AN NCS PREMIERE: NOCTURNAL CONVOCATION — “CAPITULUM IV”

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Dec 162019
 

 

Following on the heels of a debut EP (Ritual I) released this past May, the Italian musical monstrosity that is Nocturnal Convocation is crawling forth from whatever lightless catacombs it calls home to deliver a debut album on the winter solstice. Entitled Mors Omnia Solvit (which could be interpreted as “death puts an end to all things”), the album will be released by the Irish label Cursed Monk Records.

It has become commonplace to claim that certain extreme metal bands “show no mercy” in channeling their inspirations into sound, but in the case of this band, truer words could not be spoken.”Mercy” simply must not be included in their vocabulary. Their brand of necrotizing doom is so pulverizing, so diseased, so relentlessly dedicated to creating an atmosphere of soul-consuming oppression and nightmarish horror, that it offers no reprieve. It makes perfect sense that the album will be released at the point on the calendar when night will be at its longest. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OF WOLVES — “BALANCE”

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Dec 132019
 

 

When we first encountered Of Wolves in 2013, through their album Evolve, we wrote: “These three working men in Chicago are fed up, frustrated, and pissed off. They vent their fury at everything from churches to governments to pervasive greed to the treatment of Native Americans to the mass of their fellow citizens (aka “sheep”) who allow themselves to be brainwashed, duped, and distracted from protecting their own self-interests — and they don’t mince words about it. As they say, ‘Life has been rough, the music is therapy.’ Apparently, the therapy consists of taking a whole kitchen sink’s worth of musical influences and interests and letting them spill out in a flood of exuberant creativity.”

And now here we are, many years later. The world around us hasn’t gotten any better, only more fractured, delusional, hate-filled, and desperate. Needless to say, Of Wolves haven’t become any more sanguine about the direction of politics, culture, or life in general. They’ve had their own ups and downs as well. They started teasing a new album entitled Balance more than two years ago, projected for release by Cimmerian Shade, but the label owner’s illness ultimately doomed those plans. And so the band are looking again for a label, though they’re not going to allow that search to delay the album release for much longer (more on that later), and in the meantime are working on new music with plans to record it in the first quarter of 2020.

In January of this year the band released a three-part track from Balance (available here), after having rolled out each of those three parts individually, and now we’re presenting the title song, accompanied by footage of the band’s performance filmed by Mok Films at the Doomed & Stoned Festival. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BLIGHTED — “REQUIEM BEREFT”

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Dec 132019
 

 

Many years ago, in 2012 to be precise, we discovered a hellacious Tennessee death/grind outfit named Manic Scum, and showered praise not only on the EP released that year (Better Left Undead) but also a subsequent EP (Carbonized) that was released in 2017. We haven’t seen any new Manic Scum depredations since that last EP, but we have learned that members of the band have joined forces with other friends in a new group named Blighted, whose interests focus on old-school melodic death metal (with some blackening in the mix) that’s influenced by bands like Dissection, At The Gates, Dismember, Emperor, and Necrophobic.

Blighted’s debut EP will be released on January 4, 2020, and today we’re premiering the second track from it revealed so far, a sonic tapestry or turmoil and torment named “Requiem Bereft“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LESATH — “SACRED ASHES”

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Dec 122019
 

 

On January 6, 2020, the label alliance of Casus Belli Musica and Beverina will release the debut album of a mysterious atmospheric black metal band named Lesath, whose location and membership remain undisclosed. The album’s name is Sacred Ashes. It consists of six tracks, but really four songs, because two of those four are divided into two parts in the track list.

In September of this year, Lesath (and subsequently the two labels) released one of those two-part songs, “Like the Wind“, which we reviewed here. In November we presented the second half of the other two-part song, “A New Life“, which like the first single was presented with its own artwork. And today we add to these musical revelations with the premiere of the album’s title track, “Sacred Ashes“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KAWIR — “TYDEUS”

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Dec 122019
 

 

It seems that every time I write about Kawir, over a span of many years, I feel compelled to introduce them anew, because although they’ve been around since the early ’90s and were as important to the character of Greek black metal as bands such as Rotting Christ, Varathron, and Necromantia, I worry that they still don’t get the high level of recognition they deserve. And despite their longevity, Kawir are one of those rare bands for whom long years haven’t diminished the blaze of their creative fires.

I was a huge fan of their last album (reviewed and premiered here), 2017’s Εξιλασμός (Exilasmos), and now Kawir are following that wonderful record with a new album named Adrasteia, which is set for release on January 10, 2020, by Iron Bonehead Productions. As usual, Kawir have drawn upon Greek mythology for their inspirations and lyrical themes, and they’ve also enlisted some notable guests — Macabre Omen’s Alexandros on all clean vocals, Norwegian vocalist Lindy-Fay Hella on the song “Colchis,” and Melechesh’s Ashmedi performing a guitar solo on “Danaides.”

We’ve previously commented (in glowing terms) about the album’s first track, “Lemniades“, and today it’s our good fortune to present a second one — “Tydeus” — named for a mythic hero, a prince of Argos by marriage into the fanily of King Adrastos, and one of the “Seven Against Thebes”. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEAD WOMAN’S DITCH — “HRAEFN”

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Dec 112019
 

 

Time dims memories. Two-and-a-half years is not an eon, but long enough that I managed to lose track of where the name Dead Woman’s Ditch came from. It was that long ago that we premiered a song from this UK band’s debut album, Seo Mere Saetan, subsequently released in August 2017 by Third I Rex. When I re-read that earlier post, the explanation chilled my skin all over again. To repeat: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SLAVE ONE — “LIGHTLESS PERSPECTIVES”

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Dec 102019
 

 

The old year is fast rushing to a close, and the new one will be upon us before we know it. 2020 will be given an explosive start thanks to Dolorem Record‘s January 24 release of a new album by the French death-dealers in Slave One. This new full-length, which adds to a discography that already includes a pair of well-received EPs and the band’s impressive 2016 debut album (Disclosed Dioptric Principles), is entitled Omega Disciples, and today we present an album track named “Lightless Perspectives“.

References to such bands as Cynic, Pestilence, and Gorod may help prepare you for the experience of this music, but the song’s obliterating brutality and its mind-exploding instrumental mania are so riveting that it’s unlikely you’ll be capable of thinking about anything else but becoming rapidly enslaved to Slave One. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ARKONA — “AGE OF CAPRICORN”

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Dec 102019
 

 

Three years ago we had the privilege of premiering a complete stream of Lunaris, the sixth album by the long-running Polish black metal band Arkona. Today we’re fortunate to host the premiere of Arkona‘s seventh album, Age of Capricorn, in a career that’s now more than a quarter-century long. If this were to become a tradition, we would be quite happy, because Arkona have once again demonstrated, in astonishing fashion, that the fires which set them ablaze so long ago have not diminished in the least, but seem to be reaching new heights of extravagance

The band’s particular formulation of black metal is by now well-established, and their devotion to it is unswerving. Their music, as manifested so powerfully in this new record, set for release on December 13th by Debemur Morti Productions, disdains the mundane and the commonplace. Delivered with dominating supremacy, it combines unchecked ferocity, emotionally powerful melody, and an atmosphere of terrible, otherworldly grandeur and shattering bleakness. It seems to embrace death and to manifest visions of what lies beyond the pathetic scrabbling of daily existence. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLOODTRUTH — “INNER RESURRECTION”

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Dec 092019
 

 

In August of last year, little more than one month before the release of the new album by Bloodtruth (entitled Martyrium), we had the good fortune to premiere a scorcher of a track from the new record — which we introduced in this way:

“As a general rule, generalizing is fraught with risk. For every sweeping statement, someone will come up with a hundred exceptions. Yet there’s more than a kernel of truth in the observation that Italian death metal tends to live in the fast lane. It often seems like the Autobahn of death metal, in which bands with adrenaline for blood race so fast and furiously that the wheels leave the ground, trailing flames. Bloodtruth is a prime example of this phenomenon — and the explosive extravagance of their highly accelerated attack is indeed phenomenal. Witness this new song we’re bringing you today through a lyric video.”

And now here we are, more than a year onward from the release of Martyrium by Unique Leader Records, and we again find ourselves in the fortunate position of hosting the premiere of a new Bloodtruth video. This one, handsomely crafted by filmmaker Guglielmo Sergio, is for a song from Martyrium named “Inner Resurrection“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ISRATHOUM — “ARROWS FROM BELOW”

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Dec 092019
 

 

In wrestling with how to put impressions of Israthoum’s new album into words, the phrase “dead reckoning” popped into my disoriented mind. As a navigational technique, it’s a method of estimating where you are based on where you began, taking into account variables such as speed and direction over the course of the journey. In some circumstances, it might be the best you can do in determining your present position, but it’s prone to the accumulation of errors, and may leave you not knowing accurately where you are, or how to find your way back.

It’s a very “loose” metaphor, and one that applies more to my efforts to introduce the album stream than to the album itself. Arrows From Below is most definitely a journey — and a harrowing one at that, a journey of hellish upheaval and frightening revelation, both ruinous and numinous — but of course you can easily find your way back to the beginning, and re-trace the journey. On the other hand, from the experience of a listener, that journey is likely to leave you in a very different place emotionally than where you began, and at least in my case, also with only error-prone methods of trying to describe that end-position and what happened over the course of the album to produce the change. Continue reading »

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