AN NCS PREMIERE: CRYPTS OF DESPAIR — “PATH TO VENGEANCE”

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Nov 012017
 

 

If you haven’t had a good solid headbang lately, we can fix that problem for you. And if you’ve been wondering what it feels like to suffer a cranial fracture and concussive trauma, we can take care of that, too. And we can supply both those needs in one fell swoop through our premiere of a track called “Path To Vengeance” off the debut album by Lithuania’s Crypts of Despair. Entitled The Stench of the Earth, it will be released on November 24 by those German specialists in death (metal) at Testimony Records.

Crypts of Despair first took shape in 2009, went into a hiatus in 2013, and revived in 2016, eventually assembling the revised line-up that recorded this new album, whose lyrical themes include “disgust and hatred towards humanity, death worship and the occult.” Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VOËMMR — “NOX MALEDICTVS”

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Oct 312017
 

 

We are told that Voëmmr recorded their debut album Nox Maledictvs during two nights in an abandoned farm in the Portuguese countryside. What we are not told, but may infer from the sounds they’ve created, is that they were not alone, but instead participated in a communion with spirits of the dead, assisted by witches, warlocks, and shape-shifting, void-dwelling entities stinking of sulphur.

This is an album both bewitching and toxic, bewildering and beguiling, haunted and terrifying. It is entirely fitting that we present a full stream of the music on Samhain, that liminal time when the veil between our world and the Otherworld is tissue-thin, that old festival of darkness when black magic most easily parts the veil. The album is being released today by Harvest of Death, a division of Signal Rex, and you may listen to all of it below.  Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: JUPITERIAN — “SOL”

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Oct 312017
 

 

The name chosen by this masked Brazilian band has always seemed a brilliant choice, invoking not only the mythic and occult associations of Mesopotamian Neberu, Babylonian Marduk, Sumerian Enlil, the fourth sphere of the Kabbalah, and of course the bright father of the Roman pantheon, but also the crushing gravitational force of our solar system’s most gigantic planet, whose mass is two and a half times that of all the other planets in our system combined. In their music, Jupiterian create both haunting, otherworldly atmosphere and sensations of titanic physical force.

I’ve written about the band’s music frequently in the past. In attempting to describe their last release, an EP of cover songs, I referred to the band’s ability “to club a listener senseless” and to channel “pure evil — cask-strength and undiluted”, the “stark, desolate, and devastating” moods of their music, and the capacity of the vocals alone “to give any normal person a shivering case of the night terrors”. I’ve been anxiously awaiting their second album, and it will soon be upon us.

With the name Terraforming, it will be released by Transcending Obscurity Records on November 15, and continues the band’s collaboration with the brilliant Brazilian painter Caue Piloto. Three singles have been released so far, and today we present a fourth, entitled “Sol“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LÜÜP — “9°=2° (Κόγξ ὀμ Πὰξ)”

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Oct 312017
 

 

Here, we bring you a most unusual premiere from a most unusual new album, a multifaceted conceptual work of dark and ceremonial chamber music that intersects with certain aspects of black metal despite the use of acoustic instrumentation and the intimate and “conversational” nature of the chamber-music format.

The album is Canticles of the Holy Scythe by LÜÜP, which is the project of Greek composer and multi-instrumentalist Stelios Romaliadis. It will be released by I, Voidhanger Records on the 8th of December. It consists of six tracks that are described as “a concept about Death through occult philosophy; a journey of understanding and reconciliation with Death as a symbol of renewal through self awareness and enlightenment,” drawing upon folk traditions and superstitions as well as “the secrets of Alchemy and the Kabbalah, with Aleister Crowley’s magick and with ancient invocations of cosmic deities and astrological energies”.

And if that’s not enough to peak your interest, I’ll add these further descriptive words from I, Voidhanger’s introduction to the album: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): JESSICA93 — “GUILTY SPECIES”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 302017
 

 

You’re about to have the chance to hear a full stream of Guilty Pleasures, the fourth album by the French underground band Jessica93 in advance of its November 3 release by MusicFearSatan and Teenage Menopause.

I nearly didn’t agree to host this premiere, despite how hard the album hooked me. It’s pretty far away from the varieties of extreme metal that are our bread and butter, and the vocals are entirely clean, which always generates confusion among those who take us at our word when they see the site’s name.

But then I thought, if someone as musically tunnel-visioned as I am can get enthusiastic about this music, maybe the same will be true of others who usually come here to get their skulls fractured and their brains purified by flamethrowers. And in fact I do think there are aspects of the music that are likely to appeal to segments of metal fandom. Besides, you’d have to be the victim of a C4 cervical fracture not to reflexively move to these songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MALVENTO — “LA VIA SINISTRA”

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Oct 272017
 

 

As we all know quite well by now, black metal has blossomed over the decades like a spreading tangle of thorn trees, and now cuts the skin in many different ways. As that pestilential growth has occurred, the Italian band Malvento have persisted and pursued their own evolution of sound across the space of three albums and a handful of shorter releases dating back to their Camera Prima demo in 1999. And now, seven years after their last album, 2010’s Oscuro Esperimento Contro Natura, they are returning with a new full-length under the banner of Third I Rex.

The new album is entitled Pneuma, and from that album we bring you a track aptly named “La Via Sinistra“, as well as the reprise of a previously released track, “L’Incanto“. Together, these songs provide clear signs of the black magic that Malvento have conjured for this new release. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNTIL THE SKY DIES — “IV”

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Oct 272017
 

 

Are you starting to think about Halloween? Do you have your creepy costume all picked out? Started making bags of candy salted with broken glass for the neighbor kids? Wondering whether your little visitors will notice the stink from the bodies you buried under the house? I’ve got just the thing to help get you in the right mood, some music you can just keep running on a loop between now and sunrise on November 1 — although even if you listen to it just once, the odds are it will run on a loop in your head anyway, whether you want it to or not.

This song we’re premiering is a gnarly bit of nastiness, a real monster mash. I have no reason to believe it was written with Halloween in mind — in fact, the concept behind it is quite a different tale — but it really does seem perfect for the occasion. The title is just a Roman numeral — “IV” — and the diabolical creators are the two men behind Until the Sky Dies. It comes from their debut album, The Year Zero Blueprint, which Cimmerian Shade Recordings will release on November 3rd. Continue reading »

AN NCS DOUBLE PREMIERE: WOJCZECH AND KRUPSKAYA

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Oct 262017
 

 

On October 27th — tomorrow! — the German label 7 Degrees Records will release a 12″ split by two explosive but unpredictable grind bands, Germany’s Wojczech and UK-based Krupskaya. What we have for you today is a double premiere, one song from each band’s side of the split.

WOJCZECH

If the folks at Metal-Archives have got their facts straight, this new release is the 17th split discharged by Wojczech (along with two albums, an EP, and a compilation) in a career that now spans more than two decades. The track we’ve got for you today is the third of the three Wojczech tracks on this new split, an unsettling mauler named “Stunde Des Wolfes“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AUTUMNS EYES — “OPEN YOUR EYES, NOT YOUR WRISTS”

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Oct 262017
 

 

Ending Life Slowly is the eighth album by Connecticut-based Autumns Eyes, the solo project of Daniel Mitchell. Fittingly, it’s due for release on Halloween, when those of us in the northern hemisphere will find the door to the dead of winter opened by ghouls and goblins. Yet although Mitchell has frequently found inspiration from the changing colors and supernatural hauntings of late October, the new album was more inspired by what comes after. In Mitchell’s words:

“Living in New England has always made it easy to draw from the month of October for creative inspiration, with life breathing its flaming colors into all the surrounding trees. Unfortunately, these themes can only be revisited every so often before it becomes repetitive. That’s why I reached into the month of November for inspiration. A time when Fall is still thriving, but where color has faded and the trees are bare as skeletons.

“While a walk through the woods here in October can be a relaxing activity, doing the same in November carries an overwhelming sense of dread. You’re surrounded by death, and the trees no longer sway and breathe with the air. They’re cold, stiff, bare, and knock together like bones breaking in the sky. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NEKRASOV — “THE MIRROR VOID”

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Oct 262017
 

 

Most of us search for beauty in life, dream of it, grasp it when we find it, hold onto it as long as we can. But the horrors of existence always intrude, whether in the form of the daily abominations practiced by some people against others or from the incurable fear that nothing we cherish will last and that nothing awaits us at the end of our lives but the yawning void of mere extinction. And in time, all human life will also end in ashes, without a trace, a converging of all striving in death. Against the depths of such terrors, tales of goblins and vampires, ghosts and golems, seem like child’s play.

In every form of art, people have been driven to give some shape to our deepest fears and most paralyzing disillusionments, to express implacable dread or the conviction that humanity itself is a disease that will ultimately eat itself, while also devouring everything around it. And the results of such efforts can be very uncomfortable to witness and experience. Given the nature of the drives that inspire such efforts, how could they not be?

Which brings me to the title track of Nekrasov’s new album, The Mirror Void, which we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

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