AN NCS PREMIERE: ABYSSAL ASCENDANT — “WOMBS OF TORMENT”

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Sep 102020
 

 

Almost exactly one month ago we had the ghoulish pleasure of premiering a track from the forthcoming second album by the French death metal band Abyssal Ascendant. Entitled Chronicles of the Doomed Worlds – Part. II : Deacons of Abhorrence, it will be released by Dolorem Records on October 9th, accompanied by the striking artistic handiwork of Daniele Lupidi.

As on their debut album, Abyssal Ascendant have again drawn their inspirations from the Lovecraftian mythos of The Ancient Ones and the ’90s death metal of such greats as Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, and Obituary. Appropriate to their subject matter, the band demonstrate a sure-handed talent for creating sensations of supernatural horror, mindless fear, and slaughtering savagery. And as further proof of that, today we’re following our first premiere with a second one — this one named “Wombs of Torment“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE MYOPIA CONDITION — “SEPARATION FROM CLASSIFICATION”

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Sep 102020
 

 

Hailing from the Red Deer, Alberta, The Myopia Condition came together under a hybrid of heavy influences that ranged from the cathartic spirit of metalcore to the divergent grooves of Meshuggah and Lamb of God. They opened enough eyes to be selected for the finals of the Canadian Wacken Metal Battle in 2018 and festival appearances that included Armstrong Metalfest and Loud As Hell. And now the band are preparing for the October 16 release of their debut album Event Horizon.

Today we’re presenting a lyric video for the album’s first single, “Separation From Classification“, and it too is a hybrid, though not entirely what you might expect from the influences listed above. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TOXAEMIA — “TOXAEMIA”

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Sep 092020
 

 

What causes a cult Swedish death metal band to come back to life after almost 30 years of silence? Not fame and fortune, at least not in the case of Toxaemia. Their roots go back to 1989, and their early demos and other recordings in 1990 and 1991 can legitimately be considered part of the pioneering sound of early Swedish death metal, but they’re not a household name in 2020. Rather than trying to cash in on a name, it’s a much better guess that this revival was spawned by one thing and one thing only: passion for the music.

Sure, you might guess that nostalgia had something to do with it, but when you hear the music they’ve now made on a debut album that gestated this long, what you feel is fire and fury. The name of that album is Where Paths Divide, and it’s set for release by Emanzipation Productions on November 20th. One single from that album (“Pestilence”) has already been released, and today we’re premiering a second one that shares the band’s name. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THOSE WHO BRING THE TORTURE — “DARK CHAPTERS”

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Sep 092020
 

 

One person’s torture is another person’s joy. And no, we’re not talking about a sadomasochistic relationship, but instead about the kind of death metal that might sear the brains of your neighbors but will bring a big smile to connoisseurs of preternatural menace and mayhem. And who better to do that than a band who proudly name themselves Those Who Bring the Torture?

That name will be familiar to many death metal connoisseurs out there. Founded by the ever-busy Rogga Johansson more than a dozen years ago, the band has produced six albums and a pair of EPs, and a seventh full-length named Dark Chapters is now on the horizon.

The line-up has changed from time to time, as has the direction of the music. On this new record, which will be released on September 30th by Iron Blood and Death Corporation, Rogga handles guitars, bass, and vocals and is joined by lead guitarist Kjetil Lynghaug (Paganizer, Ribspreader, Johansson & Speckmann) and drummer Jon Rudin (Wombbath, Just Before Dawn). As for the music, we have a strong taste of that for you through our premiere of the album’s title track. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TERATOLITH — “ONE. DEATH”

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Sep 082020
 

 

Much is unknown about Teratolith. Its members are anonymous, their location a mystery. But what has already become apparent is that they are powerful necromancers, adepts at the creation of musical horror-scapes that engulf and submerge listeners within their frightening, avant-garde hybrid of black metal, death metal, and ambient mysteries. Last year and this year the band digitally released their first two EPs, Eclipse I and Eclipse II. And on September 25th Brucia Records will be releasing them together on an album-length CD and tape edition, also entitled Eclipse.

While much remains mysterious about the band — and intentionally so, because (as the label explains) their objective is to disconnect their creations “from virtually any other aspect of the mundane world” — Brucia has disclosed that the overarching purpose of the project is to “explore the obscure realities behind and beyond the physical dimension”, to create “unique and excruciating meditations on the occult as seen through the eyes of Death and Chaos itself.” Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: INVERNOIR — “SUSPENDED ALIVE”

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Sep 082020
 

 

As we all continue to struggle through the disturbing tremors and ruinous upheavals of this plague year, it becomes almost second-nature to view art of all kinds through the lens of this experience. That urge is irresistible in the case of “Suspended Alive“, the song we’re premiering today, through an evocative video, from the Roman doom/death band Invernoir’s debut album The Void and the Unbearable Loss. It does seem like this strange time has suspended life, as well as taken it, leaving us to wonder when a decent life will resume and what it will look like when (if?) that happens.

Even more than the title of the song, the music itself creates moods of uneasiness and longing, of turbulence and loss — a sense of grasping at memories while waiting for life to resume, but with an ominous sense that those are all gone forever and that the idea of moving forward is a fool’s dream. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ISOLERT — “WORLD IN RUINS”

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Sep 072020
 

 

While I could go on and on about the devastating magnificence of Isolert’s new album, World In Ruins, at this point I only want to consider the three songs that close this astonishing record — a trio that includes the title track, which we’re premiering today.

That concluding trio begins with “Staring At A Path Towards Nowhere“, a song I’ve written about before when it first appeared (you can find it here), whose title neatly sums up the current age. Immediately electrifying, the song’s soaring, sweeping intensity is near-celestial in its blazing magnificence. To be sure, the vocals sound like rampaging demons in the depths of hell, but even those voices sound like glorifications (of great terrors).

The other dimension of the song, which emerges when the pace slows, is a feeling of crushing grief, delivered with stately solemnity and a sense of magnificence, but conjoined with screams of harrowing vocal intensity. The segue from that passage back into the heavenly firestorm is beautifully done, as is the reprise of sorrow that comes through a beautiful but soul-stricken guitar solo that extends through a glorious maelstrom of sound and brings the song to a heart-breaking close. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AKRAL NECROSIS — “SILENT ALTAR”

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Sep 072020
 

 

The new album by the Romanian black metal band Akral Necrosis, their third overall and their first full-length in four years, is a narrative of more than an hour in length. Entitled The Greater Absence, it follows an ambitious, ignorant protagonist in his pathetic yet hazardous quest “to reveal the mysteries of the unseen and the afterlife”. Certain parts of the exposition were inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 legendary film Vargtimmen (“Hour of the Wolf”), and it further includes a guest appearance by the young Romanian poet David Topala, with an unpublished poem that is reproduced in fragments on three of the album’s tracks.

The album’s epilogue presents a terrible vision of the final destination of the human soul, and in this the band’s perspective “breaks with the concepts of heaven and hell, as well as with the belief that any form of consciousness is suppressed by death”. We’re further told that the narrative is also “an allegory of contemporary practices adopted more and more often in the mainstream music circuit that transforms black metal into a consumer product….” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PHANTOM WINTER – “CRUEL SUMMER (BANANARAMA COVER)”

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Sep 042020
 

 

(Andy Synn introduces our premiere of a new cover song by the German band Phantom Winter.)

This site’s history with German sludgemongers Phantom Winter goes back a number of years now.

In fact we’ve been fans of the band ever since their debut back in 2015, and just last year I selected their stunning second album, Sundown Pleasures as one of the best records of the entire decade.

So when the band got in touch to ask me to help them premiere their impressively ugly and abrasive take on Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” – all in service of a good cause – I couldn’t say no! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COEXISTENCE — “SYMBIOSIS OF CREATION”

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Sep 032020
 

 

The cover of the new album by Coexistence, as rendered by the enormously talented Adam Burke, is a wondrous sight to behold, a collage of beautiful colors and strange sights — of jutting spikes of stone, of a giant moon and winking stars, of aquamarine water cascading into what seems to be an entirely different dimension or sector of the cosmos…. And this is one of those pleasing cases in which the attractions of a painted album cover suit the music enshrined in the record.

That record, Collateral Dimension, is the debut album by this Italian band, who already opened lots of eyes through their 2018 EP, Contact With the Entity (reviewed here). And as good as that EP was, it is no exaggeration to say that the album is a great leap forward. Transcending Obscurity Records, which will release the album on October 23rd, calls it “a marvel”, and that’s no exaggeration either. It presents a tremendously multi-faceted hybrid of technical and progressive death metal that’s capable of entrancing and bewildering the listener while coming for your throat at the same time. We have a great example of this in the song we’re presenting today, “Symbiosis of Creation“. Continue reading »

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