AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ORNAMENTOS DEL MIEDO — “EL CAMINO DESAPARECE A CADA PASO”

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Jun 192023
 

The creative output of the Spanish funeral doom band Ornamentos del Miedo (“ornaments of fear”) has rolled forward like a powerful tide, seemingly unstoppable in its momentum. After a first single in 2018, this solo project of Ángel Chicote (Graveyard of Souls, Mass Burial, Logical End…) has produced three albums and a pair of shorter releases, most recently the EP Frío, which was released by The Way of the Hermit in January of this year. And now a fourth full-length is about to crash against the rocks of our shores.

The title of the new album is El Cosmos me Observa en Silencio. Presenting six songs and more than 70 minutes of music in total, it’s set for release on July 6th by the same label, which is an imprint of the Spanish label Darkwoods that’s solely devoted to gloomy and mournful musical atmospheres.

To help pave the way toward the release of this immense new descent into an underworld of dark emotions, today we premiere a lyric video for the 5th track in the album’s running order, a song called “El Camino Desaparece a cada Paso” (“The Path Disappears at Every Step”). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SNORLAX — “THE NECROTROPHIC ABYSS”

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Jun 162023
 

It’s not as if we didn’t already know that the Australian project Snorlax (the solo work of Brendan Auld) was capable of making music that causes listeners stop suddenly in their racing tracks, and leaves them feeling kind of gob-smacked. Especially on the band’s debut album II, that became vividly evident. But still, the band’s new album The Necrotrophic Abyss is astonishing, and we’re lucky to get to premiere it today.

Here, the band’s evolving unification of black and death metal has reached full fruition, flowering into compositions that are bludgeoning, violent, and bewildering, elaborate in their constant permutations but both viscerally frightening and soul-crushing in their renditions of desperation and downfall — and all of it executed with jaw-dropping technical skill and captured with remarkable production quality.

On this album, to put it more succinctly, the unexpected becomes expected, and the result is a compact record that stands well out from the pack as we near the halfway point of 2023. It’s not the kind of thing you hear once and move on from. It’s the kind of thing that’s like your own personal Pandora’s box, waiting to be opened again and again, to witness with stark fascination its manifold evils fly into the world over and over. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PLAGUEWIELDER — “BURNING DEATH”

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Jun 152023
 

We’ve closely followed the releases of Ohio’s Plaguewielder almost from the band’s inception, not only for the obvious reason that we’ve found the music consistently compelling but also because the progression from one release to the next has never been entirely predictable.

To be sure, dark shadows have consistently swathed the music, and it has been continuously fueled by harrowing emotional intensity. As we observed in reviewing their most recent album, the remarkable Covenant Death, “feelings of hopelessness, frustration, and fury have always seem to be fighting to get out into the songs”.

But, especially as revealed on that latest album, the band’s stylistic ingredients have become increasingly multi-faceted. That album was still music as catharsis, as Plaguewielder‘s music always has been, but the range of musical influences expanded outward in captivating ways.

We’ve learned that Plaguewielder are at work on their next album, which will have the evocative title In Dust and Ash, and we will again be eager (and intrigued) to hear it. But in the meantime Plaguewielder are bridging the gap between full-lengths with a new EP named Burning Death (set for release tomorrow via Jeff Wilson‘s disorder-recordings), and once again it holds surprises. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERPENS LVX — “I AM THE ADVERSARY (IMPII IRRELIGIOSI CARNIVORIBUS IMMORTALIBUS”

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Jun 152023
 

Spirituality is a staple of black metal, more than in any other genre of extreme metal. Although some death metal bands seem to have made a religion out of gore, and there’s no shortage of pentagrams and blood sacrifices in the classics of doom, not to mention the worship of Lovecraft just about everywhere, it is in the realms of the pitch black where supernatural belief dominates.

The exaltation of Nature is its own form of worship among many black metal bands, but there is only one figure at the very top of the pantheon. In different guises and explored through a multitude of different esoteric manifests and practices, it is Lucifer (though his names are legion) who provides the principal inspiration, or at least that is what many bands proclaim, though one suspects it is faux faith in many instances.

Serpens Lvx brandish Satanism lavishly on their debut album, extensively entitled HENDECAGRAMICON: Adversarial Ethos Exoterically Unlocking Shrines Of Dissolution, though their thematic subject matter extends to mythic demonic figures of greater variety: The song titles, for example, include references to Tiamat, Typhon, Quetzalcoatl, and Aztec vampyrism. It is a variant metaphysics — the album also includes a song called “Anticosmic Eroticism (Sexual Black Light Magick)” — but the through-lines are apparent.

The important question, of course, is how this part-Mexican, part-Russian duo have elucidated their themes in sound. We have examples for you, including a song we’re premiering today: “I Am The Adversary (Impii Irreligiosi Carnivoribus Immortalibus)“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HOLY DEATH — “NECK WOUND SESSION”

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Jun 142023
 

We’ve been fans of the underground California death/doom band Holy Death ever since coming across their second EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, soon after its release in February 2020. We’ve followed them closely ever since, like a pack of hounds chasing after a car, witness the fact that we’ve written about them on seven separate occasions over these three years.

And so my heart sank last September when I read a statement by the band’s vocalist/guitarist Torie John that jut a few days after the band released their 2022 Moral Terror EPs he was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer, and that it had spread from his thyroid to his lymph nodes.

Torie also explained that the cancer could be treated with surgery, and that it was curable. At the time of that first announcement, he was still searching for a surgeon and hospital to perform a complete thyroidectomy and removal of lymph nodes. Ultimately, the search was successful, and the extensive surgery on his neck was scheduled to take place last November.

What did he do to prepare for the surgery? Of course, he and his bandmates spent November 5, 2022, recording a new release with Raul “Riff” Cuellar at his Riff Audio studio in Burbank. Naturally, they named the record Neck Wound Session. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DESEKRYPTOR — “FESTERING ULCERATION”

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Jun 132023
 

Following up on a sequence of four short releases that surfaced over the last six years, the Indiana death metal band Desekryptor have at last recorded a debut album. Aptly entitled Vortex Oblivion, it’s now set for release by Blood Harvest Records on July 14th.

The record is indeed a lethal death metal vortex, both ghastly and gutting — merciless in its bone-smashing force, terrorizing in the violence of its convulsions, disturbing in its moods of monstrous malignancy and abject agony — and yet freakishly elaborate and dynamic in its mauling permutations. It’s the kind of music that not only rewards repeat listening but demands it, to fully appreciate all the twists and turns in the cavalcade of horrors it presents.

In other words, there is ingenuity and intrigue to be found within these hideous cataclysms, and an impressive talent for melding both old school influences and newer-school adventurousness, executed with equally impressive technical skill, which even the density of all the subterranean mangling and mauling doesn’t completely obscure.

We’ve got two prime examples of these qualities in “Festering Ulceration“, the album track we’re premiering today, and “Abysmal Resurrection“, the album’s first single that we’re also sharing. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: OUR DYING WORLD — “THE EGREGIOUS SINS OF HUMANITY”

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Jun 122023
 

The last time we visited the works of the Los Angeles band Our Dying World a year ago, the occasion was our premiere of a video for the song “Veil of the Reaper“ off their then-forthcoming second album Hymns Of Blinding Darkness. We introduced it with these words:

We’ll make you a solemn promise: Whatever condition you happen to be in now (unless you’re in a coma), the song and video we’re about to present will make you feel orders of magnitude more alive, accelerating your heart-rate, igniting your fast-twitch muscles, and spinning your head like a glorious top. And for those of you who want your music to attack like a pack of rabid dogs, it fills that need, too.

Today we get a chance to revisit the band’s work through our premiere of a new single named “The Egregious Sins Of Humanity” — and it’s another ravishing spectacle. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE PIT — “AEONS OF HATE”

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Jun 122023
 

Hailing from Queretaro, Mexico, The Pit will celebrate two decades of existence next year. Like other bands with such a long career, life has gotten in the way, and their recording output hasn’t been prolific. Until this year, their discography consisted of only a debut split in 2006 and a debut album (Disrupted Human Symmetry) in 2008. But now, 15 years later, Personal Records will soon be discharging The Pit‘s aptly named second album, Of Madness and Evil Whispers.

As one might expect, the line-up has changed in the interim, although original guitarist Antonio Nolasco, original bassist Octavio Olachea, and original vocalist Guillermo Galván are all still in harness together on the new album, joined by new drummer Mauricio Villalón and new second guitarist Angel Villegas.

Also not entirely surprising, The Pit have moved their music in different directions as compared to what you can hear on their first full-length, and the results are — in a word — electrifying. Where The Pit now thrive is in the unleashing of high-speed, high-power death metal fueled by ruthless ferocity, but also embedded with equally ruthless hooks that get stuck in the head, and simultaneously channel an array of dark and demented moods — which is to say that they are damned effective songwriters.

We’ve got two great examples of the sinister yet hurricane-strength power of the new album in two songs we want to share today, including one we’re premiering. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISIMPERIUM — “BLADE OBFUSCATION”

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Jun 082023
 

We almost never copy/paste what labels and PR agents write about the music they’re promoting. Not because they’re never right, but because we prefer to reach our own conclusions and express it in our own words, even when we’re enthusiastic enough about what we hear to host premieres. But sometimes, the word-smithing we receive is so glorious that it’s hard to resist. In the case of Sentient Ruin‘s come-on for the forthcoming debut album of Portland’s Disimperium, it’s gloriously horrifying:

As the debut 2021 7″ “Malefic Obliteration” had already hinted at, human ears will fall prey yet again to an entity whose quest for total sensorial destruction has now reached implausible and horrific extremes, far beyond the confines of sanity which had already been obliterated on the inaugural release. In its nine tracks and thirty two minutes of pure concentrated terror, “Grand Insurgence Upon Despotic Altars” discharges an inescapable payload of death that impacts the listener with the force and speed of an apocalyptic shockwave escaping the fireball of a nuclear warhead.

And there’s more where that came from, such as this: “Where bands like Diocletian, Impetuous Ritual, Tetragrammacide, Knelt Rote and Damaar had already tested and established the limits of human resistance against abstract ideas of omnipotent negativity and horizonless sonic bedlam, Disimperium explore these outer limits even further, venturing out and establishing a new era into which there is no more measure to the very definition of musical insanity sought and achieved for the sole sake of aggression”.

That’s all vividly evocative enough that you’ve probably already got a good idea of what you’re about to experience in the album track we’re premiering today, but we’ve got to justify our own existence, don’t we? So here goes…. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GUHTS — “WHITE NOISE”

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Jun 082023
 

White noise is a term that technically refers to a sonic sensation which equally includes all frequencies across a spectrum of audible sound, a meaningless commotion of static that can be used to drown out other sounds, which is why white noise generators are sometimes used as sleep aids. Sometimes it’s compared to the emissions of an old radio whose dial hasn’t yet found a station.

The New York avant-garde post-metal band Guhts had their reasons for naming their new single “White Noise“, but it’s not because the music sounds like some meaningless background drone, and it most definitely is not soporific. Far from it, as you’re about to learn for yourselves.

People who’ve heard Guhts‘ 2021 EP Blood Feather or their summer 2022 single “Burn My Body” won’t be surprised by that observation. Both of those releases were the kind of sonic and emotional powerhouses whose impact could be likened to meteor craters on Saturnian moons (not our moon, because it’s too familiar, and the music of this band tends to be startling). Continue reading »

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