the sounds.

The animating emotions seem to vacillate between depressiveness and despair, on the one hand, and hope on the other, and the music is capable of being both intensely ravaging and unnerving as well as beautiful. In all of its changing phases, however, the music, as they say, always wears its heart on its sleeve, in ways that feel genuine and often poignant.

Raat’s latest creation is a new album named Raison D’être, which is set for release by the Italian label Flowing Downward on December 12th. It provides a contrast with Raat’s last album, Déraciné. As S.R. has commented, while that album “was quite distinct and warm sounding, the new album is at once decidedly heavier and darker in its atmosphere. In more ways than one, the sound portrays the present day calamity our world is crushed under. Simultaneously, it also maintains moments of rapture and euphoria.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE EYE OF THE NORTH — “WINDS OF DEATH”

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Dec 082020
 

 

The magnificent cover art for the debut album of The Eye of the North should be enough by itself to entice any died-in-the-wool metalhead to investigate the album, but if (somehow) that weren’t enough, we have a further enticement for you today in the form of the album’s opening track, “Winds of Death“.

The name of the album is Black Thrashing Onslaught, which is a vivid clue to the band’s music. The band is the solo project of G., who is the leader in the Norwegian bestial black metal horde Goatkraft, and in this new project he indulges a fascination with murderous thrash metal from the second part of the ’80s and the ’90’s mixed with black metal “in the raw and purest form”, building upon the inspiration of such bands as Kreator, Urgehal, and later on Destroyer 666 and Aura Noir. In the song we’re premiering today, he has created an experience of high-voltage electrification that’s as wildly magnificent as it is brazenly unhinged in its ferocity. Continue reading »

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