AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HATRED REIGNS — “PLANES DIVIDE”

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Jun 212018
 

 

Late last month the Ontario death metal band Hatred Reigns released their debut EP, Realm: I – Affliction. Consisting of three tracks, it provides a preview of a future concept album that, as the band explain, “recounts the travels of damned souls to purgatory where their fate will be determined as they face numerous challenges along the way”, a concept inspired by Dante’s Inferno and the movie What Dreams May Come, but given the band’s own twist on the themes.

What we have for you today is a lyric video for the EP’s third song, “Planes Divide“, which makes vibrant use of the EP’s hellish cover art. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KHANUS — “SURRUPU”

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Jun 212018
 

 

The Finnish band Khanus made an attention-grabbing debut with their 2016 EP Rites of Fire (reviewed here). Less than 14 minutes long, it was nevertheless long enough to mark the band as one to watch closely. The genre-crossing music kept the tension and unease tightly coiled at almost all times, yet with a fascinating ability to hypnotize as it simultaneously put the listener’s teeth on edge. The EP was also long enough to attract the attention of I, Voidhanger Records, which reissued the EP on CD and is now preparing to release the first Khanus album.

Those who are familiar with this label’s releases know to expect something unorthodox. And Flammarion does indeed arouse the mind with otherworldly visions and an atmosphere of mysticism, while also channeling a primal, physically arresting energy. In the words of I, Voidhanger’s accurate summing-up, “Khanus‘ music oscillates between trance-inducing melodies almost bordering on hypnotic psychedelia and the primitive pulse of black/death metal, all seen through a distorting avant-garde lens that exalts the weirdness of the style without sacrificing brutality and aggressiveness”.

You’ll get a strong sense of Khanus‘ creative proclivities through the song we’re premiering today, a track named “Surrupu“, although it doesn’t provide a complete encapsulation of all the album’s textures. The sounds and moods are too varied for any one track to stand as an exclusive representation. Still, this a great lead-in to what Flammarion holds in store. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PÁNICO AL MIEDO — “CEBOS VIVOS”

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Jun 202018
 

 

Last fall we had the good fortune to premiere a track named “Rompe El Cepo” off the new album by the Spanish band Pánico Al Miedo, accompanied by a video that made good use of the album’s cover art (created by that famous connoisseur of the grotesque, Ed Repka). Since then, the band released a second video (for “La Fuente“), which is an eye-catcher of a different kind, and the album itself was released by a consortium of labels in April.

And now we get to bring you a third video for the album Formador, a Spanish-language lyric video for a song named “Cebos Vivos“, which seems to mean “live bait” in English. And in case you missed the first two videos or the album as a whole, we’re including streams of all of that, too! Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: RIG TIME! — “DESERVE”

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Jun 202018
 

 

I’m a prime example of why it’s a smart idea for good bands to make videos for album tracks after their albums have been released — provided the videos are a match for the power of the music, as this one is.

Rig Time!, from La Crosse, Wisconsin, released their second album War last fall but I missed it, as I did their first album Sick of It (2016) and their two previous EPs, 2014’s Awful and 2015’s Devout. I might have remained oblivious to War but for the video you’re about to see and hear, which in my case made an explosive impact, both visually and in its sound.

Its ferocity is undeniable; it’s the kind of brutal passion that’s tough to fake. Better late than never, Rig Time! has gone off like a grenade lobbed into my head, and no doubt, I’m not the only one who’s gotten wrecked by them. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISROTTED AND GUILTY C — “LIVE IN OSAKA”

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Jun 202018
 

 

(Grant Skelton provides this review of a collaborative live recording by the Chicago doom band Disrotted and the Japanese harsh noise artist Guilty C, and introduces our premiere of a full stream of the sounds.)

In 2015, Disrotted contributed a gargantuan grotesquerie of a track for a split with Japanese powerviolence veterans Su19b. The track, entitled “Infernal Torment,” is nearly half an hour of droning, staggering madness. The song is a stroke of subversive genius, further compounded by the fact that Disrotted enlisted the help of Japanese noise artist Guilty C to collaborate on it. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AETHEREUS — “THE PALE BEAST”

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Jun 192018
 

 

Sometimes visual metaphors are the most vivid means of capturing the sensations of hard-to-describe music. The imagery that came to this writer’s mind in listening to the song we’re premiering here was an extravagant fireworks display, or a kaleidoscope being spun at the speed of a turbine. The music is equally dazzling, the kind of performance that will leave most listeners wide-eyed in wonder, and smiling in delight.

The song (presented through a lyric video that makes good use of Sam Nelson’s wonderful cover art) is “The Pale Beast“, the final track on Absentia, the debut album of Aethereus from Washington State, which will be released on August 10th by The Artisan Era. It’s a prime example of this group’s brand of progressive death metal, which (as the label accurately describes) “deftly combines elements of atmospheric death metal, ferocious technical death metal, and more overtly melodic death metal”. Once you’ve heard the music, it’s not surprising that Aethereus cite Obscura, Spawn of Possession, Cynic, and Gorod among their prime influences. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORDANT RAPTURE — “UNSIGHTLY BEAST”

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Jun 182018
 

 

We have for you an explosive, adrenaline-fueled, and multi-faceted song from the debut EP by Mordant Rapture, which will be released on Friday the 13th of July by The Artisan Era. “Unsightly Beast” is its name, and it is a beast of a track, no doubt, but more grand and glorious in its ferocity than unsightly.

The Abnegation is the title of the new EP, and it represents an attention-grabbing step forward for this group, who claim among their influences such bands as Spawn of Possession, Emperor, Necrophagist, and Dissection. As those names might suggest, the sound of Mordant Rapture as displayed on this new work could be considered a form of symphonic technical death metal with black metal elements in the mix. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AKASHA — “MOONLITE RITUHELL”

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Jun 182018
 

 

The California lone wolf behind the black metal project Akasha doesn’t like most people and despises being around others. In what must have been a feverish three days and nights, he wrote and recorded Akasha‘s debut album, Consuming the Soul, and mixed and mastered it himself. His intention, and what fueled the project, was (as he explained in a recent interview) “to exact revenge on those who have crossed me and to take full advantage of the weaknesses they have shown me”.

And so the choice of Akasha as a name, invoking the ancient Egyptian queen who ate the dead with vampyric intent, is less an affinity for blood-sucking ghouls or an attempt to link arms with the lineage of Les Légions Noires and more an expression of “mental and spiritual vampyrism” — “feeding off of my enemies in order to empower myself and ruin them”. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SVIN — “CUTS”

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Jun 182018
 

 

The Font of All Human Knowledge tell us that Thomas Hardy originated the term “cliffhanger” in 1873 when he left a protagonist from one of his serials literally hanging off a cliff at the end of a particular installment. But of course, as the great Font reminds us, the cliffhanger as a plot device goes back much, much further, at least as far back as the One Thousand and One Nights, in which Scheherazade narrated a series of stories to King Shahryār for all those years of nights, “with each night ending on a cliffhanger, in order to save herself from execution”.

And since then, the cliffhanger has been a tried-and-true hook across a range of artistic media where bringing the customer back is the main objective. Think of how often you’ve seen season-ending cliffhangers in TV and on-demand series, or encountered them month-after-month in a comic book series, or been left dangling over the edge in a novel that makes you wait for a sequel. It works, even though it’s frustrating.

Why the hell, you may ask, is he droning on about the “cliffhanger” device??? You will find out soon enough. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VERANO’S DOGS — “SUMMONING THE HOUNDS”

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Jun 152018
 

 

What could be more heart-warming than an album devoted to dogs, made by a band named for dogs? After all, canines are man’s best and most devoted friends, aren’t they?

Well, you’d better fucking think again. The hounds summoned by these musical tales aren’t your loyal friends — they’re emblems of death. They range from Cerberus at the gates of Hades to the dog-headed Anubis, lord of the Egyptian underworld, from Conan Doyle’s Hound of the Baskervilles to the baying creature in one of Lovecraft’s first stories in the Cthulhu mythos. If there’s a warm heart in this music, it’s the one these tracks want to tear from your chest, still beating. Continue reading »

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