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 »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GOATCRAFT’S “PHOBOS” (AND A REVIEW OF THE GOATCRAFT-PLUTONIAN SHORE SPLIT)

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Sep 022020
 

 

On September 4th Hessian Firm will release a split record that includes the music of two San Antonio-based projects, Goatcraft and Plutonian Shore, both of whom have created outstanding releases that we’ve paid attention to before at this site. For this new split, each project has recorded three tracks, and today we’re presenting one by Goatcraft — along with a review of the split as a whole.

As the solo vehicle of musician Lonegoat, Goatcraft has specialized in the creation of dark neoclassical and ambient music that he has named “Necroclassical”. For this new split he created three pieces devoted to the depiction of Mars, drawing inspiration in part from Beherit’s electronic era (in particular Electric Doom Synthesis), and it’s the third of those in the running order — “Phobos” — that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VERMISST — “ZMIERZCH STALOWEJ CIEMNOŚCI”

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Sep 022020
 

 

Of the eight tracks on Vermisst‘s new album Zmierzch Stalowej Ciemności (which Signal Rex will release on September 4th, on vinyl and digitally), five of them first appeared as an EP bearing the same title as this album, released in a CD edition in January 2020. The other three are bonuses — new original tracks recorded last December which expand the EP to 40 minutes.

For those readers who may have overlooked the EP over the last eight months, it’s quite an arresting and often elaborate experience, one that featured not only the performances of Vermisst‘s core members Belath (guitar), Vorghast (vocals), and Kvalvaag (keys) but also impressive session work by Vlambré (bass), Bloodwhip (guitar), and Vulgrim (drums). The bonus tracks, created solely by Belath (guitars) and Vorghast (vocals, drums), are very different in important respects, but arresting in their own harrowing way. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: JUPITERIAN — “CAPRICORN”

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Sep 012020
 

 

It makes perfect sense that the grim hooded eminences within Jupiterian chose the name they did. Their music is so stupendously heavy that evoking the solar system’s most massive planet — twice as massive as all other planets combined — can’t really be considered an act of hubris. They’ve earned the right to align themselves in that way.

Apart from its immensity, and the glacial slowness of its spin, Jupiter is also home to a giant red storm that is itself larger than Earth and has raged for hundreds of years. And perhaps the most striking evolution in Jupiterian’s new album Protosapien is how much their new music rages, and how powerfully it creates an atmosphere of fear, without sacrificing the quality of titanic heaviness that first brought them global attention. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HARK FROM THE TOMB — “FEEDING HIS HUNGERING FLAMES”

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Sep 012020
 

 

The Swedish duo who have joined forces under the name Hark From the Tomb prefer to remain anonymous, though we’re told that they’ve been participants in the Swedish black metal scene extending back to the early ’90s, and members of much better-known bands. Why then did they choose to create a new vehicle for their musical creativity?

One inspiration was to channel a deep disgust with the current state of the human species — “the inability of humanity to evolve intellectually, the revolting character of mankind as a whole, and the unforgivable error of letting religion exist as anything more than an artefact of Bronze Age mythology”. As they have further explained:

“The combination of easily led idiots, the charlatans that exploit the weak, and the ultimately cataclysmic symbiosis of the dumb and the evil that collectively holds back humanity as a species is the worst and most poisonous trait that both threatens the survival of humanity as a whole, and the source of the revulsion that led to the creation of Let Them Die.”

The band’s musical inspirations — the contours of sound through which they’ve expressed such utter contempt on this debut album Let Them Die — derive from the old-school, primitive parts of their Nordic black metal antecedents. But the music is more than an experience in unbridled ferocity, as you’ll discover through our premiere of the album track “Feeding His Hungering Flames“. Continue reading »

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