AN NCS PREMIERE: THUNDERWALKER — “TO NONEXISTENCE”

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Feb 162018
 

 

Forgive me for introducing this song premiere with a personal story. By sheer unhappy coincidence, when I first contemplated listening to ThunderWalker’s “To Nonexistence” early one morning I wanted to end my own existence because I had damaged myself so severely. The combination of lack of sleep and a cataclysmic hangover left me a quivering mass of abject misery. I really didn’t want to listen to heavy metal, or any other sound, although I couldn’t stop the low intermittent groans that seemed to be coming from my own throat. But I played “To Nonexistence” anyway… and an unexpected thing happened.

I felt instantly revived. I couldn’t resist moving my head despite how much it hurt. I did that leg-bobbing thing that dudes do when they’re trying to keep time with rhythmically powerful music (but that women never seem to do). The song put a jolt of electricity through my depleted internal batteries. At least for a few minutes, I didn’t feel like death warmed over. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: STORM UPON THE MASSES — “THE ONES WHO CAME BACK”

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Feb 152018
 

 

The song you’re about to hear doesn’t last long — roughly two-and-a-quarter minutes — but it’s a hell of a fine example of how much can be packed into a short interval by people who know what they’re doing. In this case the song is “The Ones Who Came Back” by the Belgian death metal band Storm Upon the Masses, and it’s the title track to their debut album, which will be released by Dolorem Records on March 23rd.

Clues to the band’s attack can be found in their label’s recommendation of the album to fans of Hour of Penance, Hideous Divinity, and Krisiun, and in the fact that the album was mixed and mastered by Stefano Morabito at 16th Cellar Studio in Rome, who has worked with the first two of those other bands as well as Fleshgod Apocalypse (among others). A further clue might be found in the cover art created by Daemorph (Avulsed, The Black Dahlia Murder, Acranius). Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SNAKEFEAST — “ITCH”

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Feb 152018
 

 

Late last month The Obelisk premiered a song called “Pyre” from the forthcoming second album (In Chaos, Solace) by the genre-fracturing Baltimore band Snakefeast. When I heard the song, my eyes probably couldn’t have opened wider without my eyeballs falling out. The Obelisk’s take on the music seemed on-point:  “a fusion of jazz, metal, weighted-groove grind and post-hardcore, but however many subgenres they may or may not be throwing into their scorching aesthetic melting pot, they’re unquestionably working on a wavelength of their own….”

Having been so pleasantly surprised and bewildered by that track, I jumped at the chance to bring out another premiere, a song called “Itch” that’s just as boisterous, as disruptive, and as captivating as “Pyre”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BYYRTH — “BLOOD WARFARE”

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Feb 152018
 

 

Not for nothing is the music of Byyrth heralded as “vampyric black metal”. Not for nothing is their new album entitled Echoes from the Seven Caves of Blood. And not for nothing is the opening track named “Blood Warfare“.

A venomous riff swirls and squalls in the song’s opening moments, setting the stage for a track that packs plenty of hooks and malignant intent, surrounded by an air of rampant savagery. A hammering drum beat kicks in, anchoring the advent of ominous, groaning, and seething guitar noise, accompanying a cacophony of wild, blood-letting shrieks and incendiary cries. And Byyrth also indulge a side of their sound with punk roots, moving the music with a swaggering rock beat and infectious chords… but never pulling back from the murderous blood-lust that gnashes within the boiling black core of the song. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: LÓSTREGOS — “GALLAECIA”

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Feb 152018
 

 

Lendas Baixo O Luar is the debut album of the pagan black metal band Lóstregos from Galicia in the northwest corner of the Iberian peninsula, where the border of Spain meets Portugal. The album was released last November by the Spanish labels Darkwoods and Damnatio ad Bestias, and on tape by Fólkvangr Records (U.S.). It was an album that we somehow overlooked, although it received an extremely positive response from people who were more attentive than we were. And that brings us to today’s video premiere, the subject of which is a track from the Lóstregos album named “Gallaecia“.

One benefit of lyric videos like the one you’re about to see, apart from whatever visual value they might have, is to enable the discovery of music that you might have missed when it was originally released, as this one has done for us. And what a killer discovery this is. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BIBLE BLACK TYRANT — “REGRET BEYOND DEATH”

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Feb 142018
 

 

“Crushing” is a word we see tossed around frequently in the case of death metal and some doom metal bands. Bible Black Tyrant isn’t either of those (sludge might be the closest genre term, though it’s an imperfect term here), but you’d have to look long and hard to find any album this year, in any metal genre, more stunningly crushing than this band’s debut album, Regret Beyond Death. The sound is overpowering, the mood is catastrophically bleak, the overall impact is nothing short of flattening. It is, in short, a devastating assault on the senses — and it exerts a primal appeal that’s just as unstoppable.

Bible Black Tyrant is the collaboration between three experienced musicians based in the Pacific Northwest: vocalist/bassist/guitarist Aaron D.C. Edge (Lumbar), percussionist Tyler Smith (Eagle Twin), and additional guitarist/vocalist and soundscape engineer David S. Fylstra (KVØID). They come from different musical backgrounds, but in this project they’ve found a meeting ground and executed on a vision that really is remarkable.

The album will be released on February 14th by Argonauta Records (CD) with a tape release coming from Anima Recordings, and today we have the honor of presenting a full stream of the album, which we’ll introduce first with comments by the band, and then with a few more impressions of my own. This is how Bible Black Tyrant introduces the album: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEPRAVITY — “INSANITY REALITY”

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Feb 142018
 

 

Morbid Angel’s release of Kingdoms Disdained last year provoked a lot of discussion (and heated arguments) about where the album stood among the most revered works of that hugely influential band. Meanwhile, Australia’s Depravity were readying an album that might be an even more powerful bringing-forward of Morbid Angel’s legacy into the current era. Its name is Evil Upheaval.

Transcending Obscurity Records, who will be releasing Depravity’s new album on April 30, also recommends it to fans of the New York Death Metal elite — Immolation, Suffocation, and Incantation — as well as such bands as Hour of Penance, Ingurgitating Oblivion, Drawn and Quartered, and The Furor, whose Louis Rando (also in Impiety) is Depravity’s drummer.

Such adjectives as “vile”, “twisted”, and “deafeningly heavy” also appear in TO’s promotional missives, and that’s not fake news, as you’re about to discover through our premiere of an album track named “Insanity Reality“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WALLACHIA — “HEATHEN SHORES”

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Feb 142018
 

 

The opening bars of “Heathen Shores” transports the listener’s mind like a time machine, deep into centuries long lost. And then, without losing the thread of the melody, Wallachia rocket forward again, jabbing and jolting, galloping and gliding, snarling and shrieking, in a display of highly head-bangable heavy metal might.

“Heathen Shores” is a track off Wallachia’s new album Monumental Heresy, which will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on April 13th, and we’re joining with other sites around the globe in bringing you the premiere of the song. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ALTARS OF GRIEF — “DESOLATION”

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Feb 132018
 

 

In 2015 we devoted significant attention to the Saskatchewan band Altars of Grief, premiering a track from their superb split with fellow Canadians Nachtterror, publishing an interview by Comrade Aleks with Altars guitarist Evan Paulson, and naming that same song from the split (“In Dying Light”) to our list of that year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

Now, roughly three years later, Altars of Grief will be releasing their second album, Iris, through Hypnotic Dirge Records, and it’s our pleasure to bring you the stream of an album track called “Desolation“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BASALTE — “VERTIGE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  4 Responses »
Feb 132018
 

 

More than three years ago the Montréal black metal band Basalte released a debut album named Vestige that hit me like a bolt from the blue. It affected me so strongly that I did what I have a tendency to do when experiencing such episodes of euphoria — I launched into a spontaneous spate of metaphors (here):

“Vestige consists of three long songs (from 9 minutes to almost 17), ‘Mirage’, ‘Luminaire’, and ‘Obtuse’. They are guitar manifestos, strange journeys across distortion-shrouded alien soundscapes that sometimes seem like the eruption of volcanos on a Saturnian moon and then at other times shine like the Saturnian rings themselves, shimmering with the glint of sunlight on ice crystals. The drumming is just as unpredictable and just as transfixing, like a comet with a mind of its own that moves around and through the cosmic lightshow, heedless of the pull of gravity.”

I didn’t stop there, but the subject of this post isn’t a reminder of Vestige but an introduction to Basalte’s new album Vertige, which is being released today, and which you can stream after the bulwark of paragraphs I’ve written on this occasion. I’m not surprised I’ve become euphoric again; I am surprised that Vertige not only reaches the heights of its predecessor but exceeds them. Continue reading »

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