AN NCS PREMIERE: RITUAL CLEARING — “PENITENCE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 192023
 

“Cold depravity”, “raw hideousness”, “hypnotic, harrowing splendor”, “an undeniable sense of dread… laced with a resigned melancholia”. Those are among the descriptions offered in the PR materials accompanying Penitence, the debut album from Connecticut-based Ritual Clearing that’s now set for release by Eternal Death on November 17th.

Can we improve upon those vivid words? Probably not, but that won’t stop us from trying, and the occasion for our strenuous efforts is the title track from the new album that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BACTERIAL HUSK — “FLAYED BY ANOMALIES”

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Oct 192023
 

Stupid us, until recently we’ve slept on the Boston-based death metal band Bacterial Husk. Based on what we’re hearing from their forthcoming debut album Anthropogenic Ruin, that was probably a grievous error, because the album is a mind-boggling hellraiser.

It’s not the band’s first effort, having been preceded by a 2016 EP named Agnosia of Omens and the 2018 single “Mystics of Transmutation“, and the band’s members have been involved in other past and current projects, including Boston thrashers Razormaze and the brutal death metal of Scattered Remnants.

But in some ways Anthropogenic Ruin sounds like a very different beast than what’s come before — both more technically spectacular, more fiendishly berserk, maybe more vicious, and possibly even more bone-breaking, while changing moods almost as fast as the band shift among tempos and riffs.

We’ve got a prime example of what we’re trying to describe in today’s premiere of the song “Flayed By Anomalies“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE PLAGUE — “HACKED AND BUTCHERED”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 182023
 

Hailing from Sydney, Australia, The Plague erupted from cemetery earth in 2017 with a debut EP appropriately named Mass Genocide, and then honed their grisly blades with live performances in support of such bands as Angelcorpse, Master, Entombed AD, and Ensiferum (among many others).

Time passed and in 2021 Bitter Loss Records released the band’s debut album Within Death. As we wrote around that time, on the occasion of a premiere:

The music of this full-length debut does indeed live within death — death metal of the old school to be precise, of a particularly mauling and murderous, gruesome and ghastly variety. Powered by that beloved chainsawing guitar distortion, propelled by bone-smashing drumwork, and elevated into rarified air by truly astonishing vocal madness, The Plague‘s music is electrifying. We have little doubt that (as the advance press claims) it will strongly appeal to fans of classic Dismember and Entombed as well as more recent entrants such as LIK and Entrails.

And now The Plague return again, on the other side of a real-world plague, with a second album named Erosion of Gods, which will be released on October 28th by Brilliant Emperor Records. And once again we have the ghoulish pleasure of premiering a song from the album, along with a gore-soaked video-tale of hideous torture and cannibalism. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RECKLESS — “SHARP MAGIK STEEL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 182023
 

We are fast approaching Dying Victims Productions‘ October 20 release date for the debut album of the Bogotá-based speed metal band Reckless. Or rather, that album is rushing toward us with the momentum of an 18-wheeler whose brakes have failed at the zenith of its power.

The band jam the pedal down on the very first track, “Kneel Before the Gods“, and they don’t ease up very much until the closing track “Unholy Odyssey” has run its own riotous course. It’s an album fueled by adrenaline, and it’s a big transfusion of adrenaline for listeners, but as you’ll discover from our full streaming premiere, the thrills derive from more than just the music’s turbocharged intensity. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DISPLAY OF DECAY — “VITRIOL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  5 Responses »
Oct 172023
 

This makes the fourth time we’ve premiered music from the Edmonton-based death metal band Display of Decay since 2014. The last time, in 2018, we began this way:

If you imagine Display of Decay as a big rocketing road machine with a roaring jet engine in place of the usual pumping cylinders (and that’s not hard to imagine at all), the brakes obviously failed a few hundred miles ago, to the vicious glee of the blood-lusting demons at the controls. When you listen to their new album, Art In Mutilation, it’s patently obvious that they’re having a howling good time, and their full-throttle, take-no-prisoners enthusiasm is highly contagious.

Five years later, Display of Decay are finally following up Art In Mutilation with a new album (their fourth full-length) named Vitriol, which will be released by Gore House Productions on October 20th. The album title alone suggests that the band’s music is no less bloodthirsty than it was before. If anything, they’ve doubled-down on the slaughtering — but not at the cost of what makes their music simultaneously so damned contagious. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VOICE OF RUIN — “THE LAST FEAST”

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Oct 162023
 

At our site we’ve been enthusiastically following the progress of the Swiss band Voice of Ruin since 2014, which was when we hosted the first of two premieres we’ve done for them over that span of time — and now we’re adding a third one.

The occasion for this latest revelation of new music is the approach of the band’s fourth album, a record entitled Cold Epiphany that’s now set for release on December 1st. It follows by four years the band’s last full-length, Acheron, a record our review described as “melodic death metal’s melody mixed with thrash’s technicality and hardcore punk’s energy and punishing aggro beatdowns”.

As even that brief excerpt suggests, and as our review of Acheron explained in greater detail, the music of Voice of Ruin has always been difficult to classify, and the new album hasn’t made the task any easier. But the band’s willingness to pull from different stylistic wellsprings in different ways has also been a continuing source of their appeal.

That remains true on the new album, for reasons you can begin to appreciate through our premiere of a video for a song named “The Last Feast“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ASKESIS — “BEYOND THE FATE OF DEATH”

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Oct 162023
 

Today marks the third time we’ve premiered and reviewed a release by the Venetian band Askesis. The first was their 2016 debut EP The Path to Absence (here), and we followed that with their 2018 demo Black Ontology (here). Now we have a full stream of their debut album Beyond the Fate of Death, which is set for release on October 20th by Time To Kill Records. It’s a concept album inspired by “The Myth of Sisyphus”, a 1942 essay written by the philosopher Albert Camus.

“Dawn of the Current Inferno” was the first single from the album. The band described its inspiration in these words, which we share here because they also seem to provide insights into the album as a whole (as we hear it):

“‘Dawn of the Current Inferno‘ serves as a testament to the power of artistic expression to push boundaries and challenge societal norms. It encourages us to embrace the enigmatic and the unexplained, reminding us that within chaos, there’s a hidden order waiting to be discovered. This composition is an invitation to embark on a journey of introspection, where we confront our own biases and preconceptions, and ultimately find a deeper connection to the world around us”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CRUEL FATE — “DESCENTE AUX ENFERS”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Oct 132023
 

The name of the song you’re about to hear is “Descente aux Enfers“, which translates to “descent into hell”. The Canadian death metal band Cruel Fate, who included the song in their forthcoming second album Destin Cruel, chose the title well, for it truly is a descent into the realms of Inferno.

The song is less than four minutes long, but Cruel Fate still make it a journey, with each stage of the descent capturing a different manifestation of hellish horrors, all the while shaking and bludgeoning the listener like a ragged toy in the grasp of a demonic child. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOID — “SELF ISOLATION”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 132023
 

For people who suffer from paraskevidekatriaphobia today is a very bad day, a Friday the 13th, and one that dawns in the spookiest month of the year. But in the pentagram-loving world of metal, of course, it’s an excellent day to reveal new music, perhaps exceeded only by Samhain itself.

New music is indeed what we have for you today, a song from a new album by the UK avant-garde black metal pioneers Void, whose lineup features members of Dødheimsgard, Atramentum, and Dreams of the Drowned.

The album’s name is Jadjow, and it’s set for release on December 7th by Brucia Records. The song we present today is “Self Isolation“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THETAN — “GRAND OLE AGONY”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 122023
 

Genre descriptions throughout the vast world of music can be useful. The micro-world of metal alone has dozens, many of them segmented by hyphens or backslashes in an effort to put a little more flesh on the linguistic bones. As an enticement (or a warning) they’re better than nothing at all for fans harried by time, but they can be deceptive too, because of their limitations.

“Powerviolence”, for example, is the most common descriptor used for the music of Nashville’s Thetan. To flesh that out, you might also see references to early hardcore or even European black metal from the ’90s.

But whatever thoughts those descriptions might provoke, consider also that this duo have crossed over to work with hip-hop emcees such as Kool Keith, Ultramagnetic MC’s, and LIL B. Consider further that the opening track of Thetan‘s new album, which will be released on October 13th, includes a monologue by Tennessee rap icon Crunchy Black of Three 6 Mafia.

Then contemplate the fact that the album also includes cello performances by Leslie Fox-Humphreys (a.k.a. Americana/folk soloist The Bandit Queen Of Sorrows), violin performances by Ashley Mae of Lost Dog Street Band, and the sounds of a harmonica being played by Benjamin Tod of the Lost Dog Street Band.

And wait ’til you find out who appears and what happens in the album’s closing track. Continue reading »

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