AN NCS PREMIERE: VACUO — “TO THE PUTREFYING CHANTS”

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Sep 012023
 

Florence is one of the many jewels of Italy, a Tuscan city renowned for its art, architecture, and rich cultural history. But like all of the world’s great cities it has also been the setting for terrible events.

In areas near the city, for example, a serial killer known as The Monster of Florence murdered 14 victims (mutilating many of them) over the course of a decade or more in the 1970s’ and ’80s, and we’re told that it is in the area of those infamous events where Vacuo was born.

This solo project draws inspiration not from the beauty of Florence but from abyssal and abismal visions, and creates frightening audio renderings of them from ingredients of lo-fi black metal, abraded dungeon synth, noise, and freakish electronics.

Vacuo‘s debut, the work of sole member A., takes the form of an experimental EP named To Languish and Despair, which will be released by the Italian label Xenoglossy Productions on September 29th, and today we’re introducing you to its chilling fascinations through our premiere of the EP’s opening track, “To the Putrefying Chants“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GRAVE PILGRIM — “THE BIGOTRY OF PURPOSE”

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Aug 312023
 

One good turn deserves another. Yesterday we premiered a fascinating new album by Forest Thrall being released tomorrow by Death Prayer Records, and today we’re premiering another fascinating Death Prayer release, also hitting the streets tomorrow.

This one is The Bigotry of Purpose, the second full-length from the Oregonian melodic black metal band Grave Pilgrim, which follows the band’s self-titled debut album in 2021, and a 2022 EP named Molten Hands Reach West. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): FOREST THRALL — “AMIDST PINES”

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Aug 302023
 

Following up their 2022 debut album Apparitions of the Golden Horned, the New England-based black metal band Forest Thrall are set to release a second album entitled Amidst Pines on September 1st via Death Prayer Records, and we’re happily premiering it in full today.

Like a trip through previously un-visited ancient woods, the album follows a continually turning path that reveals unexpected sights, not all of them of earthly origin. There is a “backwoods” and “folkloric” quality to some of the music’s ingredients, but it also rakes the senses like rusted blades. Sometimes it sounds primitive and sometimes surprisingly elegant, sometimes diabolically deranged and sometimes spellbinding. The one thing the music isn’t is mundane or dull. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): WEALD AND WOE — “FOR THE GOOD OF THE REALM”

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Aug 292023
 

Weald and Woe, once a solo project but now a complete quartet, are based in Boise, Idaho, but in their music they have more than one foot planted in Britain and Europe as they existed 1000 years ago, give or take. Their current label, Fiadh Productions, puts it well in describing the band’s new album For the Good of the Realm:

“Weald and Woe combines the majesty of the medieval era with the ferocity of classic black metal inspired by Obsequiae, Véhémence, Darkenhöld, Immortal, Ensiferum and many others….

“The new full-length is both dreamy and intense, capturing bygone eras of courtly love and epic battles. The band’s music walks a fine line between triumphant and sophisticated choruses balanced with frigid, breakneck riffing that paints an often elegant but bleak soundscape as the listener is transported to a different time. Swords not optional!” Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HEADS FOR THE DEAD — “IN THE ABSENCE OF FAITH”

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Aug 282023
 

We are very happy once again to premiere music by Heads for the Dead. It’s the kind of happiness people feel when they wake up from supernatural nightmares and realize the monsters weren’t really eating your guts after all, or those who get thrills from the chills of horror movies in which the undead bare their rotten teeth and demons pierce the veil between worlds.

Horror in many forms is the bread and butter of this multinational death metal band, whose discography has swollen since 2018 to encompass an EP and three albums, and now there’s another EP shambling toward us, with a due date of September 1st via the venerable Pulverised Records.

As signified by its title — In the Absence of Faith — all the lyrics in these five tracks were inspired by horror-related movies “that deal with the concept of losing belief or getting challenged in extreme situations”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERAPHIC ENTOMBMENT — “ANGEL’S ENTRAIL”

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Aug 282023
 

What we have for you now is the first single from the first album by the Alabama death metal band Seraphic Entombment, which will be released on October 13th through Everlasting Spew Records.

The record’s name is Sickness Particles Gleam. As described by the label, it’s a “50+ minutes haunting and crushing ode to the foreboding; a long and unsettling journey into mankind’s darkest and most fetid hallucinations, fears, and primal impulses”. They also describe it as “bizarre and miasmic”.

This quartet (which began as a side project of Ectovoid and Hegemony members) obviously don’t think much of angels. Their band name envisions entombment of the celestial host. And the name of the song you’re about to hear spills their guts. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MAIRU — “WILD DARKENED EYES”

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Aug 282023
 

In late July of this year Trepanation Recordings released the debut album Sol Cultus by the British post-metal/sludge band Mairu. In our review (by Mr. Synn) we praised its sheer sonic weight, and its engaging nuances:

“For all the album’s devastating density and immense intensity (or should that be ‘intense immensity’?), however, it’s clear that Mairu possess a keen understanding of the importance of employing a variety of tones and shades as well, with every punishing passage of gargantuan grooves and hammering heaviness being carefully balanced by moments of mood-altering ambience and/or gorgeous, gloom-shrouded melody that serve to add an extra dash of musical colour to the group’s creative palette.”

What we have now, one month after the album’s release, is a reminder to those who might not yet have discovered it, and that reminder takes the shape of an official video for the song “Wild Darkened Eyes“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DARK HALL — “CHANGING WEATHER”

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Aug 252023
 

Most visitors here know that we often delight in musical horrors of different kinds — roaring and shrieking voices; percussion that resembles the discharge of devastating weaponry; guitars that sound like whirring bone saws  or sledgehammers pounding concrete; and moods of menace, mayhem, and abysmal agony.

But today we share a delight of a very different kind — four very talented individuals embarked on a head-spinning musical adventure, reveling in their instrumental mastery but with no more apparent effort than what’s required to breathe in and breathe out. The chance to watch them all do what they do makes the smiles even broader. (There’s still no clean singing, nor singing of any kind.)

There’s also a tale behind this song and video. The tale itself is also a delight, and we’ll begin there. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEVIL’S HOUR — “BEERLETHICS”

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Aug 252023
 

Back in January we helped slap the ass of newborn 2023 and get the baby screaming through our premiere of the title song from Black n´Punk Marauders, a debut EP by the German band Devil’s Hour.

As the record’s name signaled, the EP’s music was a cauldron of sound mainly influenced by Punk, Rock, and First Wave Black Metal bands from the ’80s and ’90s, but Devil’s Hour also masterfully pulled from wellsprings of old-school speed metal and classic heavy metal. And as feral and ferocious as the music was, the EP quickly proved that Devil’s Hour know how to write songs that are also highly infectious.

Since the release of that EP the band’s vocalist Wild Rogan deoarted, but they decided to forge ahead as a four-piece, with guitarist Burt Cocaine stepping into the vocal role, as he had done before in the band’s live shows.

Before they were Devil’s Hour the band had a different name — Sexrex. Under that older name they put out a 2020 EP named Beerlethics. And now with the revised lineup mentioned above they decided to re-record that EP’s title song. It’s being digitally released today by the German label Crawling Chaos, and we’re bringing it to you now, to help viciously kick 2023 careening toward the end of the year. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AUGURIUM — “UNEARTHLY WILL”

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Aug 242023
 

One way to think of the Canadian band Augurium‘s new album Unearthly Will is as a tour through a potentially deadly wildlife refuge of arcane and even astral origins. It provides close encounters with a variety of musical beasts, some more extravagantly colorful than others (but still with teeth bared) and some more savagely hostile. By the end you might be relieved that you didn’t become a meal for the menagerie, yet electrified by all the close calls — and by the sweeping splendor.

Augurium‘s name is a Latin word for omen, and Omen was the name of the band’s 2017 debut EP, which was an omen of things to come but not entirely predictive. Adorned by an eye-catching cover of an intriguing young woman with hands ending in talons, and introduced by a sinister symphonic intro, it delivered a brand of death metal that was equal parts blistering, bludgeoning, and imperiously hellish, anchored by vicious tremolo-reliant riffing and berserk vocal monstrosity, and accented by melodies of cruel menace, pestilential terror, oppressive gloom, and demonic violence.

From there Augurium moved more in the direction of brutal death metal with their 2018 debut album Unhallowed Ascendance, but with more dynamism than is often found in that genre, even more fully embracing bombastic, thuggish grooves, the ugly distortion of eviscerating riffage, melodies of illness and agony, and bursts of obliterating mayhem. Yet still, the music had plenty of eerie, insidious, and sometimes surprising melodic elements that helped shroud it in an atmosphere that seemed genuinely infernal. Continue reading »

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