AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MNEMOCIDE — “FEEDING THE VULTURES”

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May 142020
 

 

The first track on the album we’re about to premiere is entitled “Manifest“. In it, a woman delivers a depressing introductory statement, but one that’s difficult to deny. She observes that wars have raged throughout human history, spilling blood in vast rivers, followed by waves of despair and hate, but that somehow history always seems to leave us blind and ignorant. We are preceded by columns of shattered souls, and countless generations of shattered souls will follow us. And so, she says, “every generation will be blinded by mnemocide….”

As to the meaning of “mnemocide”, it seems to refer to the willful erasure of memory. It brings to mind a line in Greoge Orwell’s 1984: “Those who control the present, control the past and those who control the past control the future.”

That first spoken-word track on the debut album by this Swiss death metal band, who have themselves taken the name Mnemocide, could be understood as a manifesto for the album as a whole, both lyrically and in the dystopian and dismal atmosphere that the music itself generates while, at the same time, the humongous pounding grooves of the songs are ruining our necks. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COSMIC PUTREFACTION — “ABYSMAL RESONANCE PROJECTION”

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May 132020
 

 

In the spring of last year we had the pleasure of premiering At the Threshold of the Greatest Chasm, the debut album of the Italian death metal band Cosmic Putrefaction. Of that album we wrote:

“The songs are constantly veering, the rhythms and tempos in continual flux, the fretwork freakishly intricate and destabilizing. That overarching air of dementia ranges from crazed melees of rampant viciousness to brooding, muttering insanity — with moments of soaring magnificence.

“The album is not exactly loaded with catchy riffs, not made for frequent headbanging, not content to follow straight-forward, well-paved paths. Instead, it’s the kind of album that delivers a thrill-ride — a hellish sonic roller-coaster you experience blind-folded so you don’t see what’s coming. And while the atmosphere, at a high level, is one of derangement, it has other atmospheric qualities that lead the listener off into eerie pan-dimensional and cosmic realms”.

Wasting no time, Cosmic Putrefaction has prepared a second album, with the extensive title of The Horizons Towards Which Splendour Withers. It will be released by I, Voidhanger Records on May 22nd, and today we’re again privileged to make a premiere — the third and final advance track to be revealed before the album’s release. Its name is “Abysmal Resonance Projection“. Continue reading »

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

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May 122020
 

 

Over the extravagant span of eight albums, the most recent of which we’re streaming in full today, the German band Horn has marched forward on an increasingly distinctive path, diverging from where it began and now blazing a trail of its own through the tangled forests of black metal and entering a clearing in which Horn stands alone. That may sound like an overstatement, but the new album, Mohngang, is a stunning accomplishment that in all its variations and in the richness of its musical textures really is difficult to classify as standing shoulder-to-shoulder with many (or maybe any) other bands.

We’ll provide some further thoughts (and feeble attempts at descriptive verbiage), just to give you some clues as to whether Mohngang is going to strike a chord with you, but there will be no adequate substitute for simply listening to it now, just days before its release by Iron Bonehead Productions on May 15th. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ESOCTRILIHUM — “ETERNITY OF SHAOG”

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May 112020
 

 

The mysterious French black metal entity Esoctrilihum, whose sole member goes by the name Asthâghul, has been prolific by common standards, releasing four albums from 2017 through 2019, and with a fifth one now due for arrival in this plague year of 2020. And yet listening to these albums reveals continual change. Rather than conscious exploration or experimentation, the albums seem more likely to be a reflection of the creator’s mental and emotional states as they existed at each moment, and the inspirations and impulses that then flowered. But regardless of the explanation, listening to the evolution across the course of these records has been fascinating.

The new album, Eternity of Shaog, is no less fascinating than its predecessors. It represents a distinct entity with its own atmosphere, and more pronounced melodic elements, presented through violins, piano, kantele, and synths. In its many accomplishments, it reaches a creative zenith in Esoctrilihum’s recordings — but only so far, because this project can’t help but foster increasing intrigue and increasingly elevated expectations, rather than any surmise that the next release will be “more of the same”.

With two pre-release tracks out in the world already, we are now in the fortunate position of adding to those insights about the music by presenting today the title track in advance of the album’s release by I, Voidhanger Records on May 22nd. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ABYSSUS — “RELICS OF THE PAST”

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May 112020
 

 

2015 brought the release of the excellent debut album Into the Abyss of a Greek death metal band named Abyssus, a group that began life in 2011 as the solo project of Athenian vocalist and musician Kostas Analytis and now also includes guitarists Panos Gkourmpaliotis and Christos Liakos, bass-player Kostas Ragiadakos, and drummer Jan Westermann.

That album was preceded by a pair of EPs and a trio of splits, all of which were eventually released in a compilation entitled Once Entombed… Additional splits followed the release of the album, and in 2018 Death In Pieces Records released an Abyssus EP named Unleash the Storm from which we proudly premiered a track (“Operation Ranch Hand”) that ultimately made our list of 2018’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (here).

2019 saw the release of yet another Abyssus split, a four-way conspiracy among Abyssus, Obsecration, Soulskinner, and Malicious Silence under the name Sign of the Covenant of Death. And now we’re in the midst of a new year and it’s time for more music from this tremendous death metal killing machine from Greece.

On July 6th, Death In Pieces Records will release a new Abyssus EP entitled Relics of the Past. Like the last EP, Unleash the Storm, it includes two new Abyssus songs and covers of three others, and we are once again handling a premiere from the EP. It’s the title track, “Relics of the Past“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SINISTER DOWNFALL — “BEHOLD DARKNESS”

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May 102020
 

 

In 2018 the one-man German funeral doom band Sinister Downfall made its full-length debut with Eremozoic, which was the first release by the Armenian doom label Funere, in collaboration with the venerable Japanese doom label Weird Truth Productions. We premiered a song from that beautifully crafted debut, a song that was staggeringly bereft in its moods, and staggeringly heavy, too. Much like the album as a whole, it was tremendously evocative in its emotional resonance and persistently spellbinding throughout.

Sinister Downfall‘s sole member Eugen Kohl has continued to hone his craft since then, while remaining true to the vision of melancholic downfall that flowed through Eremozoic, and the result is a new album named A Dark Shining Light that will again be co-released by Funere and Weird Truth. And we again have been given the opportunity to premiere a song, the aptly named “Behold Darkness“, which is the track that ends the album. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: A WORLD WITHOUT — “IN EXTREMIS”

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May 082020
 

 

Once upon a time deathcore took the metal world by storm, drawing in vast legions of fans through its amalgam of monster vocals, brutish atonal riffing, and more bunker-busting breakdowns than any militarized armory could possibly hold. Like most waves of popular music in any genre, it quickly became saturated and homogenized, and came close to drowning beneath a tide of cookie-cutter mediocrity. The elements of the music that didn’t seem to require instrumental skill spawned hordes of bands that also had no talent for writing actual songs either.

But it would be wrong to proclaim that deathcore is dead. Instead, it has evolved, as all living things threatened with extinction must. Rather than depending entirely on the old core elements (so to speak), the better bands have expanded their musical palettes, some of them moving more in the direction of pure death metal and others integrating elements of melody and atmosphere, along with increased technicality.

The Portland band A World Without, for example, has retained some of those core features but has intertwined them with other ingredients, and today we have an example of their musical amalgamations through the lyric video premiere of a song called “In Extremis“, which includes a guest appearance by vocalist Steve Tinnon from Within the Ruins. Continue reading »

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

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May 082020
 

 

We have already written extensively about the new album Ersetu by the Italian death metal band Devangelic, just as we did about their previous releases. In this case, in addition to praising individual songs that have been previewed in the progress toward the album’s release, we published an enthusiastic review by our friend Vonlughlio, who summed it up as “a mandatory release for every brutal death metal fan”: These guys know their craft supremely well and have taken the time to create something special in their music that will pass the test of time”.

And indeed, despite how impressive Devangelic‘s first two albums were (2014’s Resurrection Denied and 2017’s Phlegethon), they have managed to elevate their music to an even higher (and more nuanced) plane of brutality with Ersetu. We are thus very excited to present a full stream of the record for you now, in advance of its May 15 release by Willowtip Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SKELETAL — “BURNING HATRED”

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May 072020
 

 

Bitterness and Burning Hatred is the name of the new album by the Finnish death metal band Skeletal. The name also sums up the emotions that a lot of people are feeling these days — living under regimes that are leaving broke, hungry, and hopeless people to fend for themselves while gambling with their lives due to deceit and incompetence in dealing with the pandemic.

Those aren’t exactly healthy emotions, and a cathartic purging of them every now and then is probably a good idea. The Skeletal song we’re premiering today off the new album provides exactly that kind of experience. Rather than gloomily seething and poisoning itself with its own venom, the song is a tremendous thrill-ride, and the kind of music that makes you feel like you can hold your head up, bare your teeth, and survive anything. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SATHAMEL — “RAISE FLAME FROM ASH”

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May 072020
 

 

I slept on Sathamel‘s debut album Horror Vacui, but I’m awake to it now, thanks to the opportunity to present the following playthrough video for one of its electrifying tracks, “Raise Flame From Ash“.

Of course, playthrough videos were fixtures in the metal scene long before the current plague, but are now even more vital ways of allowing musicians and fans to stay connected. And, as in this case, they continue to be vehicles for introducing people to releases they might have missed. This is an especially good introduction (or reminder, for those who are already aware of this UK band’s work), because it’s a guitar playthrough for a song that’s a blazing guitar powerhouse (even though it’s a love song!). Continue reading »

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