AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CEMETERY LIGHTS — “THE UNDERWORLD”

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Aug 272019
 

 

The debut album of Cemetery Lights is a bewildering experience, and a magical one. The sound is earthy, in fact so organic in its tones and so stripped-down in its elements that it brings to mind garage-band rock recordings from many decades past. At the same time it sounds unearthly, so sinister, mysterious, and exotically arcane that it fogs the mind and chills the skin — and conjures visions of otherworldy splendor. Those weirdly perilous and wondrous aspects of the music are in keeping with its conceptual inspirations, which are rooted in the Homerian epics of ancient Greece, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and in several other complementary texts

This album, The Underworld, is the solo work of The Corpse, a Rhode Island-based musician who began his endeavors under the name Cemetery Lights with a pair of 2018 EPs, Lemuralia and The Church on the Island, which themselves drew inspiration from the history and mythologies of the ancient Mediterranean region — and also sounded like a throw-back to an earlier age of black metal from the same region. Written between 2009 and 2014, the eight songs on the album were recorded at the same time as those EPs, but unlike them include live percussion. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WHITE WARD — “DEAD HEART CONFESSION”

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Aug 272019
 

 

In 2017 we devoted significant attention to Futility Report, the debut album of the Ukrainian iconoclasts White Ward, hosting the premieres of two songs and then of the album as a whole. It was (and still is) brilliant in a way that few albums are in any year. In its extravagant inventiveness and unexpected stylistic juxtapositions it could have been a train wreck, mangled bodies strewn about like broken toys, and fractured machines burning in a jumble of warped iron and splattered diesel. Instead, like mad scientists who are in fact visionaries, White Ward produced something through their unorthodox splicing of diverse musical genres (which included black metal and jazz) that was as enthralling as it was deviant.

In the abstract, contemplating how White Ward might have improved upon Futility Report in a second album is an odd exercise, because it assumes the possibility of gauging greater or lesser degrees of success when there is no objective measuring stick at hand for their kind of bohemian rhapsodies. At a minimum, however, it’s possible to say that the band’s second album, Love Exchange Failure (due for release on September 20 by Debemur Morti Productions), is still non-conformist, still surprising, still electrifying. And while it’s obvious that White Ward still have no inclination to follow any straight and narrow path, their new compositions seem more cohesive, and more powerful in their capacity to evoke strong emotional responses, without at all repressing the adventurous spirit that drove the first album from beginning to end. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ZEIT – “DRANGSAL”

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Aug 262019
 

 

“With frustration in their hearts, green lungs and Sternburg on their lips, ZEIT try to find their way through the great gray – The distress known as city: Inspiration, coercion, freedom and jail. In dark alleys full of delusions, doubtful souls roam, lost in addiction. No hood, no cult – no collective.”

With those words the Leipzig band Zeit introduce their second album, Drangsal (“distress”), which will be released this coming Friday, August 30th. Through a changing amalgam of black metal, sludge, and doom, they’ve created an album that’s relentlessly intense and brutally heavy in more ways than one, delivering music that captures the blighted urban existence described in those introductory words. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HAUNTER — “SPOILS VULTURED UPON SOLE DELETION”

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Aug 222019
 

 

After the strength of Haunter‘s 2016 debut album (Thrinodia) and splits with Crawl, Sovereign, and Black Vice, hopes have been high for this Texas band’s next album, which is now set for release on September 13th by I, Voidhanger Records. It is no exaggeration to say that even the most fervent and optimistic hopes have been exceeded. Across the five substantial tracks included on Sacramental Death Qualia, Haunter have created an authentic musical adventure. Their compositions have become even more creatively elaborate, more technically demanding, and more unpredictable. The whole trip is one of those forays into extreme music that’s capable of leaving listeners wide-eyed and breathless.

The album invades a small sector of music that isn’t densely populated, a place sought out by travelers who enjoy high-flying progressive adventurousness — when it’s experienced within an extreme framework, intertwined with the sounds of violence and insanity, of desolation and despair.  Sacramental Death Qualia delivers its mind-bending permutations with exactly that kind of harrowing intensity, but its surprises don’t end with the intricacy of the movements and the sharpness of the dark mood swings. As you’ll discover through the song we’re presenting today, Haunter are equally capable of creating moments of spell-binding beauty. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PAGANIZER — “ROT SPREADS”

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Aug 222019
 

 

Undeniably, rot does spread, whether in wood, in human flesh, or in a damaged mind. Decay and decomposition are the natural end-points of organic life, the inevitable by-product of death. Once the spark goes out, the path to ruin is usually very slow — but the rot in the Paganizer song we’re presenting today spreads like… wildfire.

We hope that Paganizer needs no introduction. As the oldest and longest-running of the numerous groups to which the great Rogga Johansson has devoted his talents, it is a musical landmark that rises high above the gnarled forests and subterranean crypts of Swedish death metal. Unlike most living things, the music of Paganizer also seems immune to rot and deterioration. Arriving 20 years after the release of Paganizer’s debut album, the new full-length, The Tower of the Morbid, is full proof of that. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ENEMY OF CREATION — “VICTIMS OF THE CROSS”

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Aug 212019
 

 

We’re told that the members of Indiana’s Enemy of Creation are veterans of the underground hardcore scene, and you can tell from listening to the music that they didn’t abandon those roots. But on their forthcoming sophomore EP Victims of the Cross they’ve spliced them with different forms of metal — mainly thrash, but with (as their label says) “the occasional nod to death metal greats Obituary and Bolt Thrower“. And as you’ll discover through our full streaming premiere of the EP, those references still don’t exhaust the differing elements that the band have integrated to create a wonderfully multi-faceted — and relentlessly electrifying — release. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GEIST — “SLEEP DEPRIVED”

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Aug 212019
 

 

That photo up there, it’s a classic example of the calm before the storm — the members of Geist holding still for the camera. Even in that frozen moment, you get the sense of barely repressed menace, a perception of people who are much more comfortable exploding on stage than waiting while the timer ticks toward the detonation.

And man, these dudes from the northeast of England really are explosive. Through a feral mix of dark hardcore, crust, and metal, they channel emotionally raw and devastating sensations (and bone-busting force) through their debut album Swarming Season. And the video we’re premiering today for an album track named “Sleep Deprived” captures them in their true element, throwing themselves with utter commitment into the performance of the music (rather than waiting for the shutter to click). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CELL — “GOD OF THE NETHERREALM”

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Aug 202019
 

 

The Canadian black metal band Cell (based in Winnipeg, Manitoba) have an unusual origin story. Before there was a band there was an idea for a science fiction comic book, born from the imagination of guitarist/vocalist Hyperion. In thinking about how to bring the conceptual idea to life, he decided to use music as the vehicle instead, and from that turn in the creative path, Cell was born, and their musical narratives flow from those concepts.

With one album under their belts (2016’s The Frozen Moon of Erebath), Cell are now poised to release their second full-length, Ancient Incantations Of Xarbos. While black metal forms the backbone of the music, Cell have brought in elements of of death metal, hardcore, thrash, and doom to expand upon their cosmic endeavors.

All those elements are on display in the almost theatrically rich dynamics of the song from the new album that we’re presenting today, “God of the NetherRealm“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OKTAS — “SILFRA”

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Aug 202019
 

 

An okta is a unit of measurement used to describe the amount of cloud cover at any given location. The term has become the basis for the name chosen by a group of Philadelphia musicians led by visual and musical artist Bob Stokes (Drones for Queens) and including friends of his from previous bands — drummer Rob Macauley and fellow bassist Carl Whitlock of Dirt Worshipper, and minimalist composer Jason Baron from Cloud Minder, who plays the cello with Oktas.

Under that name they’ve recorded a debut self-titled EP that embraces a range of influences, from ambient minimalism to atmospheric black metal and epic doom metal, woven together with a cinematic edge. Lyrically “based in the filth ridden streets of south Philadelphia”, as Bob Stokes tell us, the words transport us “to a world destroyed by mankind’s own hubris, pllagued with endless war, constant natural disasters and humanity desperate for redemption”.

The EP is set for digital release on September 20th, which will coincide with an art show by Bob Stokes at the Grindcore House Cafe in Philadelphia in conjunction with Dark Arts and Craft. And in advance of the release it’s our pleasure to premiere one of the EP’s three tracks — “Silfra“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABYSMALIST — “REFLECTIONS OF HORROR”

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Aug 192019
 

 

“18 minutes of eldritch lurch ‘n’ crunch“. Sometimes it’s hard to improve on a good publicist’s summing-up, and in few words that is indeed a very good description of the “crushing ruminations” (another stolen phrase) displayed across the four tracks of Abysmalist’s debut demo, Reflections of Horror. A solemn and shivering bow must also be aimed in the direction of Abysmalist for their selection of a title for the demo, because electrifying horrors live and breathe within its supernatural confines.

Formed by two veterans of the Bay Area crust and hardcore underground, Abysmalist indulge their affections for Bolt Thrower, Obituary, and other “pre-blastbeat death metal” from the early ’90s (one more stolen phrase), as well as an attraction to such authors as Clive Barker and Patrick Süskind, whose works provided lyrical inspiration. And like authors such as those, the eerie reverberations and ghastly vocals in their music send chills down the spine even as the band pound and eviscerate or drag us through dank crypts like rotten but still breathing corpses. Continue reading »

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