AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ARCHGOAT — “THE OBSIDIAN FLAME (FROM MY DEPTHS)”

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Jul 302018
 

 

The unparalleled Finnish black metal band Archgoat are returning with their first album since 2015’s The Apocalyptic Triumphator, and their fourth full-length overall since the band’s formation in 1989. The name of the new one is The Luciferian Crown, and it will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on September 14th. In late June we premiered one track from the new album (“Messiah of Pigs”), and now we present another one through a lyric video: “The Obsidian Flame (From My Depths)“.

Bands such as this one are rarities — bands who have lived for nearly three decades but made no compromises despite the clamor and clawing of thousands of other bands trying to find their own hand-holds on the ever-shifting edifice of heavy music, dislodged by changes in trends or simply weakened by the passage of time. We watch the decline of dedication in other groups, or the burning out of their creativity as age seems to choke the oxygen from once-bright fires. But Archgoat seems immune to the ravages of time. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MORGUE WALKER — “GHOUL CATHEDRAL”

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Jul 282018
 

 

The ghastly scene of bombed-out, body-strewn destruction depicted on the cover of Morgue Walker‘s new EP, Forage the Ash, serves as an accurate visual representation of the music, and of the effect it might have on your quivering brain. Their brand of blackened deathgrind is poisonously toxic, ghoulishly malignant, and viciously obliterating. But don’t take our word for it — listen to the track we’re bringing you through this rare Saturday premiere: bow your heads and prepare to enter the “Ghoul Cathedral“.

This new band from the Carolinas features members of Putrefying Cadaverment, Hateful Transgression, and Mysteriarch, and Forage the Ash is their debut release — a five-track attack that will be released on August 30 and is available for pre-order as of today. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DIPLEGIA — “SELF”

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Jul 272018
 

 

Diplegia, who hail from Troy, New York, made their recording debut in 2017 with the release of an EP named Squander. Since August of last year, they’ve also released two singles from a forthcoming album — “Follow” and “Bitter” — and we wrote about each of them in our SHADES OF BLACK columns (here and here). The name of the album is Abject Failure, it will be released on September 21st, and today it’s our pleasure to premiere a video for a third single from the album, a track named “Self“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HEADS FOR THE DEAD — “DEEP BELOW”

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Jul 262018
 

 

I’ve been hungry for this new album ever since I first caught wind that it was on the way. That greediness was based entirely on finding out who was in the band, and the names of the people who had contributed as guest or session musicians. The leading roles were filled by the very busy Jonny Petterson (Wombbath, Ursinne, Henry Kane, Pale King), who was responsible for the music and its production, and by vocalist Ralf Hauber (Revel In Flesh), with Erik Bevenrud (Down Among the Dead Men) as the session drummer. And to add to those names, Matt Moliti (Sentient Horror) performed guitar solos on three tracks, and Håkan Stuvemark (Wombbath, Pale King) soloed on two others.

With that line-up and those additional contributors, I had little doubt this new collaboration, which goes under the name Heads For the Dead, was going to be good. The question was, how good? And the further question concerned the direction that Petterson pursued in the music. Death metal, of course, but that’s a very broad label, and Petterson has already proven that he’s capable of venturing off in more than one direction beneath that big banner.

Well, now we have some clues for you. One track premiered earlier this month from this new album, Serpent’s Curse, and today we’ve got a second one in advance of its release by Transcending Obscurity Records on September 24th. Continue reading »

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

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Jul 252018
 

 

By coincidence, in the NCS post immediately preceding this one my comrade DGR acknowledged that thrash has been “something of a blind spot for this site”. “We basically have a handful of favorites and will notice absolute standouts among newcomers, but overall we’ve never had a fully dedicated thrash person here”. And that’s all pretty much true — including the part about noticing absolute stand-outs among newcomers, and man, do I have one of those for you here in Missouri’s Degrave.

When I saw references to Vektor in the press materials for their new self-titled album, I was both excited and skeptical — because Vektor blaze like a meteor in the night sky, and the kind of stuff they pull off is hard for anyone to compete with. But it turns out that the music on this new Degrave album is legitimately mind-blowing.

These tracks are so head-spinning that it left this listener constantly bewildered and bedazzled, wide-eyed at the technical pyrotechnics on display here, and in a state of gob-smacked wonder at the sheer exuberant devilry displayed by the song-writing.  I could hardly be more excited to share the full album stream with you today — and I say that for whom thrash is pretty far down the list of favorite metal genres Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NECANDI HOMINES — “II”

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Jul 252018
 

 

After a long road forward, with their journey beginning more than a decade ago, the Italian black metal band Necandi Homines released their debut album, Da’at, last year through Vacula Productions. But the distance between the band’s origins and that first full-length won’t be repeated before we hear from them again: They’ve recorded a new EP named Black Hole that will be released in September by the UK label Third I Rex and the Italian label Toten Schwan Records. It consists of three tracks, spanning almost 30 minutes of music, and today we present the second of those as a sign of what’s coming next from these evolving experimentalists.

The EP is described as “the act of self-observation”, a cathartic, in-depth exploration of the inner self that starts from within the human condition and “finds its apex in the coldness and silence of the greatest void.” Judging from the track we present today, which comes in the middle of Black Hole‘s three-track sequence, it will be fascinating to experience the complete journey from beginning to end. This one alone is chilling and hypnotic — it casts a dark and lasting spell — but it does that in surprising ways. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SHED THE SKIN — “WE OF SCORN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 242018
 

 

It takes a lot of skill and a lot of experience to do what Cleveland’s Shed the Skin have done, to make a death metal album that sounds like a heavy metal classic right out of the box, a fist-pumping, mosh-triggering, high-octane thing that’s part-anthem and part-homage to venerated traditions, but doesn’t come off as a formulaic re-tread. It has authentic spirit, tremendous energy — and it’s damned vicious, too. You can see the miles on those faces up above, but the wear plainly hasn’t worn them out — far from it.

The experience shows on the faces, but it’s on their resumes, too. This veteran line-up consists of Kyle Severn of Incantation on drums, Matt Sorg of Ringworm and Blood of Christ on guitars, Ash Thomas of Faithxtractor and Vladimirs on vocals and guitar, and Ed Stephens from Vindicator on bass. Together, they’ve created something special with this second album, We Of Scorn, which will be released by Hells Headbangers on July 27th and which you’ll get a chance to hear in full, below the following blocks of laudatory text. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DIS ORCUS — “SOMNAMBULISTIC VISIONS”

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Jul 242018
 

 

Most of us who are devoted to music from the black realms have at least a vague idea of what’s intended by the phrase “atmospheric black metal”. That’s probably not the correct genre description for Somnambulistic Visions, the debut album by the Ukrainian band Dis Orcus, yet the music is so persistently creepy, so cold, so stricken with a feeling of encroaching inhuman horror, that its success in creating a nightmarish, vampiric atmosphere is one of its signal accomplishments. True darkness is to be found here.

The songs are almost entirely mid-paced, the reverberating drums devoted to relatively simple rhythms that are somewhere between rocking and ritualistic. There’s virtually no blasting, no displays of physical excess. The beats are not exactly metronomic — they’re too unpredictable for that, too peppered with short snapping tones and bursts of double-bass rumble or martial tattoos — but they don’t get in the way of the main design of the music, which (as I perceive it) is to freeze the blood and to draw the mind into a hideous hallucination. (At the same time, however, they’re very effective in getting your head moving.) Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MANES — “ENDETIDSTEGN”

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Jul 242018
 

 

Like their countrymen in Ulver, the Norwegian band Manes have traveled far from the kind of music that first drew so many to their side. And it hasn’t been an uninterrupted trip. The first releases in the mid- and late-’90s, which revealed an atypical kind of black metal that soon attracted a fanatical following (many of whom continue to seem fanatical to this day), ended in a hiatus, and when Manes surfaced again with 2003’s Vilosophe, they had become exponents of a very different sound, which led to much gnashing of teeth and tearing  of hair.

Even that journey also seemed to come to an end in 2011, despite the release three years later of Be All End All.  But Manes are now returning again, with a new album whose intriguing title is Slow Motion Death Sequence. It’s scheduled for release by Debemur Morti Productions on August 24th, and as an introduction to what it holds in store, we are helping to premiere a video (the band’s first one ever) directed by Guilherme Henriques for a track called “Endetidstegn”, which opens the record. Continue reading »

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

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
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 »

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