AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AKHENATEN — “AMULETS OF SMOKE AND FIRE”

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Aug 192018
 

 

In the run-up to the release of Akhenaten’s third album, Golden Serpent God, earlier this year, we had the pleasure of premiering a video for “Erishkigal: Kingdom of Death“, and now we get to bring you another video for another track off this excellent album: “Amulets of Smoke and Fire“.

For those of you who haven’t already discovered the record, the Colorado brothers Wyatt and Jerred Houseman who stand behind Akhenaten drew inspiration from the mythology and mysticism of ancient Mesopotamia, interweaving exotic melodies into a framework of powerful blackened death metal, accenting the album’s 11 formidable tracks with such instruments as Turkish Saz, Oud, Persian Santoor, Duduk, Kalimba, Handpans, and Sitar. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PULVERIZED — “DEVOCIÓN”

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Aug 172018
 

 

Having laid their foundations through two demos released in 2010 and 2014, the Chilean death metal band Pulverized are now poised (like a demon leopard about to leap) to release their debut album, Monuments of Misanthropy. It will be brought forth by Krucyator Productions on October 13th, and (with an evil grin on our faces) we’re bringing you a stream of the album’s opening track, “Devoción“.

When you eventually have a chance to listen to the album, you’ll detect the strong influence of metal from the early ’90s by such U.S. bands as Morbid Angel, Deicide, Obituary, and Suffocation, as well as the rabid extremity of such South American forces as Krisiun and Abhorrence. Based on just this one track we’re delivering today, it’s also obvious that Pulverized have not only embraced these sinister and sadistic spirits, but also have the songwriting and performance skill to channel with vibrancy and power so much of what makes this kind of death metal deathless. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BOETHIAH — “DRIFTING INTO THE VOID”

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Aug 162018
 

 

Those of you who encountered the spine-shivering wonders of Boethiah‘s debut album, Invocation of the Xenolith, when it was released in the first month of this year may not be expecting new music from this two-man California band so soon, but new music is indeed what they’re now bringing us. On September 21st, a new six-track Boethiah EP named Celestial Gateway will be released on tape by Camo Pants Records and on CD by Rotted Life. We have one of those tracks to share with you today.

“Drifting Into the Void” is a prime example of Boethiah‘s unusual ability to integrate the revered HM-2-powered tone of Swedish death metal with alien musical ingredients that send the listener’s imagination out into the chilling vastness of the interstellar void. It’s not for naught that their music has been characterized as “an insidious integration of the past and the future”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SUICIDE FOREST — “KINGDOM OF SOLITUDE”

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Aug 162018
 

 

On October 2nd Ascension Monuments Media will release the self-titled debut album by Suicide Forest from Tucson, Arizona. The album is the work of 23-year-old multi-instrumentalist A. Kruger, although he is joined by other musicians for the band’s live performances.

Kruger’s choice of the name for this project suits the mood of the music, referring as it does to the sprawling Aokigahara forest northwest of Japan’s Mt. Fuji, reportedly the second most popular place in the world to commit suicide, after the Golden Gate Bridge. We’re told that in 2003, the last year when Japanese authorities released official numbers, 105 bodies had been found there, though no accurate count is possible, given the density of vegetation and the abundance of wildlife within that sea of trees. Continue reading »

AN NCS DEMO PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ZWARTE DOOD — “VAN KAÏN’S ZAAD”

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Aug 152018
 

 

It makes sense that the first demo of Zwarte Dood (Dutch for Black Death, though this project is Belgian) ends with a cover of a track by the infamous Ildjarn (a track I haven’t been able to find anywhere). Like much of Ildjarn’s music, Zwarte Dood‘s demo is an exercise in brutally distorted, minimalist, and palpably hostile black metal romping and rampaging. It’s crude and punishing, hateful and harsh — and in places, powerfully hook-heavy and head-moving.

The opener, “Aanvang“, lasts less than a minute, a stage-setter consisting or eerie swirling and shining ambient music, punctured by the slow strumming of reverberating strings, and elevated by something like the sounds of an angelic choir. After that, before you reach the Ildjarn cover at the end, there are two main songs with another kind of interlude in between them. Continue reading »

GOLDEN BATS: “RESIDUAL DREAD”

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Aug 152018
 

 

Residual Dread is a titanically heavy album, steeped in a kind of gothic gloom, and so haunting in its laments that it threatens to split the heart even as it’s splintering bone. With both a persistently brutal punch and an emotionally devastating conveyance of grief and pain, the music repeatedly hits home with staggering force on multiple levels — all the way up until the final 4 minutes and 40 seconds of the album, when something unexpected and perhaps even more astounding happens. But I’ll come back to that in due course.

The album is the latest one by Golden Bats, the solo project of Australian musician Geordie Stafford (from Brisbane). It’s being released today, both digitally and on vinyl, by a label called Domestic La La, which seems a whimsical name for a carrier of such desolating sounds. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AETHEREUS — “THAT WHICH IS LEFT BEHIND”

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Aug 142018
 

 

Back in mid-June we had the pleasure of premiering a lyric video for a song called “The Pale Beast” off the debut album by the Tacoma, Washington band Aethereus, whose progressive approach to death metal fluidly combines atmospheric, technical, and melodic aspects of the genre with compelling results. Back then, the release date for Absentia seemed a frustratingly long way off, but now it’s out, having hit the streets on August 10th via The Artisan Era. And to help spread the word, we’re again fortunate to bring you a video for another one of the album’s marvelous tracks, “That Which Is Left Behind“.

To put the song in context, “That Which Is Left Behind” appears sixth in a nine-track running order, within an album that (as the band explain) is “loosely structured around the Kübler-Ross Five Stages of Grief (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance)”. Moved by the death of the band’s original bassist Shaun Hansen, the band chose to compose and arrange the album in a way that follows the stages of grief “and describes the experience of losing a loved one and the lasting impact that person’s absence has on an individual, a group, and life as a whole”. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLOODTRUTH — “THE LAST PROPHET”

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Aug 142018
 

 

As a general rule, generalizing is fraught with risk. For every sweeping statement, someone will come up with a hundred exceptions. Yet there’s more than a kernel of truth in the observation that Italian death metal tends to live in the fast lane. It often seems like the Autobahn of death metal, in which bands with adrenaline for blood race so fast and furiously that the wheels leave the ground, trailing flames. Bloodtruth is a prime example of this phenomenon — and the explosive extravagance of their highly accelerated attack is indeed phenomenal. Witness this new song we’re bringing you today through a lyric video.

“The Last Prophet” is one of ten absolutely ferocious tracks on Bloodtruth’s new album, Martyrium, which will be released by Unique Leader Records on September 28th. Consistent with the overarching thematic concept of the album, it’s a lyrical sledgehammer against the edifice of the Christian Church and the historical atrocities committed by the Church against people branded as “heretics”. Musically, it’s a spectacle of fast-twitch muscle fibers in action, everything geared toward heart-pumping savagery and maximum destructive impact. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABSOLVTION — “GALLOW’S DESTINY”

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Aug 142018
 

 

The effect of listening to the new EP by the French black/death band Absolvtion is similar to what I imagine I’d feel if I turned a corner and found a cobra immediately at my feet, its head raised, its hood open wide, swaying, about to strike. I’d feel shock and fear mixed with repulsion, but I’d be transfixed, mesmerized by the terrible beauty of the thing, frozen in fascination.

Gallow’s Destiny exerts a similar mesmerizing attraction, a similar capacity to freeze you in your steps, and at the same time it’s unnerving and poisonous. It tends to blot out rational thought, paralyzing that part of your mind and then sinking its fangs deep. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: REBEL SCUM — “GUZZOLINE”

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Aug 132018
 

 

When we first encountered music from the blood-pumping debut album of Buffalo’s Rebel Scum two years ago, we were moved to write: “Rebel Scum are churning out some devilish rock ‘n’ roll that will make you want to get loaded, jump on a big, smoking chopper, and eat up the highway, with Satan as your co-pilot.” With one more short leap of imagination, we might also have referred to a full-throttle chase across a post-apocalyptic wasteland, the kind of marauding rush so vividly captured in the Mad Max movies.

We’re fiendishly happy to report that Rebel Scum are returning, and this time they’ve made that leap of imagination for us. On September 3rd they’ll be releasing a new self-titled EP, and the first single we’re bringing you today has a title that evokes the Road Warrior — “Guzzoline“. Continue reading »

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