AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ORACLE — “DRAFTED”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 182018
 

 

The last forced conscription of young men into the United States military ended in early 1973, not long after the cessation of active U.S. ground operations in the Vietnam War. Since then, enlistment has been voluntary, but the time could come again when young men (and perhaps women) will be forcibly pulled from their lives and thrown into peril in a foreign land.

The song “Drafted” by the Alabama melodic black/death metal band Oracle addresses that history and that prospect, but also uses the experience as a metaphor for more ever-present situations in which we all have found ourselves. And in that song, they set those themes to music that’s dark, hard-hitting, and quite memorable.

It’s only one fine track out of many on their new album Into the Unknown, which was released by Naturmacht Productions on April 1, but it’s not surprising that it was chosen as the subject of the music video we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SVEDERNA — “SVEDJELAND”

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Apr 182018
 

 

If you put lyrics aside, which is not difficult to do when they are in Swedish and you’re own meager understanding is limited to English, the emotions conveyed by a human voice in the throes of intense expression become subject to changing interpretations, depending on the music behind it. That thought occurred to me (though not for the first time), as I listened to the new album by the Swedish black metal band Svederna, which will be released this Friday (April 20).

J. Holmberg’s burning howls, savage shrieks, and raw-throated yells are undeniably intense, a full-force outpouring of emotion. But the emotions the listener feels may change dramatically depending on what his talented bandmates are doing behind him. They can be heard to convey violent fury, or terrible anguish, or wild cries of defiance, simply because of how the music changes. Of course, he does his own part to change the mood, too, especially when uttering spoken words in somber tones.

And the moods do change across the eight songs on Svedjeland. Indeed, they change within every song, because Svederna are obviously interested in, and quite adept at, crafting their vibrant brand of melodic black metal with alternating ingredients and energies. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SKINNED — “AS THEIR BODIES FALL”

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Apr 172018
 

 

In August of last year we premiered a video for “We Are the End“, a tremendous new single by the electrifying Colorado death metal band Skinned. As we reported then, the song was to appear on Shadow Syndicate, the forthcoming fifth album in this band’s slaughtering career, which dates back to the mid-’90s. But the months passed, and the album didn’t arrive….

But now it finally has a label (Xenokorp Records) and a release date — May 4th – and today we get to bring you another video for another single from the album, this one called “As Their Bodies Fall“, which features guest vocals by Josh Welshman of Defeated Sanity and lyrics by Paul McGuire of Cerebral Bore, who also directed this lyric video. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THE CANYON OBSERVER — “NØLL”

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Apr 172018
 

 

In November of 2015 we premiered an album named FVCK by Slovenia’s The Canyon Observer. As I wrote then: “It will fuck you up. It’s almost unremittingly intense — as heavy as a pile of corpses, as hallucinatory as a drug-induced nightmare, chaotic, deranged, and powerfully disorienting. It’s also spellbinding, a descent into a subterranean demolition zone that proves to be as hypnotic as it is harrowing.”

Today, we again find ourselves in the fortunate position of premiering an album by the same band. This new one is named NØLL, and it will be released on April 20 by Vox Project (France) and Kapa Records (Slovenia). For this new album, the band haven’t completely left behind their post-metal influences, but the new album amplifies the elements of sludge and doom in their sound, mixes in a variety of disturbing experimental textures, and even more dramatically increases, to truly stunning levels, their propensity for inflicting violence. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EXCOMMUNICATED — “INTOXICATED” (AN OBITUARY COVER)

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Apr 172018
 

 

Collectively, the founding three members of the Louisiana band Excommunicated have more than 75 years of experience in the metal underground. When you add in the balance of the line-up on their new album Death Devout, the combined experience goes well over the century mark. They’ve been involved in numerous other groups across a range of extreme genres, but it’s clear that they all have one passion in common, one that’s reflected in this new album’s title — a devotion to death (metal).

Excommunicated’s 2011 debut album, Skeleton Key, was a collection of 10 original songs conceptually making up “a dark treatise on the medieval Catholic Church; centering on corruption, abuse, as well as strange and ghoulish habits”, and they have plans to record a sequel in the near future, with the tentative title of The Exterminating Angel. But what they’ve done in the meantime, with Death Devout, is to pay homage to a pantheon of death metal greats. This is an album that consists mainly of cover songs, and we have the premiere of one of those covers today in advance of the album’s April 20 release date.

But before we get to that premiere, let’s take a look at the track list: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SCARIFICARE — “TILASM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 162018
 

 

Without meaning to denigrate the music of bands whose music goes straight down the middle of specific metal genres, there’s an unusual level of interest (at least in my case) that’s consistently provoked by groups whose ambitions lead them to create intersections of multiple traditions, like audio Venn diagrams. Such amalgamations probably fail as often as they succeed, but when they do succeed, they can provide the kind of exciting surprises that really stand out. And that’s what the Portuguese band Scarificare have accomplished on their new album, Tilasm, which we’re premiering today with a full stream.

This is the band’s third album, but it reflects the work of a new line-up, with guitarist Quetzalcoatl (also the vocalist an keyboardist on this record) being the only mainstay since the band was formed; here, he is joined by bassist Eligos and drummer Luis Leal. And what they’ve done on Tilasm is to draw together elements of black metal, death metal, doom, and (for want of a better term) epic heavy metal to create a wonderfully dark and multi-faceted sequence of songs that are both atmospheric and explosively powerful. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNFLESH — “THE ERADICATION COMMENCED”

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Apr 162018
 

 

“Think Arsis meets Dissection” — with reminders of “Necrophagist, AngelCorpse, Obscura, Revocation, and Emperor“. When I saw that list of names in the PR recommendations for the debut album by Boston-based Unflesh, it took little else to kindle the fires of intrigue, though the album artwork by Junki Sakuraba certainly added a spark as well.

As it turns out, the music of Savior really does justify such an august group of references, just as it demonstrates both an evolution and an advance beyond the music of the band’s first EP, Transcendence to Eternal Obscurity. As the band’s founder Ryan Beevers accurately observes, the new album “is a lot darker and more aggressive than our previous EP”. And as a prime example of the new heights Unflesh have reached through their integration of technical death metal and black metal, we have the premiere of a track called “The Eradication Commenced” in advance of the album’s May 25 release date. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CLARET ASH — “THE GREAT ADJUDICATION”

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Apr 162018
 

 

(We are very happy to present the premiere stream of the new album by Claret Ash in advance of its April 30 release by Casus Belli Musica and Beverina, preceded by Andy Synn’s review.)

 

Reviewing this album has been something of a strange experience for me, since I’ve actually already written about half of it last year, when the first five tracks were released as The Great Adjudication: Fragment One.

Now though, with the addition of seven more songs (which, I suppose, collectively make up Fragment Two), the band are all set to release the complete version of The Great Adjudication next month in its full, seventy-five minute glory.

The big question of course, is whether the Australian quartet’s gamble is going to pay off, whether these additional tracks will serve to enhance and improve that initial experience, or whether their decision to split the record up into two separate sequences of songs – and then attempt to recombine them for the album proper – is going to blow up in their faces. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VOMITILE — “LABELED DEAD”

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Apr 132018
 

 

Vomitile hail from the Mediterranean island nation of Cyprus, which they’ve turned into ground zero for their own detonations of hard-charging, war-like death metal since 2007. Over the last decade they’ve released an EP and two full-lengths and performed live with such blood-thirsty luminaries as Sodom, Kreator, Obituary, and Vader, and toured with the likes of Master and Onslaught. Now they’ve got a third album — Pure Eternal Hate — ready for imminent discharge via Satanath Records and the Spanish label Hecatombe Records. It will be upon us on April 18th, but today we’ve got a sample of the punishment it will deliver through our premiere of a lyric video for one of the new songs.

Vomitile have a taste for thrash as well as eviscerating death metal, and so this new song, “Labeled Dead” is a high-octane ripper that gets the blood pumping and the body moving. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LIE IN RUINS — “DEMISE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Apr 132018
 

 

When I learned that Dark Descent Records would be releasing a new EP by the Finnish death metal band Lie In Ruins, I had one of those wide-eyed, take-a-big-gulp moments you get when the unexpected hits you like a piece of lumber on the back of the neck. In other words, it was a big surprise — but in this case a very welcome one. And then the waiting began, to find out exactly what these men had done with their time away from the studios.

Four years have elapsed since this band’s last album, Towards Divine Death, which was very good (and if you haven’t heard that album, quit screwing around and get your butt over here sometime soon). This new EP, Demise, is also the band’s eighth release overall in a career that began in roughly 1993 under the name Dissected, halted for many years after a few rehearsal tapes were recorded, and then resumed for real in about 2002.

What we have for you today is a full stream of Demise a couple of weeks before the official release date. Rather than a collection of clearly segmented songs, it is instead presented as a single track nearly 29 minutes in length. And I do believe it’s the best thing this band have ever done. Continue reading »

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