AN NCS PREMIERE: BOREAL HYMN — “MAN OF IRON” (BATHORY COVER)

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May 252020
 

 

Last fall the Vancouver band Boreal Hymn made a very auspicious debut through a demo entitled Tundra. Uniting the exceptional talents of Bronson Lee Norton (the vocalist of Seer and Eyes Without A Face) and instrumentalist Colby Hink (of Wormwitch and ex-Old Graves), Boreal Hymn created a musical experience that could easily be called transportive.

To paraphrase some of the the words of acclaim from commenters on the demo’s Bandcamp page, the music was a shifting slice of dark pagan metal incorporating dark growls, lofty vocals, and evocative chants, conjuring visions of crackling fires, hoary trees, and vast open spaces — evocative and expansive. And to repeat some of what I wrote about the demo at that time, the sensations of the music ranged from cold and dismal to fiery and majestic, sometimes undeniably bleak, but persistently enchanting.

And so it’s a real pleasure to premiere a new Boreal Hymn recording today — a cover of Bathory’s classic “Man of Iron” from Blood On Ice (1996) — especially because Boreal Hymn will be donating 100% of the sales in May to The Canadian Mental Health Association for Mental Health Awareness month. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SHEZMU — “À TRAVERS LES LAMBEAUX”

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May 252020
 

 

In its earliest formation the Montréal band Shezmu was a duo consisting of vocalist/guitarist Olivier Bérubé Emond (aka Comte Bergaby) and drummer Marc-André Labonne. Following their self-release of a demo and two EPs under the banner of Les Fleurs du Mal Productions (with the second also being co-released through Iron Bonehead Productions), they were joined by bass player Yanick Tremblay-Simard (Sol Miracula, Aiauasca), and that trio recorded a debut album entitled À Travers Les Lambeaux, which is now set for release on July 27th by one of our favorite labels, Krucyator Productions.

As on their previous releases, Shezmu’s lyrical themes for the new album draw upon ancient history, but here the songs explore the themes of rage, sorrow, and madness. Employing ingredients from the realms of doom, black metal, and death metal, Shezmu’s music channels these sensations and experiences, reaching depths of profound anguish and manifesting the triumph of darkness over sanity.

Today we present the album’s title track, which the band tell us is “about suppressed emotions and actions — feelings that, a long time ago, were part of the human routine, but which are now considered unacceptable, even illegal”. The song explores themes such as “violence, loss of control, and the virtues of death.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NEXION — “REVELATION OF UNBEING”

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May 252020
 

 

The first full-length album of the Icelandic band Nexion is a union of literary, visual, and musical art that makes a striking impression. In all those respects, the artists have aimed high, and they’ve achieved their integrated visions in unusually impressive fashion.

The album is Seven Oracles, and it will be released by Avantgarde Music on June 20th (the Summer Solstice). On the cover is a rendering of a seven-headed beast, each one representing an oracle, each one with its own message and its own song. The messages are revealed in powerful lyrics, which are beautifully displayed through hand-crafted calligraphy in the 16-page booklet accompanying the record, each page further illustrated by the hand of Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal, who created all the album art and the calligraphy.

These seven messages and the music accompanying them are all connected, and we’ll come back to that subject before we leave you. But first we’re honored to premiere one of the seven oracular messages from the album, a song named “Revelation of Unbeing“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ATRÆ BILIS — “PHANTOM VEINS TRUMPET”

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May 222020
 

 

Atræ Bilis trace their inception to a chance encounter in a Vancouver record store between guitarist David Stepanavicius and drummer Luka Govednik. It didn’t take long for the ideas to begin flowing and the jamming to start. A wide range of influences naturally worked their way into the creative process, though as Stepanavicius tells it, there were no preconceptions about what the music would sound like — and the debut album of Atræ Bilis (a Latin phrase for a malady that translates to “black bile”) is indeed difficult to shoehorn into any rigid genre definition, though death metal (of varying kinds) is at its core.

That album, Divinihility, will be released by Transcending Obscurity Records on August 14th, adorned by the typically terrific artwork of Adam Burke. Today we’re premiering a video for a song off the album named “Phantom Veins Trumpet“, and it vividly displays the band’s multi-faceted yet cohesive songwriting talents, and the tremendous energy of their sounds. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE: CHAOS CASCADE / KAPALA — “CONTAMINATION ALLIANCE”

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May 222020
 

 

You listen to this new split by Chaos Cascade and Kapala and you get the sense that they don’t think the viral plague is acting fast enough. They’ve formed a Contamination Alliance to accelerate the extermination, aided by a conspiracy with Dunkelheit Produktionen who will release this audio warfare on vinyl (July 18) and digitally (May 23rd).

Germany’s Chaos Cascade, ever-prolific, returns to the slaughter grounds after two other splits and an EP also released this year. The Chaos Cascade track on this new split is “Wreak Havoc“, and that’s exactly what it does. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FELLAHIN FALL — “ROVER”

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May 212020
 

 

Fellahin Fall‘s unusual musical formulation amalgamates earth-quaking heaviness and ethereal sounds of astral mystery, somber yet beguiling intonations and soaring vocal extravagance, futuristic electronic accents and vast, panoramic soundscapes that wondrously shimmer and shine. Their melodies are entrancing (both chilling and soulful), their rhythms viscerally powerful, and the atmosphere of the music seems to transport the listener across time and space into altered realms.

Fellahin Fall‘s debut album, Tar a-Kan, was just released on May 15th. As the band explain: “It’s narrated by a man in the near future who is ravaged by the change in time, technology, and himself. Tar a-Kan struggles to come to terms with his ever-changing state and the crushing urbana that surrounds him.”

The music has been described as “gothic-industrial” and as “dark-wave industrial”, and those descriptions refer to the band’s significant use of synths and keyboards, creating gleaming cascades of sound as well as darting vibrancy, and to the weight and potency of the body-moving percussive undercurrents, as well as the resonance of the singing. But those shorthand descriptions don’t fully encompass the range of sensations the music presents, or the ways in which it kindles the imagination to produce unearthly visions. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: DEVIL WITH NO NAME — “DEVIL WITH NO NAME”

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May 202020
 

 

(Andy Synn introduces our premiere of the self-titled debut EP by the western U.S. black metal trio Devil With No Name, which is set for release on May 22nd.)

Unlike most Black Metal bands, Devil With No Name take their inspiration not from the chilling heart of winter but from the burning heat of the Arizona desert, whose desiccated desolation is, in its own way, just as bleak and inimical to human life as the icy vastness of the frozen wastes. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MRTVI — “MACHINE GUN” (PORTISHEAD COVER)

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May 192020
 

 

So far, the experimental black metal band MRTVI, which is the solo project of Serbian musician Damjan Stefanović, has released two albums — Perpetual Consciousness Nightmare (2015) and Negative Atonal Dissonance (2017). Both are fascinating, and well off the usual beaten paths of black metal. As we wrote around the time that the second album was released (by Transcending Obscurity Records), MRTVI “makes a determined effort through this music to fracture reality into a shower of sharp shards and splinters, to plow madly through the constrictive channeling of experience through our perceptions, in search of an inner cosmos”.

MRTVI is at work on a new album (and you can listen to a track from it via a Transcending Obscurity label sampler HERE), but in the meantime has decided to release two cover songs, and we’re premiering one of those today in advance of its release by MRTVI’s label, Life Is A Dream Records. As you can already see from the title of this post, it’s a surprising choice — Portishead’s song “Machine Gun” from their 2008 album Third. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PROTOSEQUENCE — “A BLUNT DESCRIPTION OF SOMETHING OBSCENE”

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May 182020
 

 

On their new EP A Blunt Description of Something Obscene, Protosequence have created a genuine musical spectacle, a fusion of tech-death and progressive metal that manages to be both jaw-dropping and beguiling, both head-spinning and bone-smashing. It creates pyrotechnic displays of breath-taking instrumental agility that often seem completely deranged or utterly alien, accompanied by bestial vocal ferocity, but it also seduces the listener with elements of mesmerizing melody. And around every corner (of which there are many in these labyrinthine compositions), a new surprise awaits.

The EP will be released tomorrow by Lacerated Enemy Records, but today we bring you the chance to hear all the music. Get prepared for a wild thrill-ride — and of course we have our own thoughts about these tracks to help you prepare, though no one will blame you for skipping over them and pounding the Play button down below. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INSTIGATE — “ATONEMENT”

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May 152020
 

 

Three-and-a-half weeks ago we premiered a video teaser of music from a new Italian death metal band named Instigate. The band initially attracted our attention because of the people who are in the line-up. As that video explained, the idea for Instigate sprang from the mind of guitarist Stefano Rossi Ciucci, who is a member of the Italian death metal band Bloodtruth, whose music we have featured more than one at NCS, most recently in our December 2019 premiere of a video for a track off their ravaging 2018 album Martyrium, released by Unique Leader Records.

Rounding out the Instigate line-up are Bloodtruth bassist Riccardo Rogari, vocalist Stefano Borciani from Demiurgon, and drummer extraordinaire Kevin Talley, who has performed with the likes of Suffocation, Dying Fetus, Misery Index, and Chimaira.

The line-up is indeed impressive, and it happily turns out that Instigate’s music is just as impressive as you would expect, even though the current plague has forced the band members to record from their separate home studios, with the results being re-amped and mixed by the engineering maestro Stefano Morabito at his famed 16th Cellar Studio in Rome.

And now, to follow that earlier teaser, today we’re presenting a complete track from the band’s forthcoming demo EP, Echoes Of A Dying World, which will be released on May 29th. And, as you can see, we’re also unveiling the tremendous cover art by Vladimir “Smerdulak” Chebakov (Hideous Divinity, Katalepsy, and more). Continue reading »

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