AN NCS PREMIERE: GUERRA TOTAL — “BATTLE OF YPRES”

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Mar 312020
 

 

In October 1914, near the Belgian city of Ypres, Allied and German forces begin the first of what would be a series of battles to control that ancient Flemish city and its strategically important location. Fighting continued, with stunning losses on both sides, until November 22, when the arrival of winter weather forced the battle to a halt. In that first battle alone, more than 250,000 combatants lost their lives, and the bloodbath would continue in the following spring and subsequent years.

The intensity of that conflict and the almost unimaginable scale and senselessness of the slaughter has inspired many metal bands in the past. As the song we’re presenting today proves, it has also inspired the Colombian band Guerra Total, whose name means “total war” in Spanish, and who themselves come from a country that has been home to one of the longest armed conflicts in the world. The band’s new album, their ninth release in a career that began in 1997, is a concept album about Death managing humanity, using war as its own benefit.

Entitled War Is The Pursuit Of Death: A Hymnal For The Misanthrope, it will be co-released on April 17th by Satanath Records (Russia) with Iron, Blood And Death Corporation (Mexico), and today we’re presenting the second track on the record, “Battle of Ypres“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KARLOFF — “BASTARD OF THE NIGHT”

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Mar 312020
 

 

In these dark times music lovers have a lot of extra time to spend listening and exploring (at least those of us who don’t work in essential activities). I suppose most of us have devoted that time moving around among genres rather than staying on the same road all the time. Variety can indeed be the spice of life, especially when our moods have turned sour and could really use some spicing-up. Karloff has done that for me, giving me something I didn’t realize I needed, and I hope Karloff will do the same for you.

Karloff’s formulation of raw punk and black metal is undeniably sinister, and it runs like a wild wolf-pack on the hunt (or an angry gang marauding through mean streets), but it has made me feel not just glad to be alive, but kind of rapturous too. Its feral, stripped-down attack and high-voltage energy appeal at a primal level, and the immediately infectious nature of the songs makes them easy to stick with, and to use as a means of lighting a fire to any playlist whenever they pop up.

I overlooked Karloff when the band released its first demo in 2018, or when it released the Raw Nights EP last year. Thankfully, I’ve encountered them now, thanks to the decision of Dying Victims Productions to combine those two releases into a single 20-minute vinyl/digital record, also called Raw Nights, with new cover art. Today, in advance of the record’s release on April 24, we’re presenting one of the eight songs, “Bastard of the Night“, along with a stream of a previously released song. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RITUAL DICTATES — “GIVE IN TO DESPAIR”

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Mar 302020
 

 

Sometimes when a band pull from as broad and deep a well of musical inspirations as Ritual Dictates have done on their debut album, the results can be disjointed and chaotically jarring. But when the interweaving of stylistic ingredients is as masterfully and naturally accomplished as it is here, the results can stand out from the pack, and provide a multi-faceted experience that’s an enormous thrill. And that’s the best single word I can think of for Give In To Despair — it’s a thriller, from beginning to end.

The singles released from the album so far have already attracted a lot of excited attention around the web, but for those who might be encountering this band for the first time (and it’s a good time, because we’re streaming the whole album today), it’s a project formed by ex-3 Inches of Blood members Justin Hagberg and Ash Pearson (who’s also the drummer of Revocation), both of whom have also been members of Allfather (Canada) and Angel Grinder, respectively. And for this grand debut, they also enlisted an eye-opening group of guest performers from metal and rock, whose names are worth listing before we go further: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE AND REVIEW: CONSUMER (SELF-TITLED EP)

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Mar 302020
 

 

The Italian band Consumer make no pretense at all about what they’ve done on their self-titled debut EP. They confess that it is “ugly music”: “In this record we’ve put not only our musical influences, but the life-related ones as well. Its deformities and its horrors, its disharmonies and its incommunicability. We’re three different people who are united by the fact of being constantly disoriented in this world. We try to contain the problem with almost unplayable breakdowns, feedbacks and screams.”

There’s much more to the music than unplayable breakdowns, feedbacks, and screams, but what it all adds up to is mutilating punishment — maniacally destructive at times, noxious and diseased at others, and completely oppressive and hopeless at still other times. The impact is often electrifying, but just as often it threatens to beat you senseless and choke you lifeless. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VITAM ET MORTEM — “LOS CUERPOS EN EL RIO”

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Mar 272020
 

 

With 18 years of continuous work and five studio albums behind them, the Colombian band Vitam Et Mortem are now returning with their sixth full-length, which is set for release on April 13th by Satanath Records (Russia) and Exhumed Records (Ecuador). Entitled El Río De La Muerte (River of Death), it is a conceptual work that functions as an exercise in historical memory — focusing on the armed conflict that has scourged Colombia for the past 60 years. In doing so, the album makes a comparison between the Magdalena River in Colombia and the Acheron river of Greek mythology, one of the five rivers of the underworld, known as “the river of woe”.

The band’s significant years of work and ever-evolving musical explorations have resulted in a truly fascinating listening experience, and an unusual stylistic amalgam that intertwines elements of black and death metal, ritual and folk influences, and the union of ravaging brutality and mesmerizing melody. As a great example of these achievements, we present today a lyric video for a song called “Los cuerpos en el río” (“The corpses in the river”). Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANTE-INFERNO — “OATH”

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Mar 272020
 

 

Fane is the forthcoming debut album of the British black metal band Ante-Inferno. In its inspirations and conceptions, it embraces a dark view of ancient and perilous mysteries hidden within the natural (and supernatural) world, its title representing a place where those eternal secrets persist:

“The Fane is a house of secrets, a house of stories, a vault of the treasured knowledge that mankind has forgotten; it is a chalice of truth in an age of lies. It stands within the great forest that covers this land from coast to windswept coast, its glades and glorious canopy unseen by blinded eyes. The way to its door is written between the notes of the old songs and behind the lines of the tales that reverberate with the honesty of the ages. Behind its many doors are many pathways and many are the eyes that watch from the shadows that gather around its blazing hearth. It teems with restless ghosts and creatures whose thirst for blood is as endless as the Fane itself. It is all your world is not – the eternal centre of what was and will forever be.”

In its music, the album is incredibly intense, but intense in different ways. To quote from the advance press materials, because this passage is spot-on, it combines “aching atmosphere and rabid ferocity, icy grandeur and raging flames against a midnight sky”.

No one song completely reveals all the sensations created by the album, whose songs flow into each other and represent steps along a winding path. But the song we’re presenting today through a stunning video — “Oath” — is certainly a compelling example of the album’s achievements. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BYTHOS — “SORATH THE OPPOSER”

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Mar 262020
 

 

Although a new alliance, the Finnish black metal band Bythos boasts a seasoned line-up of performers who come from other groups whose names will be known to every fan of black metal — Behexen, Horna, Sargeist, and Ajattara. In this new formation they’ve combined their talents to create an album that is thematically “an interdimensional view of the underworld and its deities, emphasising strongly on the spiritual evolution to liberate the imprisoned powers, and make one with the outer darkness”.

As further described, The Womb of Zero deals with: “The resetting of the divine plans through destruction and rising above limitations of life. Beauty in destruction, destruction in beauty. A sonic interpretation of what once was, and our constant path of devolution towards the Luciferian dawn”.

We share these insights first, because the music within the album translates these lyrical themes so well, and so powerfully, creating sensations of both chaos and transcendence, of fury and exultation, of menace and magic. We have a great example of these achievements in the song we’re presenting today through an occult-themed video, in advance of the album’s April 24 release by the esteemed Terratur Possessions. Prepare for “Sorath the Opposer“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLACK PESTILENCE — “SPURN ALL GODS”

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Mar 262020
 


photo by Belfry Photography

 

A dozen years into their career, the masked marauders in Black Pestilence from Calgary, Canada, will be discharging their sixth studio album on May 1st, and it’s a scorcher — a high-flying, hard-hitting, blood-lusting hybrid of black metal, punk, and noise that floods the system with adrenaline.

To help spread the word about the new album, the title of which is Hail the Flesh, today we’re premiering an official video for “Spurn All Gods“, a track that’s fast and filthy, feral and ferocious, and a non-stop thrill-ride in both sight and sound. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERON — “VOID EATER”

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Mar 252020
 

 

This makes the third time in our long, wretched history that we’ve had the honor of premiering music from Vancouver’s Heron. First, three-and-a-half years ago, it was a stream of their second EP, Fire Twin. The second occasion, two years ago, was a track from their debut album, A Low Winter’s Sun. And now, we present “Void Eater“, while helping to announce the new Heron album on which it will appear.

That album, entitled Time Immemorial, will be released in a variety of formats on May 15th by Sludgelord Records. And while Heron have already proven themselves through their previous releases to be a formidable force for skull-fracturing, soul-shattering intensity, Time Immemorial leads them (and us) even deeper into dark dimensions of dread and despair, of physical trauma and mental dislocation, and its ravaging, visceral impact is undeniable. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FOETAL JUICE — “GLUTTONY”

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Mar 252020
 

 

Derek Carley fuckin’ practices what he preaches! In this video for a song called “Gluttony” he stuffs his gullet with kebabs while howling like a rabid demon at his rabid audience — and then self-eviscerates, spewing gore across all the greedy faces and then feeding their ravenous hungers with his own intestines. Deeeelicious!

It’s a hilariously grotesque film, with a little surprise at the end which proves that gluttony survives even death. And speaking of death, the song itself is a berserker blast of electrifying death-grind, vicious and wild and… eviscerating. Continue reading »

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