AN NCS PREMIERE: PILLARS — “SWARMS FROM THE SWAMP”

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Aug 282018
 

 

Imagine a sudden, seismic shift in your reality. You find yourself alone on a vast, humid plain, shrouded in mist and littered with bones. Before you looms a giant monolith of granite, a gargantuan tombstone of broken hopes that blots the sun — and it’s disintegrating, with boulder-sized fragments cascading down in a slow-motion avalanche of black destruction. You want to run, but the earth has turned to tar beneath your feet, and begins to heave as the boulders strike like bombs.

It’s an ugly, nightmarish dream from which you awaken in a cold sweat, haunted and shivering. It’s one way (my way) of imagining the visions created by the song you’re about to hear, the name of which is “Swarms From the Swamp” by the French band Pillars. It comes from their debut album, aptly entitled Onwards to Nothingness, which will be released on September 28th by Seeing Red Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GILLIAN CARTER — “…THIS EARTH SHAPED TOMB”

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Aug 282018
 

 

Nor for the first time, Adam Burke‘s cover painting was the first source of intrigue about this album. The intrigue deepened when I listened to what was publicly available at the time I first saw the painting. The music in many ways was pretty far afield of what we usually cover at this site, and maybe that was part of its attraction — the allure of something stylistically different, and yet in its own way just as dark, as bone-bruising, and as emotionally super-charged as the metal extremity that takes up most of our time here. Little did I know, even then, how intensely involving the complete album would be.

The album in question is …This Earth Shaped Tomb by the Florida band Gillian Carter. It’s their fifth full-length, a 15-track, 35-minute affair that proves to be a constantly changing and perpetually surprising juxtaposition of sounds and moods. It will be released on August 31st by Skeletal Lightning in North America and Moment of Collapse Records in Europe — and we have a full stream of it for you right now, preceded by bunch of spoilers. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MALIGNER — “ATTRACTION TO ANNIHILATION”

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Aug 272018
 

 

The Swedish death/thrashing power trio Maligner wear their late-’80s and early-’90s influences on their sleeves, blasting ahead in the footsteps of such bands as Sadus, Dark Angel, and perhaps most especially Human-era Death. But it’s one thing to draw influence from bands like those and it’s quite another to execute on a vision with the kind of supreme confidence and jaw-dropping skill displayed by Maligner on their debut album, Attraction To Annihilation.

They waste no time establishing their credentials, opening the album with a track (“Oath-bound”) that’s an explosive adrenaline-surge powered by lightning-fast fret-work and agile, rhythmically dynamic drumming with a propensity to turn on a dime. Serving up an array of blaring chords and frenzied riffs, this trio explode through the song in a way that’s surgically precise but capable of channeling bonfires of chaos. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BLOOD OF SERPENTS — “IN DARKNESS, BROTHERHOOD”

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Aug 232018
 

 

The song you’re about to hear is such a wild, vicious, blazing torrent of sound that it’s hard not to think of it as a shock-and-awe campaign, or perhaps as a cyclonic Sirocco scourge blasting from the open gates of Hell. The name of the track is “In Darkness, Brotherhood“, and it comes from Sulphur Sovereign, the explosive new album by the Swedish black metal band Blood of Serpents.

This new track isn’t the first one to be divulged from the album in advance of its September 25 release by Non Serviam Records. Earlier this month we were assaulted by the song “Devil’s Tongue“, which was so striking that we were moved to write about it immediately, before we had any inkling we’d be invited to host today’s premiere. The sheer electrifying effect of that song’s blinding speed and warlike vehemence (and the scalding savagery of the vocals) were gripping, and the high, soaring, delirious grandeur of the melody at its core made it even more riveting. And now we’ve been riveted again. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INFESTUS — “THRON AUS TRÜMMERN”

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Aug 232018
 

 

Infestus may have reached the point when it is no longer fair to characterize the music as black metal, because as diverse as that genre of music has become, the term connotes limits that no longer seem applicable to this German band’s extravagantly multi-faceted new album, Thrypsis. Even Debemur Morti Productions, who will be releasing the album on October 5th, now refers to the music as Dark Metal — which is the amorphous banner we tend to hoist over music that we can’t easily (or accurately) categorize with more familiar metal labels, no matter how many hyphens they might include.

The further progression of ideas reflected in the music of Thrypsis will not come as a shock to those who experienced the stunning tapestry of desolation, malevolence, and bleak beauty rendered in the last Infestus album, 2014’s The Reflecting Void, yet it’s abundantly evident that Infestus has climbed to dizzying new heights on this new record. The song we’re helping to premiere today, “Thron aus Trümmern” is powerful proof all by itself. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ROTTEN EVISCERATION — “ASCENDING FROM THE PUTRID GRAVE”

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Aug 232018
 

 

All of the outward trappings of the Perúvian death metal band Rotten Evisceration suggest an experience of depraved, gore-splattered, blunt-force horror — from their name, to the cover art for their debut album Ancient Grave Ascension, to the titles on the album’s track list. All these outward signs might lead some to conclude that their music is entirely devoted to brutal bludgeoning and mindless mayhem, and that’s not far from the truth, but it’s definitely not the whole truth, as you’re about to discover.

It’s our putrid pleasure to announce the details of this release, along with that ghastly cover art: Ancient Grave Ascension will be released by Blood Spattered Axe Records in conjunction with Guts ‘N’ Blood Records on November 1st of this year. And we also have for you the premiere of the breathtakingly destructive but tremendously electrifying title track from the album, delivered through a lyric video that revels in the terrors of the cover art. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BEDSORE — “AT THE MOUNTAINS OF MADNESS”

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Aug 222018
 

 

I feel compelled to begin the introduction to this premiere with an uncalled-for comment about the band’s name: Don’t be fooled by it.

At one time or another we’ve all been bedsore, waking up cranky and achy. But sleeping poorly and moving slowly upon rising is such a drab, mundane experience, one you just want to banish with the aid of a gallon of coffee. But there’s nothing mundane about the song you’re about to hear, nothing dull or forgettable. To the contrary, it’s a big eye-opener, an unexpected bolt from the blue that proves to be both mystifying and harrowing, a labyrinthine excursion through a nightmare realm. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ULVEN — “DEATH RITES UPON A WINGED CRUSADE”

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Aug 212018
 

 

We’re so spoiled, those of us with a taste for the bitter, biting salts and the boiling acidity of black metal. We lift the old vintages to our lips, and the new ones; we feel the sting of sulphur in our nostrils and see the pale beckoning hands or the charging cavalries of death in our minds; we might feel transported to nether dimensions that seem poised to swallow and sever us without a backward glance of regret. Satiety can lead to cynicism for some, and even for the never-sated but not easily impressed among the rest of us, we do tend to greet new black metal with the same demand that became the motto of Missouri: Forget the rhetoric, you’ve got to show me.

The PR rhetoric around Ulven’s new album was that it would be “based on the worship of death and reaching beyond the shadows of the deep abyss”, and that as compared to Ulven’s first album, the sounds of this new one — Death Rites Upon A Winged Crusade — “have shifted and morphed to become an entirely new and unholy creature.” Okay, I thought, show me. And Ulven did.

And now we’ll show you, too. There’s a full stream of the album at the end of this post; the album will be released on August 24th by Fólkvangr Records on tape and CD, with a vinyl edition coming from Death Kvlt Productions. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WITCH RIPPER — “THE WITCH”

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Aug 202018
 

 

After the demise of the impressive Minnesota death metal band Iron Thrones about six years ago, its members moved on to other things. Bassist Curtis Parker moved on not only musically, but also geographically, relocating from Minneapolis to Seattle where he launched a new project named Witch Ripper. At first, it was essentially a solo project, though Parker’s ex-Iron Thrones bandmate Pete Clarke collaborated as the drummer on Witch Ripper‘s self-titled debut EP, which was released in 2012.

I heard about that 2012 EP not long after it came out, and found it hugely entertaining. As I wrote then, it brought to mind the likes of Mastodon, High On Fire, Neurosis, and Helms Alee, channeling the power of the riff at high-megawatt levels of addictive hookiness, but also delivering layers of memorable melodic complexity that made it stand out from the stoner crowd. You could be swallowed up in hard-rocking, hard-rolling jams one minute, stomped-on hard the next, and swimming off on astral streams the next. I immediately started looking forward to the next Witch Ripper release. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BANGLADEAFY — “RIBBONCUTTER”

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Aug 202018
 

 

I was both perplexed and intrigued when I first encountered the name Bangladeafy roughly two years ago (and I was very late to this party, given that this NYC duo had already been making music together for many years before). The name made more sense when I learned that drummer Atif Haq is Bangladeshi, and that bassist, keyboardist, and vocalist Jon Ehlers is hearing-impaired. I was also temporarily perplexed and intrigued when I listened to the first music revealed from their then-forthcoming second EP Narcopaloma — and then quickly became amazed by what they’d done, which was to create an experience that was somehow brain-twisting but melodic, instrumentally jaw-dropping but spell-binding.

Now Bangladeafy have recorded a new album, the name of which is Ribboncutter. It will be released by Nefarious Industries on September 21st. That news, all by itself, was a source of fresh intrigue. It seemed a given that these two wouldn’t have done anything that could remotely be considered conventional. The only question was what kind of roller-coaster ride had they have created for us, and whether listeners would be left securely strapped in place for the spin or instead be vaulted way out into thin air, arms and legs flailing in frightened and gleeful exhilaration. The answer should have been obvious. Continue reading »

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