AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): EXPUNGED — “EXPUNGED”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 212020
 

 

Expunged is a new Canadian death metal band, barely a year old at this writing, but their debut self-titled EP which we’re premiering today quickly blasts away any idea that its members are newcomers just taking their first tottering steps. And indeed they are not tyros.

The band is the brain-child of W.D., who has been the principal member of Dead Soul Alliance, and before that the guitarist of Evolution Fail, whose demo was released in 1997. Joining him in Expunged are drummer K.F. from the old-school death metal band Töteblut and vocalist/bassist J.S. (aka Jo “Steel” Capitalicide from Ice War, among other bands).

The experience shows on this new EP. It is a stunningly good musical house of horrors, one that draws influence from a range of Swedish and Finnish death metal bands going back to the late ’80s and early ’90s. But rather than sounding like some kind of retrograde re-hash, Expunged is an electrifying experience, one that delivers cold, crushing power, lunatic frenzies, ghastly atmosphere, and the kind of melodic and rhythmic accents that make these five songs memorable. Continue reading »

AN NCS TEASER REVEAL: INSTIGATE — “ECHOES OF DYING WORLD”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 212020
 

 

We don’t often devote our premieres to mere teasers of new music — in fact, today may be the first time we have ever done it. But in this case we couldn’t resist. What you’re about to see is a video that reveals details about an exciting new band as well as a taste of the explosive and electrifyingly brutalizing sounds they are concocting in the unusual recording process that has now become a necessity in these times of viral plague.

The name of the band is Instigate, and it first drew our excited attention because of the people who are in the line-up. As the video explains, 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. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLDEN LIGHT — “SACRED COLOUR OF THE SOURCE OF LIGHT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 202020
 

 

Golden Light are a new band formed by E. Henderson (also of Njiqahdda), who handles all instruments and sounds, and vocalist Meghan Wood (Crown of Asteria). Their debut album, Sacred Colour of the Source of Light, will be released by Iron Bonehead Productions on April 24th. William Blake‘s painting “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun” makes for a perfect cover, given the nature of the music.

Regarding that nature, Iron Bonehead’s publicist has written of these four songs (three of which are of significant length), “their spectral sorrows shoot a brilliance that’s blinding and bellicose in equal measure: a mystical, sun-drenched swarm of sound that embodies and defies black metal simultaneously, orthodoxy UN-done and recast”.

The tendency to portray the music in words used mainly for visual experience is irresistible (as you will see), but the music also has a near-relentless physical momentum that in itself becomes a method of creating a trance, as well as a multi-faceted effect on the emotions. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: “LEVIATHAN III”

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Apr 202020
 

 

The German band Bait (whose three-man line-up includes a member of Der Weg einer Freiheit) embarked on its musical journey in 2013, and it has indeed been a journey. Embracing bruising metallic hardcore as its focal point, the band has moved in other directions, principally blackened ones but also incorporating ingredients of sludge and doom, with an increasing atmospheric content, without completely abandoning the animating spirit and iron-hard grooves of hardcore, or the scraped-raw fury and anguish of the vocals.

For the moment, the band’s journey has reached a culmination in their intense new album Revelation of the Pure, which the releasing label Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions describes as “a piece of shear nihilistic and utterly destructive music”. This new record will be digitally released on May 22nd, with physical editions to follow, and what we have for you today is a lyric video for a track from it called “Leviathan III“, which as its name suggests is linked to tracks from the band’s first two releases. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GORLVSH — “SHEPPARD ONE IS DOWN”

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Apr 172020
 

 

When DECIBEL premiered “Wait For Me“, the first single off the forthcoming debut album of Montreal’s Gorlvsh (pronounced Gore-Lush), they compared the band’s music to a combination of Converge, Death from Above 1979, and Lightning Bolt, “an amalgam of math rock angularity, crushing metallic riffs, off-kilter rhythms and a few catchy hooks in there for good measure”. Gorlvsh themselves described the song as “our attempt to rip off NAILS and be heavy AF”, and as “the song where we finally nailed down the tone we wanted from the unconventional bass rig”.

The bass tone is maybe more important than you realize, because Gorlvsh don’t use a guitar. It’s just bassist Nick Boucher slinging the riffs in ways that provide a lot more than groove, drummer Noah Baxter working in an exhilarating amount of intricacy to go along with a lot of skull-busting, and vocalist Isaac Ruder adding both bleeding-edge intensity and melodic hooks. The result is music that’s sometimes bizarre and mentally unbalancing, sometimes gut-slugging, and sometimes downright enthralling — and rarely follows a straight line.

To go along with that first single, today we’re presenting “Sheppard One Is Down.” This time the band told us the track was their “attempt to rip off a tune from Converge’s last record, but diverged immediately and became something totally different, far slower and more atmospheric than the average Gorlvsh tune.” Continue reading »

NCS PREMIERE: AFSKY — “TYENDE SANG”

 Premieres  4 Responses »
Apr 172020
 

 

The second full-length album by the Danish black metal band Afsky is entitled ofte jeg drømmer mig død, which translates to ”often I dream myself dead”. The songs are based on a number of old Danish poems and texts by artists such as H.C. Andersen, Jeppe Aakjær, and Emil Aarestrup, and could be viewed, at least in part, as a tribute to a history of Danish lyricism and poetry.

The cover image for the new album is a painting by H.A.Bredekilde named “Udslidt”, which means “worn out”. We’re told that Afsky selected the painting because it “fits well with several of the selected texts for the record, which are precisely about the little man, who must work until he dies, for the higher classes in society”.

Consistent with the lyrical inspirations and that attention-grabbing cover art, there are also qualities in the music of Afsky that are poetic, even elegant in their own way, and also deeply sad. Yet as you’ll discover in listening to the song from the album we’re premiering today — “Tyende Sang” — there is also tremendous visceral power in the music as well as turbulent emotional intensity and sweeping melodic grandeur. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BURDEN LIMBS — “HYPOCHONDRIAC”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 152020
 

 

We’ve all now seen examples of songs that were written and recorded long before the pandemic reared its ugly head and took our throats in its teeth, but which now seem as if they had been written yesterday. “Hypochondriac” by the British band Burden Limbs is one of those songs. Now must be a particularly miserable time to be a hypochondriac, but the music also captures the tension, the terror, and the sense of unreality that now pervades everyone’s existence, while the words convey meaning that goes beyond the afflictions of mere hypochondria.

What we’re presenting today is a disorienting and disturbing lyric video for this song, one that is well-suited to the disorienting and disturbing sensations in the music. The band’s vocalist Chad Murray explained it to us this way: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SARPA — “ANGUISHING REVERIES”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 152020
 

 

“Anguishing Reveries“, the song you’re about to hear, is an eye-popping, jaw-dropping surprise — in part because the title may lead you to expect one thing and the music will deliver something astonishingly different. The music is astonishing for other reasons besides the possible mis-direction of the title, but we’ll come to that explanation in a minute.

For now, let’s tell you that the song is the creation of Texas vocalist and multi-instrumentalist David Baxter (drummer of Plutonian Shore, ex-Skrew, ex-Škan) operating under the name Sarpa, a project that he formed in 2018. And the track appears on Sarpa’s debut album Solivagus, which will be released on June 5th of this year. Musically (to borrow from the advance press material), the album is “primarily embedded in the essence of black metal, but Sarpa throws other ingredients such as progressive rock, acoustics, old school death/thrash, and some Afro/Latin rhythms into the pot”.

And now let’s get back to the song you’re about to hear…. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OMNIARCH — “PATHFINDER”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 142020
 

 

Omniarch come our way from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada, and they don’t come timidly. Their formulation of technical and progressive death metal absolutely blazes with exuberant spirit, technical virtuosity, and turbocharged energy, while incorporating memorable melodic and atmospheric accents. It’s the kind of music that will likely find welcome among fans of such bands as Revocation, Inferi, and The Black Dahlia Murder.

Omniarch’s self-titled debut album will be released on May 8th, and today we’re giving you a glimpse of all the qualities mentioned above as we premiere the song “Pathfinder” (and in case you missed it, we’re again presenting the album’s first single, “Ohm Cairn“). Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PHOBOS MONOLITH — “OKTOBER (LUNAR ECLIPSE)”

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Apr 142020
 

 

“When the Light Will Fade“, the title track and first single released from the debut EP of Phobos Monolith, quickly demonstrated the band’s precocious mastery of ingredients that are vital to the appeal of doom-influenced melodic death metal: craggy low-end weight, jolting rhythms, a vocalist who possesses a deep and ravaging growl that’s spine-tingling to hear, and most importantly a talent for crafting forlorn melodic hooks that make an immediate and lasting impression. In addition, consistent with the band’s thematic interests in the mysteries of space-time and the multiverse, they created a sound that hinted at the vastness of the cosmos, accented by ringing keyboards that sparkled like starshine.

That song made a very positive first impression, and now we’re able to bring you a lyric video for a second single, entitled “Oktober (Lunar Ellipse)“, in the lead-up to the June 29 release of When the Light Will Fade by Pest Records. Continue reading »

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