AN NCS PREMIERE: “SCORCHED” BY SCORCHED

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May 182015
 

 

Next Monday Unspeakable Axe Records will begin shipping the debut self-titled demo of Delaware death metal band Scorched, and in advance of the release we’re bringing you a music stream of the entire album — which is available for digital download as of today.

Scorched consists of four full-length songs along with a brief intro track and two atmospheric interludes. On those four songs, the band more than live up to their name, delivering a scorching conflagration of feral death metal with style. The music has an old-school tone and viciousness and mixes full-throttle rampaging (with elements of crust/punk in the mix) with slower, staggering, doom-saturated lurches. There’s a skull-crushing rhythm section at work, along with riffs that thrash, chug, and eviscerate with equal potency. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TERMINUS EST — “HARBINGER

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May 182015
 

 

(Austin Weber provides this introduction to our premiere of a new single by the band Terminus Est.)

One of the coolest things about getting to write here at NCS has been Islander’s graciousness in allowing me to alert the metal masses to all the weird and new bands I know about that perhaps most people don’t. In the vein of this ongoing tradition, we are proud to bring you the debut single and first recorded song by newly formed international death metal supergroup Terminus Est.

The band was founded by Canadian native Edward Gryn, who plays guitar and performs vocals in the band. The group started out as a collaboration between him and drummer extraordinaire Hannes Grossmann (Alkaloid, ex-Obscura, ex-Necrophagist, etc.), and they had originally locked in Dominic “Forest” Lapointe (Augury, Teramobil, ex-Beyond Creation, Atheretic, etc.), but he had to bow out before writing his parts. So they recruited another highly skilled bass player, Oliver Pinard from Cryptopsy.

While the band is set to record their debut album this year, they wanted to show the world what they’ve been working on, and so today we premiere for you their debut single, “Harbinger”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEIN ZUM TODE — “WHITE SUPREMACHEESE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 182015
 

 

(Austin Weber introduces our premiere of a new song by Sein zum Tode.)

South Carolina based tech-metal mental grind patients Sein zum Tode are about to drop a new EP called Siamese Second Cousins Never Removed. To paraphrase how I formerly described them in my review of their 2013 debut beeep, imagine a fucked up merger between Psyopus and Mr Bungle’s creepier dark moments with some of their trademark carnival twists, and you arrive somewhere within the sonic realms of Sein zum Tode. As far as three-piece bands go, they create one hell of a ruckus, and it’s the interesting kind of ruckus if you weren’t able to piece that together from the preceding words.

Now that Siamese Second Cousins Never Removed is about to drop on June 2nd, we offer up a caustic sampling of it to you in the form of, “White Supremacheese”, and it’s a divine aural meeting between insanity and creative genius. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: KAOS VORTEX — “TOMB OF THE UNDYING”

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May 152015
 

 

Kaos Vortex are a German band who hit our radar screen when we learned in 2013 that Fredrik Huldtgren from the fantastic Swedish band Canopy had become their new frontman. The band have recorded a debut album named Seeds of Decay that’s set for a May 22 release on CD and digitally by Bret Hard Records. Not long ago we featured a killer single from the album named “Terrorizer”, and now we bring you the premiere of an official video for another track: “Tomb of the Undying“.

It’s becoming increasingly apparent that Kaos Vortex can be relied upon to deliver the kind of death metal that grabs you by the neck and shakes you all the way down to the soles of your feet. “Tomb of the Undying” begins hammering and howling right from the start, but it moves in different directions before reaching its finale. It includes jolting grooves, rapidly jabbing riffs, and slithering, serpentine lead guitar work that shrouds the punishing attack in a thoroughly morbid and sinister atmosphere. As expected, Fredrik Huldtgren’s deep growls and harrowing howls are beastly and voracious. Continue reading »

THE PREMIERE OF A NEW AMIENSUS SONG AND AN ANNOUNCEMENT OF AN AMIENSUS-WARSEID TOUR

 Metal News, Premieres  7 Responses »
May 152015
 

 

We’ve been following Minnesota’s Amiensus very closely, from their excellent 2013 debut album Restoration (reviewed here), to their split that same year with Oak Pantheon, entitled Gathering (reviewed here), to the release of their cover of Forefather’s “Wolfhead’s Tree” last fall, which we had the privilege of premiering (here). And now we’re delighted to bring you a stream of the first advance track from the band’s new album Ascension — plus we’re announcing an NCS-sponsored Amiensus tour with Wisconsin’s Warseid. First, the music…

AMIENSUS: “WHAT WORDS CREATE”

The new Amiensus song is “What Words Create”, the third track in order on Ascension. It’s a dynamic, multifaceted song — dramatic, atmospheric, sweepingly melodic, and also charged with hard-driving energy. And it gets stuck in your head very quickly. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AIRLINES OF TERROR — “U.F.O. = TESLA”

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May 142015
 

 

The Italian band Airlines of Terror will be releasing their second album Terror From the Air on June 25 via Goressimo Records, and today we premiere for you a lyric video for the album’s first single — “U.F.O.=Tesla” — with artwork by Michel “Away” Langevin of Voivod.

If you’re a fan of The Day the Earth Stood Still and other sci-fi movies from the 1950s, you’ll get a big kick out of the video, and I think you’ll get a big kick (in the head) from the song, too. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ACCURSED SPAWN — “BURNED INTO STERILITY”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 142015
 

 

Accursed Spawn get their game faces on in their new video — you’ll see soon enough — but first, a bit of background information.

Accursed Spawn were spawned in Ottawa, Ontario, and appear to have spent their formative years in a slaughterhouse. Or at least that’s the inference we draw from their music. They have two EPs to their credit, the most recent being 2014’s Putrid, which is the source of the song featured in the video we’re about to premiere: “Burned Into Sterility“.

The band don’t waste any time getting to the meat of the matter in this track. Right out of the gate they explode in a brutal, hyper-accelerated frenzy of munitions-grade drumming, machine-gun riffing, and guttural roaring. There’s no let-up as the song proceeds either. If anything, it just burns hotter and hotter, reaching a boil with the swarming guitar work that lights up the song’s finale. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PYRRHON — “THE MASS”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
May 142015
 

 

(In this post Austin Weber introduces our premiere of a song from the new EP by New York’s Pyrrhon.)

After last year’s outstanding album, The Mother Of Virtues, I had no expectation of hearing new music from Pyrrhon for a while. Yet here we are a year later and they’ve already churned out an impressive new EP called Growth Without End set to drop on June 2nd (both vinyl and digitally). We here at NCS felt it supremely fucking necessary to help spread the word about it, and now we offer up a disturbingly brilliant new track called “The Mass” to infect your earholes.

It’s probably best to take a deep breath before listening to “The Mass”, because it will immediately throw you into a deafening war zone of caustic and spastic riffing, schizoid vocal exorcisms, booming bass-lines, and bafflingly complex drum-work. Once it has thoroughly decimated you, the track unfolds into a slower mid-section replete with eerie grooves, taunting you in demented fashion, until it shifts back into the chaotic vortex with which it began. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TJOLGTJAR — “THE FIFTH MASS AND HER WORKS”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
May 132015
 

 

Fans of idiosyncratic black metal should be rubbing their hands in anticipation over Taste the Divine Wrath. That’s the name of a new LP-length split by The Meads of Asphodel and Tjolgtjar that’s due for release on June 2 by Eternal Death Records. Last week Terrorizer premiered one of the tracks by The Meads of Asphodel (here), and today we bring you one by Tjolgtjar: “The Fifth Mass and Her Works”.

With 11 full-length albums and numerous shorter releases spawned over a 17-year period, Tjolgtjar has been nothing if not prolific. The band is the alter ego of J.R. Preston — one of many that bears his imprint (including the late lamented Blood Cult, who we featured here not long ago) — and the music associated with his name has been far from conventional. This new track is no exception. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: HYPOTHERMIA — “SVARTKONST”

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May 122015
 

 

Sweden’s Hypothermia began as a two-man collaboration more than a decade ago, but has now expanded into a three-person force consisting of vocalist/guitarist Kim Carlsson (Kall, ex-Lifelover), drummer Richard Abrams (Sitra Ahra), and guitarist Hans Cools (Kilte, Trancelike Void). The band’s fifth album, Svartkonst, which features a guest appearance by violinist E.B., will be released on May 15 in Europe and May 19 in North America by Agonia Records, and we will now give you a chance to hear the album in its entirety.

Each of the five songs on Svartkonst stands quite well on its own, each one with its own personality and pallet of emotional colors, but the album is more than a collection of individual songs. The overall effect of hearing it from beginning to end is greater than the sum of the individual parts. It builds an enveloping atmosphere that induces introspection, memory, imaginings of places not visited, and maybe even of lives not yet lived. Continue reading »

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