AN NCS PREMIERE: MARRAS — “SEA OF TREES”

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Oct 182019
 

 

Where Light Comes to Die is the debut album of the Finnish black metal band Marras, whose members have been involved in Vargrav, Förgjord, Nekrokrist SS, and Mimorium. It will be released on November 18 by Spread Evil Productions.

What we’re presenting today is a song from the album name “Sea of Trees“, and Marras have explained that its their oldest song, one which actually pre-dated the band’s formation, and which became the vision for the project as a whole, as members Valgrinder and Obscurus began to discuss it:

“We asked Vilthor from Mimorium to play drums and H from Nekrokrist SS to handle the main vocals. I [Valgrinder] did the bass and some of the synths, Obscurus handled the guitars, and V-khaoz from Vargrav did additional synth compositions. Although the vision was clear from the very beginning, Marras started to sound like a collaboration of its creators.” Continue reading »

FIT FOR AN AUTOPSY: “THE SEA OF TRAGIC BEASTS”

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Oct 182019
 

 

(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by New Jersey’s Fit For An Autopsy, which will be released on October 25th by Nuclear Blast and features cover art by Adam Burke.)

There’s a hoary old cliché that says “good artists borrow, great artists steal”.

We all know it, of course, but have you ever thought about what it’s really trying to say?

The point it’s trying to make, at least the way I see it, is that while some artists may borrow an influence here or there from various sources, the really great ones take these influences and make them their own.

And that’s precisely what prominent “Gojira-core” pioneers Fit for an Autopsy have done on their latest, greatest, album, taking the very best elements of the Duplantier brothers’ pre-mainstream work – the powerful riffs and primal vocals, the turbulent, tidal rhythms and melancholy melodies, the ear-catching, attention grabbing pick-scrapes – and stamping them with their own indelible mark. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERPENS LUMINIS — “BRIGHT EUPHORIA”

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Oct 182019
 

 

Competent vocals in the most extreme of metal genres are commonplace. Whether it be the guttural growls and grunts of death metal or the shrieks and howls of black metal, it seems that vast hordes of people can execute them well enough to pass — maybe not in ways that really pop open a listener’s eyes, but at least capably enough that they don’t distract from or diminish the surrounding music. But being merely competent would seem to be a failure in bands who devote themselves to spiritual black metal.

When the paramount goal of the music is to be guided by esoteric mysticism, to become consumed by the black flame, to reveal dimensions that lie outside the mundane world, and to channel the fervency of intense devotion, the vocals need to be out of the ordinary. The voice should sound like the performer is seeing visions most of us can’t see, overcome by inner flames that most of us don’t feel, out on the bleeding edge where rational thought has been banished and the madness of ecstasy or pain (or both) rules the day. Achieving that might test the limits of what human vocal chords can produce without injury, but must at least convey genuine spirit.

Which brings us to Bright Euphoria, the new album by Serpens Luminis. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SHRINE OF INSANABILIS — “VAST VORTEX LITANIES”

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Oct 172019
 

 

Today W.T.C. Productions is releasing Vast Vortex Litanies, the highly anticipated second album by the German black metal band Shrine of Insanabilis. It has been highly anticipated because the band’s first album, 2015’s Disciples of the Void, was so damned good (and the follow-on EP, 2016’s Tombs Opened by Fervent Tongues… Earth’s Final Necropolis, proved that the debut was no fluke). But Vast Vortex Litanies is nonetheless better than everything that has preceded it — as you’ll discover through the full album stream we’re sharing today.

While the band’s song-writing reveals improved dynamism and the enhanced infiltration of sorcerous melodies, it is the heights of glorious yet frightening frenzy that stand out, and that make the album such a continuously exhilarating experience. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HAUSTIÐ — “BASKING IN REFLECTED GLORY”

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Oct 162019
 

 

I learned about Haustið just before Thanksgiving last year, thanks to a recommendation from Rennie of starkweather, who vividly compared Haustið’s then-latest demo to “a cross of Emanation and Wolok on a suicide mission”. When I wrote about that demo, Howling, the Sol Above, Nothing Below, I described “a surreal quality to the music as it flows along its twisting course, with outbursts of dark, dissonant, thorny permutations interwoven with soulful, gliding, and sinuous instrumental passages, both moody and mystical, that sometimes partake of traditions other than extreme metal”.

The next Haustið recording, released this past spring and also discussed here, was a two-track EP named Long Lost Ruins Cried their Black Soot. It was also a marvelously multifaceted experience, with both a “physically” powerful impact and a bitter and chilly atmosphere, delivering one changing experience after another.

Now we find ourselves in the midst of autumn, and Haustið (which is itself Icelandic for autumn, though it is the solo project of a Brazilian man who uses the name Draug), has prepared a new EP named Basking In Reflected Glory, and it’s our good fortune to premiere its tremendous title track today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TAN KOZH — “TROISIÈME FONCTION”

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Oct 162019
 

 

Regular visitors to our site will be familiar with the French label Antiq Records, a label we’ve come to prize around here for exceptional releases by Grylle, Véhémence, Wÿntër Àrvń, Dorminn, and Créatures (to name a few). And now Antiq will be adding to that list with the striking debut album of the pagan black metal band Tan Kozh.

The name of the album is Lignages Oubliés, and it’s set for release on November 15th. Inspired by ancient Indo-European myths, the first part of the album (we’re told) “contains visions of the past and future wars and destruction, within the background the awakening of ancient pagan gods and the eternal turn of the wheel of time; the second part of the album is made of prayers addressed directly to ancient gods”.

What we have for you today is a stream of the album’s opening track, “Troisième Fonction“, which launches the first part of the record. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PISSED REGARDLESS — “IMPERIAL CULT”

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Oct 152019
 

 

In reviewing albums I usually avoid dropping the names of other bands as reference points, but in the case of the new record by San Diego’s Pissed Regardless, mentioning Ringworm, Integrity, No Warning, Darkest Hour, and label-mates Light This City is a good quick way of getting your head prepared for the album stream we’re presenting in advance of its October 18th release by Creator-Destructor. Just seeing those names all in one place is a significant tip-off to the variable ingredients Pissed Regardless have harnessed in Imperial Cult.

But it still probably won’t prepare you for just how crushing the album as a whole is, on multiple levels, or how electrifying it is to experience the band’s twists and turns as they take you through these ten tracks. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VULTUR — “POSTMORTEM LIVIDITY”

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Oct 152019
 

 

I feel like there ought to be a death metal air raid siren that could be turned on when albums like Vultur’s Drowned in Gangrenous Blood are on the way, not so much as a warning (though some people probably should be warned so they can run for the hills) as it would be a rallying cry for addicts of thoroughly gruesome and brutally bludgeoning old school monstrosity. I can imagine the throngs coming on like the zombie hordes in World War Z.

This new album, which follows Vultur’s 2016 demo (Beak) and their 2018 debut album (Entangled in the Webs of Fear) really does display the kind of spirit and craftsmanship that is likely to cause slobbering hunger among fans of evil, diseased, and neck-wrecking death metal. These Hellenic hellraisers have learned their black art very well, as you’ll discover when you hear the track we’re premiering today in the run-up to the album’s October 31st release by Memento Mori. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): UNAUSSPRECHLICHEN KULTEN — “TEUFELSBÜCHER”

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Oct 142019
 

 

At the beginning of Unaussprechlichen Kulten‘s new album Teufelsbücher we hear a haunting piano melody and the swell of symphonic strings. The stateliness and solemnity of those moments is at odds with nearly everything else that comes after, and yet its mystifying grandeur is in keeping with the magnificence of the insanity that soon ensues and never really relents until the grandiose and sorcerous extravaganza of “Necromancy and Torment” brings the album to a close.

The six songs on Teufelsbücher are asylum dreams, hellish visions of menace and madness that also relentlessly challenge the listener’s own sanity. The ever-twisting-and-turning compositions are ecstatically exuberant and the performances technically bewildering. The music boils like an overheated cauldron of unchained creativity, un-tethered to trends and un-bowing to conventions. It’s as if the band, in the throes of a possession, succeeded in opening Pandora’s box, loosing upon the world, through the sounds of mutated death metal, a torrent of bat-winged and brazen evils, never to be sealed again. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NEBRUS — “π”

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Oct 142019
 

 

Diego Spezzoni‘s cover art for the new album by Nebrus seems tailor-made for the music. Meticulously rendered in the style of pointillism, it creates surreal visions of hellish creatures and moldering ruins, of glowering skies and crumbling columns, of burnt offerings on an altar wreathed in serpents, of foul sulphurous vapors and the dark forces they beckon forth. Dark Forces Reign is the name of the album, and dark forces reign in the music.

This is the third full-length by this Italian black metal duo — vocalist/lyricist Noctuaria, and  drummer/guitarist Mortifero (joined here by session bassist Sir VIII Coffins Mime) — and it will be released by Third I Rex on November 30th. What we have for you today is the premiere of a track named “π“, presented through a video that’s as spooky, as surreal, and as evil as the cover art — and the music displays all of those qualities too. Continue reading »

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