AN NCS PREMIERE: BEDNJA — “LEDENA PALACA”

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Oct 312019
 

 

This is kind of an odd premiere. In fact it’s probably a misnomer to call it a premiere at all. But the album on which the song appears is so fantastic that I’ve softened my usual rigid adherence to the literal meaning of the word in an effort to help further expose it to new listeners.

The album, Doline Su Ostale Iza Nas, was first briefly released for public streaming — but not for sale or download — by the Croatian band Bednja early last year. At their request we enthusiastically premiered that full stream of it along with an extensive review, from which I’m including a few excerpts below. Bednja’s plan then was to find one or more labels willing to release the album in a physical edition — and they succeeded. None other than Transcending Obscurity Records (whose label boss knows a good thing when he hears it) signed Bednja and will be releasing Doline Su Ostale Iza Nas on November 29th in a variety of formats.

And now, before we get to some specific comments about the song we’re presenting, “Ledena Palaca“, allow me to repeat a few things I wrote in last year’s review (which you can find here): Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OBSIDIAN TONGUE — “RETURN TO THE FIELDS OF VIOLET”

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Oct 292019
 

 

It has been a long wait, six years now since Obsidian Tongue‘s wonderful second album, A Nest of Ravens in the Throat of Time, albeit with some great work in evidence through their track “The Lakeside Redemption” on a four-way split in 2015 (Northeastern Hymns). In that time guitarist/vocalist Brendan Hayter has joined forces with a new drummer, the formidable Ray Capizzo of Falls of Rauros (and a live member of Panopticon), and together — at last — they have completed a third full-length, simply entitled Volume III.

Today it’s our great pleasure not only to assist in announcing this Maine band’s new album — which will be released by Bindrune Recordings on January 31, 2020 — but also to premiere a stunning song from the record named “Return to the Fields of Violet“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DIE KUNST DER FINSTERNIS — “REVENANT IN A PHANTOM WORLD (QUEEN OF OWLS ADDENDUM)”

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Oct 292019
 

 

“Die Kunst der Finsternis plays Horror Metal exclusively.” So says this Sweden-based band, the macabre solo project of Deacon D. (also a fixture in Hetroertzen), and truer words were never spoken. There is equal truth in the title of the band’s third album, Revenant in a Phantom World (Queen of Owls Addendum), because the music does indeed sound like the expressions of one who has known death and returned from its domain to haunt the living, or to feed upon their blood. It also captures the transformation that listeners risk by becoming immersed in its deeply chilling sensations.

It’s the kind of album that kindles the imagination, in very discomfiting ways, and perhaps is best described by the visions it spawns rather than by a dissection of its ingredients, which include bits and pieces of black metal, death metal, gothic melody, and a cavalcade of demonic voices, all interwoven through the experimental and expressionistic imaginings of its creator. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LVXCAELIS — “MAHER SHALAL HASH BAZ”

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Oct 282019
 

 

Now fourteen years into their existence, the Chilean black metal band LvxCaelis have produced their strongest work yet, a ravishing third album entitled Maher Shalal Hash Baz that will be released by Lamech Records, fittingly on October 31st.

Pursuing ancient occult and mystical themes across seven tracks, the trio of Irad (guitars/vocals), Nimrod (bass), and Frater B. (drums) create a sonic tableau of varying sensations, from plundering cruelty to chilling reverence, from crushing bleakness to carnal swagger, from terrifying splendor to chaotic ecstasy — and all of it cloaked with a mantle of menace and mystery. Today we give you the chance to hear all of it. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: REMOTE VIEWING — “A DOG IN THE OVEN”

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Oct 282019
 

 

As we all know, musical heaviness comes in different shapes and sizes. Heaviness, for example, might be measured by the brute-force impact of low-frequency distortion and punishing drumwork. On the other hand, it might be gauged by a measure of emotional weight, by the transmission through bleak melody and tormented vocals of pain, grief, and despair. The song we’re presenting today by the London band Remote Viewing combines heaviness in both of those senses, and the consequences can be devastating.

“A Dog In The Oven” is the name of the track we’re premiering, and it’s one of eight on the band’s new album, It’s Better This Way, which will be released on November 29th by Sludgelord Records. Continue reading »

SARTEGOS: THE PREMIERE OF “AS DEVESAS SOM DOS LOBOS” AND A REVIEW OF “O SANGUE DA NOITE”

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Oct 282019
 

 

(On November 29th I, Voidhanger Records, in collaboration with Blood Harvest Records, will release the debut album of the Galician black metal band Sartegos. Today we’re premiering a song from the album, preceded by a review of the album by guest contributor Conchobar.)

 

“Behold, may that night be barren; may no joyful voice come into it.
May it be cursed by those who curse the day — those prepared to rouse Leviathan. May its morning stars grow dark; may it wait in vain for daylight; may it not see the breaking of dawn.…”

Job 3:7-9.

Darkness has an odd ontology; the metaphysics of night are pluripotent but also polysemic. Shadow has with it the dusky, twilit sense of a lessening, but also the waxing of a distance from daylit realities. There is, as night advances, a thickness and a viscosity in its tendrils – it stains and layers the fading of light. And as it advances, it consumes. Not ravenously, but purposively, relentlessly, indefatigably. The negentropic islands of solar reality are slowly blotted out by the obscurations of a lunar regime.That nocturnal density – its flows and coalescences, pulses and coagulations, are the blood of the night – o sangue da noite. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLDEN BATS — “VII”

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Oct 252019
 

 

Roughly one year ago the distinctive one-man mauling machine known as Golden Bats, then located in the vicinity of Brisbane, Australia, released an album named Residual Dread, the first official full-length after more than a dozen demos, splits, and EPs dating back to 2011. As recounted in this review, it was a titanically heavy album, steeped in a kind of gothic gloom, and so haunting in its laments that it threatened to split the heart even as it was splintering bone. With both a persistently brutal punch and an emotionally devastating conveyance of grief and pain, the music repeatedly hit home with staggering force on multiple levels. The songs were mainly slow or mid-paced, and relatively simple in their composition, but the music was tuned like a Stradivarius of suffering, supremely well-calculated to deliver punishment with tremendous primal force, and the songs so well-written that they were very hard to forget.

Since then, Golden Bats‘ alter ego Geordie Stafford has moved to Rome, Italy (just a couple of months ago), and is nearing completion of a follow-up album. In the meantime, he has decided to release some of his older but previously un-released creations, the first of which we’re premiering today. Denominated VII, to place it in line with a sequence of earlier demos, it includes four tracks, two of which are covers, and all of which again demonstrate the crushing power and mind-bending, emotionally wrenching impact of Golden Bats‘ formulation of sludge. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PRAISE THE PLAGUE — “TORMENT”

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Oct 252019
 

 

We would like to offer two rounds of applause to begin this premiere. The first goes to Berlin’s Praise the Plague for the wrenching emotional power channeled by their song “Torment“. The second is for Sven Liebold, whose surreal video for the song is a nightmarish feast for the eyes, one of those ever-changing visual collages that you can’t look away from, and which in this case integrates frighteningly well with the music.

The song comes from a two-track EP by Praise the Plague that was released digitally, and on vinyl by Argonauta Records, on September 13th. Entitled Antagonist II, it follows the band’s debut full-length Antagonist, which was released last year. Both tracks are powerful mood-changers, amalgams of black metal and doom that have the capacity to make you forget about whatever you were doing or feeling before listening, and to transport you into the indigo-dark dimensions where this band dwell. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: UNFATHOMABLE RUINATION — “PROTOPLASMIC IMPRISONMENT”

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Oct 242019
 

 

Any time we see the artwork of Eliran Kantor on an album cover, it becomes an irresistible lure into the record. Here, his painting captures the inspirations for the music, depicting a solemn solitary figure, who “stands surrounded by demonic deformities which represent the inner turmoil that torments those with mental illness” (to quote from the press materials from the album). We can almost hear the “screams of anguish and vicious voices whispering of fear, violence and self-loathing”.

And these conceptions are indeed the animating forces behind Enraged and Unbound, the stunning new album by Unfathomable Ruination, with each song “plumbing the depths of the deepest mental illness and exploring the primitive violence that lies within us all”.

That description is no exaggeration, as you’ll discover when you listen to “Protoplasmic Imprisonment“, the song we’re presenting today through an official video in advance of the album’s November 22 release by Willowtip Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: XENO OOZE — “XENOLOGICAL WARFARE”

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Oct 242019
 

 

Imagine what would happen if you could buy bags of death metal, crust, grindcore, and powerviolence at your local market, throw big handfuls of all that stuff into a blender, liberally lubricate it with alien blood fresh from the refrigerators at Area 51, spice up the mix with amphetamines and lysergic acid, puree the shit out of it, and then chug it straight down without breathing. Sound good?

Actually, you don’t have to tax your imaginations, you just have to listen to Parasligm Shift, the debut album by the deviant three-piece Phoenician band Xeno Ooze. You’ll have the chance to do that on November 1st, which is the day of its release by Last World Records. But in the meantime you can chug down “Xenological Warfare“, which is the opening track from the album that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

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