AN NCS PREMIERE: MYSTAGOS — “RITUAL”

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Aug 302019
 

 

We’ve been following the creations of the Spanish avant-garde black metal band Mystagos (formerly known as Chains Ov Beleth) with great interest since discovering the first two advance tracks from the band’s 2017 debut album Ho Anthropos Tes Anomias. Ultimately, we reviewed and premiered a full stream of that remarkable and multi-faceted musical tale of metaphysical divination. We also reviewed the fascinating follow-on EP by Mystagos, 2018’s Pvrvsha, which presented a changing patchwork of sensations that ranged from the harrowing to the surreal, though there was really almost nothing about the music that seemed commonplace or grounded in what we perceive as reality.

Now Mystagos has completed a new album named Azoth, which will be released on September 30th by the Spanish label BlackSeed Productions. Offered the opportunity to premiere a track from Azoth, we leaped at the chance. The new song “Ritual” is the one we bring you today. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WOUNDS — “METAMORPHOSIS”

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Aug 302019
 

 

In April of this year Everlasting Spew Records released the debut EP (Light Eater) of the Chicago quartet Wounds, which presents five tracks of technical death metal that not only manifest impressive dexterity and turbocharged energy but also succeeds in delivering skull-busting grooves and resonant melody. What we have for you today is the premiere of a playthrough video of one of those songs — “Metamorphosis” — which features performances by Wounds guitarist Rick Mora and bassist Franco Caballero.

In the video you’ll also hear the adrenaline-fueled work of drummer Nate Burgard, though not the vocals of frontman Norman Hale (we’ll give you a different way to experience his vocals after the video stream). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PATRONYMICON — “HAISSEM”

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Aug 292019
 

 

Get ready… get ready for your heart to start pumping hard, for the blood to race in the veins, for your brain to light up like wildfire. Those are the effects of the song we’re bringing you today from the new album by the demonic Swedish black metal band Patronymicon, which is set for international release by Osmose Productions on September 27th. Aptly entitled Ushered Forth by Cloven Tongue, it follows the band’s last album (All Daggers Toward the Sky) by six years, and proves that the time was not wasted.

The song you’re about to experience, “Haissem“, pitches the listener into the midst of the Wild Hunt. Launched by blaring chords, grim, heavyweight riffing, and mountainous drum detonations, it soon leaps forward in a racing scourge of vicious, flame-throwing guitars, thunderous drum tumult, and scorching screams, segmented by delirious writhing arpeggios and exotic, swirling solos. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THE FIFTH ALLIANCE — “THE DEPTH OF THE DARKNESS”

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Aug 282019
 

 

In mid-July the Dutch genre-benders in The Fifth Alliance released a single named “Black”, the opening track on their new album The Depth of the Darkness. It made a stunning first impression on this writer (only a first impression, because I hadn’t encountered the band’s previous two albums, Unrevealed Secrets of Ruin (2013) and Death Poems (2015)).

“Black” amalgamates gigantic, heaving, low-end tones and bone-cracking drum beats; glinting guitar notes and wailing clean vocals; haunting atmospheres of shivering moodiness and building tension; and a thundering eruption of blackened ferocity that takes the seeds of pain in the music and makes them flower in thorns. In that eruption, the guitars buzz and boil in a grim torrent of sound as the rhythm section leaves wreckage in their wake, and the vocals vent scarring torment. After that storm of sound the music becomes spectral and chilling (the vocals even more insane), but seductive as well as disturbing. Those ringing notes you hear at the end don’t go away even after the silence falls.

Of course it is true, as most parents teach their obstinate children, that first impressions matter a lot. But what you do afterward can either undermine a brilliant opening gambit or prove instead that it was no fluke. So the question here becomes, did The Fifth Alliance build on “Black” across the remaining four substantial tracks on The Depth of the Darkness or deflate the lofty expectations created by that first single? You’re about to find out. Continue reading »

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 »

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