AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DRAGHKAR — “THE ENDLESS HOWLING ABYSS”

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Jul 202018
 

 

After releasing a 2017 demo and a pair of 2018 splits on the Blood Harvest label (with Desekryptor and Ossuarium), the Los Angeles-based death metal trio Draghkar are now just one week away from the release of a new EP, appropriately named The Endless Howling Abyss. It’s a four-track effort that will be available digitally, with a CD release by Craneo Negro Records and a cassette tape release by Nameless Grave Records, but we’re giving you a chance to stream the EP today.

While Draghkar’s first release spawned references to old school, cavernous death metal in a kindred spirit to such modern practitioners as Grave Miasma and Tomb Mold, the new EP is a more violent and hard-charging affair that draws influence from early Greek black and death metal, as well as the likes of such other old-school progenitors as Molested and Mercyful Fate. The music on this outing displays a kind of wild, ecstatic savagery, with a feverishness that matches its cruelty. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BLIGHT HOUSE — “IMMACULATE REJECTION”

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Jul 192018
 

 

Frank Owen Gorey is not a well person. Frank Lloyd Blight is not a well person either. Physical illness provided the genesis for their collaboration. Mental illness has kept it going.

There must be swamps in Southern Rhode Island, where these two live. I wouldn’t know. Maybe it was only the basement where F.O. Gorey was quarantined with a fever in 2014 that was swampy. We’re told that when the fever broke after days of misery, spasmodic riffs recorded in bouts of febrile dementia were left behind, and the fractured, worm-riddled foundations of Blight House had been laid, the cracked edifice thereafter completed with F.L. Blight’s assistance.

They self-released a self-titled EP of nasty, grinding death metal, but that didn’t purge the festering freakishness to which they’d given free reign. And so now there’s a new Blight House album, Summer Camp Sex Party Massacre, which will be released by Nefarious Industries on Friday, August 3rd. For fear of what might happen to us if we said no, we agreed to premiere a song from it named “Immaculate Rejection“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ENNUI — “THE WITHERING PART I – OF HOLLOW US”

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Jul 182018
 

 

Ennui from Tbilisi, Georgia, are an old favorite of this writer, sort of like a fondly but frighteningly remembered ghost that lives the attic, an ancient and towering haunt that’s itself deeply haunted and that occasionally emerges from its sunless gloom to blot the sun from our own changing seasons. As Ennui say in a statement about the mammoth new song we’re hosting today: “None of us will ever see the gleams of light in silent dawn. None of us will even know, that our shadow was already gone.”

Three years on from their very fine last album, Falsvs Anno Domini, the Ennui duo of David Unsaved and Serj Shengelia are ready to emerge again, once more to draw us inexorably into their own deep shadows with a new album named End Of The Circle, which is set for a September 5 release by Non Serviam Records.

Ennui never hurry through their songs — their withering spells take time to unfold, to deepen, and to flourish, and especially so on this new record, whose three sagas range in length from 20 minutes to more than 30. And two of those are parts of a conceptually unified musical tale. “The Withering Part I — Of Hollow Us” is what we have for you now. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CRAWL — “REJECT THE CROSS”

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Jul 172018
 

 

You may not know it, but right now you’re in the path of a wrecking machine. It’s growling and rumbling, eagerly waiting for you to push the arrow in the player below so that it can run you over and drag you behind it like so much roadkill.

With that introduction, you’ve probably figured out that despite their name, Crawl aren’t some turgid, sludgy doom band bent on relentlessly lowering your body temperature and suppressing your pulse rate in a semblance of death. No, their music is an amalgam of Swedish-style death metal, crust/punk, and hardcore thats capable of striking with explosive power, as you’ll discover in the song we’re bringing you today, which proclaims “Reject the Cross“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BURIAL HORDES — “HUMAN CONDITION (ISOLATION – MEANINGLESSNESS – MORTALITY)”

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Jul 172018
 

 

The Greek black metal band Burial Hordes began working to bring their hellish visions to life in 2001, and over the 17 years since then have released three albums (with a fourth one on the horizon), along with many shorter releases. Their hate-fueled dedication to misanthropic philosophies of opposition has been unwavering, but their music has been an evolving and continuing source of intrigue, leaving us to wonder where their dark creative impulses will take their music from album to album.

The new Burial Hordes record is entitled ΘΑΝΑΤΟΣ ΑΙΩΝΙΟΣ (The Termination Thesis), and it will be released by Folter Records in September of this year. One song from the album (“Thrownness and Fallenness of Being“) seized our attention when it was revealed last month, and it’s now our privilege to present another one, which is the new album’s chilling opener — “Human Condition (Isolation-Meaninglessness-Mortality)” — through an official music video. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MORROW — “THE WEIGHT OF THESE FEATHERS”

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Jul 162018
 

 

The Seattle band Morrow devoted four years of work to their debut album, The Weight of These Feathers, and it sounds like they devoted every waking hour of those four years to this remarkably impressive creation. It’s nothing if not ambitious, revealing a rich array of sounds, movements, and moods across these seven, mostly longer-than-average tracks, which collectively span almost an hour of music, and interweaving a diverse range of styles that includes (but isn’t limited to) black metal, progressive metal, ambient music, and folk.

Morrow will release the album on July 21st, and it’s our pleasure to bring you a full stream of the record today, preceded by a few more thoughts about it by way of introduction. (Okay, more than a few.) Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DESCENT — “SKINWALKER”

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Jul 132018
 

 

Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to plant yourself, chained to something sturdy, in the face of a Category 5 hurricane? Or to be caught defenseless in the path of a jet-propelled carpet-bombing campaign? Or to be scorched to a crisp by the blast of a military-grade flamethrower? Well of course you have — haven’t we all?

There’s no need to wonder any more, or to be left with the emptiness of fervent desires for self-destruction gone unanswered. You just have to listen to “Skinwalker“. Even a single solitary listen will do the trick.

“Skinwalker” is a track off the debut album by a band from Brisbane, Australia, named Descent, whose members come from the ranks of such bands as From These Wounds, Scumguts, Dire Wolf, Coffin Birth, The Fevered, and Siberian Hellsounds, most of whom we’ve written about here at one time or another. Entitled Towers of Grandiosity, the album is pegged for release by Redefining Darkness Records on August 31st. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SLOTH HERDER — “SACRED COWARD”

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Jul 132018
 

 

If you look at Sloth Herder’s Facebook profile, you’ll see that they’ve chosen “Power-slob” as the description of their musical genre, and “abandon pop sensibility” as the summing up of their band interests, which is pretty funny. And in a way, it kind of makes sense — because trying to pin down the band’s music is a bit like trying to pin a glob of mercury to the dashboard of a moving car. Elsewhere, I’ve seen it described as “demented avant-death/grind”, “blackened doom/grind”, and “a dynamic clusterfuck of seething brilliance”. Their debut album, 2017’s No Pity, No Sunrise, spawned comparisons to such wide-ranging acts as Antigama and Pyrrhon, Yautja and Gaza (among many others).

I myself have resisted the temptation to whip up some kind of genre descriptor in my previous writings about the band, because I don’t like the convulsions that happen when my brain knots up. I’m content just to whip up some adjectives in an effort to capture the convulsing effects of Sloth Herder’s music. Speaking of which, we do have some new Sloth Herder music to present. It’s a track named “Sacred Coward“, which is one of two tracks on a new single that the band will be releasing through their Bandcamp page on July 20. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: ENGULF — “GOLD AND RUST”

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Jul 132018
 

 

Today, the very lucky 13th of July, is the release date for Gold and Rust, the new EP by the one-man, New Jersey-based death metal project Engulf. It comes adorned with a wonderful cover created by Misanthropic-Art, which by itself should be an irresistible invitation to explore this music even if you weren’t already aware of Engulf‘s capabilities, as first revealed through last year’s Subsumed Atrocities EP (which also featured an eye-grabbing cover by the same artist). And those capabilities continue to be strikingly impressive.

All credit goes to Hal Microutsicos, who again proves himself to be a guitar wizard, but one who uses his sorcerous talents in the service of genuinely ferocious death metal onslaughts that get  pulses racing and skulls fracturing, even as they get eyes popping wide over his technical proficiency. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DRAWN AND QUARTERED — “RAVAGE THE CADAVER”

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Jul 122018
 

 

I suppose I ought to confess at the outset that as a resident of the Seattle area for a couple of decades, I became a devoted fan of Drawn and Quartered long ago. Because they’ve been long-time fixtures in the Seattle underground for a couple of decades themselves, that means I’ve been able to watch them perform on numerous occasions, and have always left with a sore neck and a crooked, fiendish smile on my face. It therefore won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve had their new album The One Who Lurks high up on my radar screen since it was first announced — especially since six long years have passed since their last one, Feeding Hell’s Furnace.

That confession, by the way, wasn’t intended as an acknowledgment of any kind of bias. This band earned my loyalty (and that of many others, both here and around the globe) because they’re just really damned good. I say it only because I was prepared to like the album, based on history, before I ever heard it.

But I will say that, even with that history of enjoying records and performances, this new full-length still surprised me. It proves not only that Drawn and Quartered have plenty of gas left in the tank, but that they’ve tapped into some kind of eldritch fuel source that ups the octane even further beyond the premium juice that has driven the pistons of this savage death machine before. Continue reading »

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