AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOAT SPERM — “VOICE IN THE WOMB”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Sep 052018
 

 

Let’s first deal with the elephant in the room: this band’s name. To some of you it might signify primitive, ear-raping, bestial black metal. For others it might lead to scoffing — derisive presumptions that there will be nothing to take seriously here. Both guesses might be understandable, but both would be wrong.

Having heard, and thoroughly enjoyed, Goat Sperm‘s persistently surprising debut EP, Voice In the Womb, it does occur to me (without any inside knowledge) that there was a streak of perversity at work in this Ukrainian band’s choice of name, and not just for the most obvious reason. I can imagine them chuckling behind their hands, or maybe cackling with devilish glee, over that decision, because of the head-fake that it represents. And part of the reason I make that guess is because the music itself is such a twisted but ingenious experience. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MORNE — “TO THE NIGHT UNKNOWN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 052018
 

 

There’s a lyrical passage in one of the songs on Morne’s new album that comes across like a challenge:

Show your fear
Show the way you bleed inside
Wear your wounds like I wear mine

When you listen to the music on this shattering album, those words seem to be more than a possible challenge to listeners. They could just as easily be understood as an expression of the challenge that these Boston doom insurgents set for themselves when they made this record, one they threw themselves into meeting, body and soul. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEVENTH GENOCIDE — “SLEEPLESS”

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Sep 042018
 

 

“Sleepless” is the name of the new song by the Roman band Seventh Genocide that we’re presenting today. Simply experiencing the changing moods and sensations of the music induces an interpretation of that title, which may or may not be supported by the lyrics. These changing and sharply contrasting sounds seem to capture not mundane insomnia, but a kind of severe sleep deprivation that leads to unbidden reveries, feverish paranoia, hallucinatory visions, and sudden discoveries of untapped energy whose reservoirs somehow haven’t yet been exhausted.

To come at the song in a different way, it is by turns hypnotic and jolting, dreamlike and savage, haunting and explosive. It’s quite an eye-opening trip, and a very enticing attraction for Seventh Genocide‘s new EP, SVNTH, which will be jointly released by Third I Rex and Toten Schwan Records on October 28th. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PSYCHOTOMY — “WITNESS OF VOID”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 042018
 

 

Roughly 18 months ago we premiered a video for a track called “Evidence of Tyranny” by the Italian death metal band Psychotomy, which was a precursor to a new album that was expected later that year. The album didn’t arrive quite as soon as we had hoped, given how good that first teaser was, but now it is nearly upon us: It will be released on September 28th by Everlasting Spew Records. The album includes “Evidence of Tyranny” in “a brand new and fully improved guise”, along with eight other ravaging tracks, one of which we have for you today.

“Witness of Void” is a masterful achievement, a song whose immediately strong impression becomes even more impressive with further listening. And the song both induces and demands further listening because it’s such a twisted, continually changing nightmare, and so insidiously effective at worming its way into the listener’s head for a long, haunting occupancy. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CRYSTALMOORS — “HIJOS DEL SOL”

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Sep 032018
 

 

On October 15th Casus Belli Musica and Beverina will join forces to bring forth an album-length split by two distinctive Spanish pagan metal bands, CrystalMoors and Hordak, both of whom pay homage through their music to the ancient lifeblood of their Iberian homeland, and today it’s our pleasure to present one of the CrystalMoors tracks that will appear on the album — “Hijos del Sol“.

The CrytalMoors side of the split, which consists of four tracks, is named Árguma, a Cantabrian word for a plant called gorse which we’re told is an invasive species that originated in Cantabria but now grows throughout Europe. With 4-cm thorns and deep, strong roots, “Árguma (also known as Tojo) symbolizes the Cantabrian nation of the pre-Roman epoch, bristling in the same way for self-defense and deeply rooted in its native land.” Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): WINDFAERER — “ALMA”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Aug 312018
 

 

Those of you who’ve been visiting our site regularly for more than a year or two will be familiar with the name Windfaerer, because we’ve been following their steady ascent since early days. This New Jersey-based, folk-influenced black metal band was launched by guitarist and frontman M. Gonçalves as (we are told) “an epic black metal paean to his ancestral homeland of the Iberian Peninsula (Spain and Portugal)”. From its earliest days, Windfaerer has now evolved into a full band in which Gonçalves is joined by electric violinist B. Karas (aka Valček), guitarist I. Keren, bassist M. Muñoz, and drummer J. Applegate, some of whom contribute vocals in addition to their prodigious instrumental talents.

Since 2009 Windfaerer have released two albums, in addition to a few shorter releases, and their third full-length, Alma, is now rapidly approaching a September release by Fólkvangr Records and Avantgarde Music. It’s their most impressive work to date, as you’re about to discover through our stream of all eight tracks. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LIFELOST — “MALIGN EMANATIO”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 302018
 

 

What happens when the frontman of the brain-twisting Spanish death metal band Wormed turns his imagination and talents to black metal? You are about to find out, because that is what Phlegeton has done through a new solo project named Lifelost.

The first fruits of this new adventure are collected in a debut album entitled Dialogues From Beyond. Perhaps it will come as no surprise, at least to those listeners who are fans of Wormed, that the music transports listeners far away from the familiar contours of the world in which we lead our daily lives and into a midnight-dark, alien dimension that turns reality upside-down and inside-out. It is a mystifying, hallucinatory, and above all, a very frightening place. The album track, “Malign Emanatio“, that we’re premiering today is a vivid example of these achievements. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CRUCIBLE OF HATE — “THE HELL INSIDE”

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Aug 292018
 

 

Crucible of Hate may be a new name for many of you, but this Ohio metal band’s members aren’t newbies, having burnished their vicious skills in such groups as The Conquering (black metal), Skullbomb (thrash), and The C.O.A.S.T. (melodeath). In this new formation, which began to take shape in 2016, they’ve pursued a groove-heavy brand of dynamic melodic death metal, whose varying sounds are about to be displayed through a debut album named Dark Metamorphosis, which will be released on September 15th.

The diversity of the music on this first full-length means that it’s tough to fully represent what they’ve accomplished in any one song, but the one they’ve chosen for our premiere today — “The Hell Inside” — certainly reveals their talent for crafting hook-heavy, head-moving thrill-rides. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEROCS — “SCP-106”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 292018
 

 

The multi-national collective known as Serocs, whose line-up now includes members of First Fragment, Chthe’ilist, Funebrarum, Benighted, and Sutrah, have a new album headed our way. Under the title The Phobos/Deimos Suite, and adorned by an eye-catching painting by Nicola Samorì, it will be released on October 26th by Everlasting Spew Records.

We have a lot of information to share with you about this new album, as well as the premiere of the first single, but we’re going to depart from our usual practice of leaving the song stream to the end and get right to it — preceded only by a piece of cautionary medical advice: If you don’t have an oxygen mask with a fully charged canister nearby, you might try hyperventilating before you listen to this track. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PILLARS — “SWARMS FROM THE SWAMP”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Aug 282018
 

 

Imagine a sudden, seismic shift in your reality. You find yourself alone on a vast, humid plain, shrouded in mist and littered with bones. Before you looms a giant monolith of granite, a gargantuan tombstone of broken hopes that blots the sun — and it’s disintegrating, with boulder-sized fragments cascading down in a slow-motion avalanche of black destruction. You want to run, but the earth has turned to tar beneath your feet, and begins to heave as the boulders strike like bombs.

It’s an ugly, nightmarish dream from which you awaken in a cold sweat, haunted and shivering. It’s one way (my way) of imagining the visions created by the song you’re about to hear, the name of which is “Swarms From the Swamp” by the French band Pillars. It comes from their debut album, aptly entitled Onwards to Nothingness, which will be released on September 28th by Seeing Red Records. Continue reading »

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