AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): I, DESTROYER — “COLD, DEAD HANDS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 072023
 

The story of New England-based I, Destroyer is an unusual one, perhaps best summed up as a tale of indomitable perseverance in the shadows of the underground. As we write this, the band are on the eve of their 20th anniversary, and yet (with a new lineup in place) are only now about to release their first official EP as a label release.

Those two decades did see the production of four I, Destroyer demos, but they were self-released and usually passed along by hand to friends, fans, and other bands. Moreover, although those four demos collectively included 21 songs, they totaled only about 38 minutes of music. The new EP — Cold, Dead Hands — is nearly 25 minutes all by itself, spread across 6 tracks. If you do the math, you’ll figure out that these songs on average are longer than anything the band have done before.

These songs are also dynamic and expertly executed assaults. And make no mistake, they are indeed vicious assaults, relentlessly pulse-pounding attacks of black thrash and speed metal, but with enough changes in momentum and mood (and plenty of technically eye-popping performances) to keep listeners perched on the edge of their seats. It’s raw and nasty, fetid as well as ferocious, both feral and freaked-out — a wild ride from beginning to end.

And so, it’s with fiendish pleasure that we present a full stream of Cold, Dead Hands today in advance of its June 9th co-release by Eternal Death and Born for Burning. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CLARET ASH — “CASCADENCE OF THE TWILIGHT” (AND AN INTERVIEW)

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Jun 072023
 

In 2019 very few (if any) people foresaw all the global upheavals that the immediately following years would produce — a global pandemic, the damage caused by rapidly accelerating climate change, and a ravaging war in Europe, among other catastrophes. The Australian band Claret Ash didn’t foresee them either, at least not in all of those specifics, but what happened did depressingly dovetail with an imaginative narrative they had already begun, and informed where it would then unfold in a tale of societal collapse.

In December of last year, almost five years after the release of their last album The Great Adjudication: Fragment Two, the band began a new musical sequence called WORLDTORN. As explained by the band in an exclusive interview you’ll find at the end of this feature, it “picks up from where the last album, The Great Adjudication, finished by focusing on events after the collapse of society and the eradication of humanity”.

Clarest Ash launched WORLDTORN in December with the single “GATEWAYS” (reviewed by us here). Thematically, it described a world in turmoil, reeling from an “anthropocentric holocaust” during which nature had mutated and become the supreme force and humans were forced into hiding.

And now Claret Ash will be following that initial chapter of their continuing narrative with a second installment, a new EP named WORLDTORN: Anemoia that’s set for release on CD and digital formats by Hypnotic Dirge Records on August 11, 2023. In addition to the afore-mentioned interview, it’s our pleasure today to premiere the EP’s electrifying opening song, “Cascadence of the Twilight“. Continue reading »

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

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Jun 062023
 

Today we premiere a full stream of Lithic, the debut album by Hamburg-based Voidhaven, arriving five years and many hardships after their self-titled debut EP. It provides a masterful union of stylistic ingredients from different corners of the vast realm of Doom, sectors where death/doom, funeral doom, and trad doom reign in their haunted, ice-cold castles. Both instrumentally elaborate and vocally multi-faceted, the album is completely captivating.

Perhaps this won’t come as a surprise after you learn that the band’s line-up is composed of veterans, and includes members of such bands as Ophis, Fvneral Fvkk, and Remembrance. Yet as noted above, the writing and completion of the album didn’t come easy, but the time enabled care and attention to detail. And that’s probably a good place to begin, with the band’s own extensive statement of how the album came to exist and what they sought to achieve: Continue reading »

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

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Jun 052023
 

We’re approaching the halfway mark on 2023’s calendar, but we’ll venture the bold speculation that even by year-end you’ll have a hard time finding an album more overwhelmingly powerful in its sound and mood than Portraits, the forthcoming third album by the French atmospheric black metal band Aodon that’s set for release by Willowtip Records on June 9th. Over and over again, it takes the breath away with the monumental scale and visceral intensity of its music.

The themes of the songs are dark, and unmistakably the music is too, even in its suddenly softer phases, which provide haunting (and occasionally even hopeful) reprieves from the album’s turbulent and towering intensity. It is, to forewarn you, a harrowing series of portrayals, but so immense and immersive that it chains the senses in place, caught and consumed by the calamities and the contrasts. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ORGAN DEALER — “PANORAMIC” AND “SOLITUDE IS DEATH”

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Jun 052023
 

Mondays tend to be morbid days for many of us. Maybe our asses are dragging from a weekend drowned in excesses of various kinds and not enough sleep. Maybe we’re staring at the face of an ugly job, knowing that there’s five days of them standing in a nasty gauntlet ahead of us. Motivation might be in short supply, and over-stuffed pessimism riding you like a sway-backed mule.

But don’t lose hope, there’s an antidote for this Monday: an opportunity to stick your head into a sonic blast furnace that will at least temporarily incinerate your woes (and your clothing and flesh). And even if you’re actually looking forward to the start of a new work week, what you’re about to hear will give it the kind of kick-start otherwise available only from a syringe of adrenaline plunged into your carotid artery.

To fulfill that promise we have the premiere of not one but two tracks from The Weight of Being, a new album by the explosive New Jersey grindcore band Organ Dealer, which will be fully detonated by Everlasting Spew Records on July 28th. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MELAN SELAS — “DREADFUL DOME”

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Jun 052023
 

We know from the first three records released by Melan Selas (Melan Selas, Ῥέοn, and ΦΑΟΣ) that this black metal band is capable of quite significant variations and contrasts in their music, but what perhaps tends to stay most firmly rooted in memory are the songs where the band let the adrenaline throttle all the way out and fly toward elevated heights.

There is where they most powerfully reveal themselves as part of the modern vanguard carrying forward many of the old traditions of unmistakably Hellenic black metal, with its embrace of classic heavy metal riffing, epic keyboards, and an atmosphere that’s just as magnificent as it is fierce and ripping.

As it happens, that’s the kind of Melan Selas song we have for you today, a heart-palpitating and highly infectious track named “Dreadful Dome” off the band’s new album Zephyrean Hymns, and it’s presented through a lyric video. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OMINØS — “OH DARKNESS MY SUN”

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Jun 022023
 

Later this month Void Wanderer Productions will release a debut EP fittingly named The Everlasting Pain by the black metal band Ominøs. In vivid but accurate terms, the label describes the EP’s four haunting and harrowing tracks as a means of “entering ancient gateways to lands of death, where happiness is sucked out of souls, safety is distorted into agony and dreams are crushed into nightmares,” as “ice-cold screams chant accursed poetry about the inevitable demise of humanity”.

What we have for you today as an even more vivid rendering of what this Dutch duo have achieved on the EP is the premiere of the EP’s closing track “Oh Darkness My Sun“. Lyrically, it is a dire meditation on suffering and sorrow, where darkness becomes the sun and the protagonist yearns for its victory over light. Musically, it evokes unearthly nightside realms, freezing temperatures, and indeed the vanquishing of light and the shivering splendor of darkness. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERPENT CORPSE — “LET THE RATS FEED”

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Jun 022023
 

The Montreal band Serpent Corpse named themselves for a dead thing, and their brand of death metal does channel the stench of rot and ruin. But the great serpent brandished in their name still lives, a monstrous presence that will not be subdued, but finds an ally in death.

In less gruesomely poetic terms, Serpent Corpse are bringing forth a debut album named Blood Sabbath that isn’t just rotten to the core but also massively bludgeoning, chillingly supernatural, and maniacally vicious. The music seeps into the bloodstream like a fatal poison, disembowels with ravenous cruelty, and feeds on what it has spilled with ghastly relish.

Well, I guess we weren’t finished with the gruesome poetry after all. With music this horrifying and electrifying, it’s hard to resist.

Speaking of feeding on entrails, we have an album track to share with you today that’s named “Let the Rats Feed“, and man, do they ever. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NON SERVIAM — “DEATH ATARAXIA”

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Jun 012023
 

Not so long ago we wrote here that while many musical extremists add new layers of brick and mortar to old walls surrounding well-established genre structures, the anonymous Parisian duo Non Serviam take a wrecking ball to genre walls. Their music is about catharsis and confrontation, and to extend the alliteration, it can be confounding — because it goes where the creators’ passions and wild inmventiveness take it, outward into the world from a burning inner core of rage.

You would conclude that the music on their new album Death Ataraxia is confrontational even if you didn’t know what inspires it. It has the effect of getting in the face of listeners and shoving them out of comfort zones and off-balance, teetering but fueled. But what inspires the music is also confrontational, an anarchist and antifascist ethos that condemns the abuses of capitalism and hate-mongering directed against the least powerful among us.

Yet it would go to far to brand the music, or what inspires it, as nihilistic, even if sometimes it sounds ruinous or hopeless. In the midst of superheated resistance there seem to be goals beyond not surrendering or becoming complacent, beyond furiously swinging the wrecking ball at what confines our bodies and minds. Goals like embracing those who need support when we can, (furiously) seizing the opportunities for rapture when they present themselves (no matter how fleeting), or just letting your head spin away from the ugliness of the real into the very un-real.

Another way to put it is that in listening to Death Ataraxia you’ll find times when you might want to sway and bounce, or to let your mind wander in intriguing but dangerous dreamscapes, but plenty of other times that might make you want to put your head back and howl, or hurl yourself like a missile into violent collisions, or feel your brain spin (dazzled) through a kaleidoscopic sonic collage where nightmares thrive. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SILVERN — “STILL HIGHER THAN SAVIOUR’S STAR”

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May 312023
 

Early last year we had the privilege (and pleasure) of premiering a single named “Lorn“, which was the debut release of the Ukrainian black metal band Silvern, and the first sign of their first album to come. The song was laden with sharp hooks, and Silvern propelled it with a visceral punch. It created an electrifying yet distressing experience. The song also had intriguing lyrical themes, and (for reasons you’ll soon learn) we’ll repeat part of what Silvern had to say about them:

The lyrics describe the controversial figure of a human as a biological species, which constantly creates a problem for itself and everything around. The possibilities of consciousness are endless, you need to develop yourself and live in harmony with the Universe, but instead, a human invents religions, kills, harms the environment, thinking that he is the crown of God’s creation. Everything is much more complicated. Sometimes you need to look a bit higher than the Saviour’s star.

That last line provides the connection to yet the second Silvern single, which we’re premiering today — “Still Higher Than Saviour’s Star“. Continue reading »

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