SEEN AND HEARD: ENTRAILS, AU-DESSUS, KOLLAPSE, QRIXKUOR, SATANARCHIST

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
May 042017
 

 

Things are going to slow down here at NCS until early next week. As of this morning I’ve left Seattle with Ms. Islander for a short vacation, and blogging isn’t part of any planned activities. Any attempts by me to do any NCS stuff besides hurriedly post whatever I might receive from other contributors would be met with severe punishment, or at least a cold shoulder.

I thought I’d pull together a round-up of new music before we left, but found myself with too little time to write impressions of the songs I chose. So this will be more bare-bones than usual.

ENTRAILS

The last time I wrote about this band, almost exactly two years ago, I began by saying that, “By my lights, Sweden’s Entrails can pretty much do no wrong”. Back then the context was their new album Obliteration. Now they have a new one named World Inferno, which will be released by Metal Blade on June 16th. Continue reading »

GOATWHORE: NEW ALBUM DETAILS AND NEW TRACK REVEALED (“VENGEFUL ASCENSION”)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
May 032017
 

 

Rather than save this news and new music for our next round-up, I decided to strike while the iron is hot. It is Goatwhore, after all, and their consistency both on record and on stage has always been impressive. Plus, we’re huge fans.

First, here’s the news, announced not long ago: The band’s new album (their seventh) is named Vengeful Ascension. It’s a ten-track, 41-minute record, featuring eye-catching cover art, and it will be released by Metal Blade on June 23rd. The press release we received also included this description of the album’s lyrical themes: Continue reading »

A CHILL IN THE AIR: APOCALYPSE ORCHESTRA, HAWKBILL, OV SHADOWS

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
May 032017
 

 

I’ve done this before, I’m sure I’ll do it again. Sometimes I listen to new music by bands whose music I haven’t heard before, and by complete coincidence it lines up. That’s what happened here — though this particular listening experience also included a revisiting of an EP I’d heard before.

By chance, I listened to all the music in this post back-to-back a couple of nights ago, and it was not only very good from beginning to end, it also seemed to flow in an interesting and connected way despite the dramatic differences in the music of each band. The wind blew with a chill… and that’s the best way I’ve come up with to capture the sensation of the experience.

APOCALYPSE ORCHESTRA

I love a lot of things about this first song, and the video that accompanies it, but the bagpipess are a huge reason. And now that I’ve mentioned that instrument, I’m sure that some of you will want to run from the song like wolves are on your heels, which I suppose is one reason why some cultures have used them as war instruments. Everyone else, please read on… and listen. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 3): TEMPLE OF VOID, CAVERNLIGHT, CONDOR, CATHEXIS, WAR/PLAGUE, MAIM, AOTV

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 302017
 

 

This catching-up effort which began on Friday may have gotten out of control. I have music from 7 bands in this “final” installment, including three full releases as well as a quartet of individual tracks. And I put “final” in quotes because I still have a bunch of new black metal for a SHADES OF BLACK feature. I almost always post those on Sundays, but this time I may have to post it tomorrow. Depends on how long I can go without food, bathroom breaks, sociable interaction with my wife, rational thought, other distractions from our glorious mission….

TEMPLE OF VOID

“Huge, enormous, vast, immense, large, big, mighty, great, colossal, tremendous, prodigious, gigantic, gargantuan, mammoth, monstrous, monumental, giant, towering, elephantine, mountainous, titanic”. These are all synonyms for the word “massive”. By listing them, I’ve gotten a head start on the task of describing the first single from Temple of Void’s new album.

Ooops! I forgot “humongous” and “hulking”. Continue reading »

A TRIO OF TWISTS: THOUGHTS OF IONESCO, MIND SO FRAGILE, BUFIHIMAT

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 302017
 

 

The three songs I’ve collected here are off our usual beaten paths. I would consider all of them metal, but they are all twists on convention, and for that matter they’re all kind of twisted in other ways. Obviously, I found myself liking all three quite a lot or they wouldn’t be here. And because I thought they would make an interesting feature grouped in this way, I’ve separated them from a bunch of other new songs that are included in Part 3 of the SEEN AND HEARD post that’s coming later today.

THOUGHTS OF IONESCO

There’s a big article at The Font of All Human Knowledge devoted to Detroit-based Thoughts of Ionesco. As I write this, however, it’s missing one important fact, though the hive mind responsible for The Font’s content will undoubtedly update it soon. The missing fact is that Thoughts of Ionesco have reunited and will be releasing their first new material since 2001. In fact, they’ve already released something new. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): SCHAMMASCH, ABSU, ARKHON INFAUSTUS, DARK HABITS, PAROXSIHZEM, DUMAL, PANZERGOD

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Apr 292017
 


Schammasch – photo by Andrea Stoppa

 

Happy Saturday. I’m continuing an effort to catch up on things I spotted over the last week but didn’t have time to write about. For this Part 2, I decided to include mostly news items, and leave a lot of the remaining new music I’d like to recommend for Part 3. Not sure when I’ll get Part 3 done, maybe in time to post later today but most likely for tomorrow.

The first three items here are announcements of new albums, with artwork. The last three are new tape and CD releases that provide reminders about very good releases that originally appeared last year or early this year. And sandwiched in the middle is a bit of recommended new music.

SCHAMMASCH

Here at NCS we’re big fans of the Swiss band Schammasch. And so it was exciting to see the band’s announcement this morning that they plan to release a new trilogy of records as the follow-up to last year’s Triangle trilogy. The new series will be entitled The Maldoror Chants, and the first album — The Maldoror Chants: Hermaphrodite — will be released on the 9th of June. Here’s the cover art, along with the band’s description of the new trilogy: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ANIMA NOSTRA, ASHCLOUD, COLD INSIGHT, KAFIRUN, SADIST, WEREGOAT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 282017
 

 

As I mentioned earlier today, I returned to Seattle very late last night after a 4-day road trip for my day job. While away, I didn’t have time to pull together round-ups of new music that I was noticing, so I have some catching up to do. This is the first installment of that catching-up exercise, which will continue with at least one more part either later today or tomorrow. The music here is organized in alphabetical order by band name, and I’ve tried to provide variety in each of these installments.

ANIMA NOSTRA

I wasn’t familiar with Anima Nostra before hearing this first song, but I’ve learned that it’s a collaboration between Henrik Nordvargr Björkk (Sweden) and Margaux Renaudin (France). The two of them released an album named Anima Nostra last year, and now they’ve taken that as their band name.

Their second album, Atraments, will be released by Malignant Records (digitally and on digipak CD) on June 2nd. I gather from press announcements that the sound now differs from their first collaborative effort, “taking the more intimate ritual ambient aspects of the debut, and incorporating them as part of towering constructs that blur the line between death industrial, doom metal, and neo-classical”. Continue reading »

DECAPITATED (“NEVER”) AND GODS FORSAKEN (“BORN OF BLASPHEMY”)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 282017
 

 

I left Seattle on Monday for my job and arrived home again near midnight last night. I woke up four hours later because there is very little justice or fairness in the world. Before my eyes would focus properly, I saw messages from friends on Facebook that alerted me to the two new tracks I’ve collected here. I have a fuckton of other new music to sift through since I didn’t have time to assemble a SEEN AND HEARD round-up while I was out of town, but I decided to get these two tracks up on the site without delay, even before the coffee kicks in.

DECAPITATED

Three years after Blood Mantra, Poland’s mighty Decapitated are returning with a new album named Anticult, which will be released by Nuclear Blast on July 7th. Last night the album’s memorable cover art appeared on the web, and this morning, before the sun rose out here on the U.S. west coast, Decapitated detonated a video for a new song named “Never“. Continue reading »

U.S. BLACK METAL: OBSCURE RECOMMENDATIONS FROM NEILL JAMESON

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Apr 272017
 

 

(We welcome Neill Jameson (Krieg) back to our site, who in this post recommends music by some of the more obscure U.S. black metal bands, mainly from the ’90s — some of whom have new releases in the works.)

This past weekend was the Decibel Metal & Beer Fest, and while I was proving to the world I can’t hold my liquor I ran into some people like Austin Lunn who can actually carry on the kind of conversation about black metal that gives me pause, and also the motivation to do something like this. I also ran into a few old friends who were a part of the burgeoning ’90s US black metal scene, members of bands that I find criminally underrated.

Between that and all the talk about what “USBM” should and shouldn’t be, I figured I’d talk a bit about bands that are from a time where Antifa wasn’t throwing smoke bombs into apolitical shows or bands didn’t get name-dropped on Chris Brown’s vest. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SECOND TO SUN, INGURGITATING OBLIVION, ANCIENT ASCENDANT, POSTVORTA, WHEN ICARUS FALLS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 222017
 

 

I’m slow out of the blogging gate today, partly because I overindulged during the usual Friday night blow-out with my co-workers and partly because I had trouble deciding what to write about for this round-up. The problem, as usual, wasn’t too few ideas but too many.

Before moving on to the music I ultimately selected, I’ll mention a handful of news items:

First, you might remember that last August we premiered the full stream for a hell of a good debut album by Portland’s Bewitcher, accompanied by these words (among others): “Bewitcher seem to have discovered a hidden vault filled with pure riff gold. Every song on the album is packed with electrifying guitar work, blending thrash, speed metal, Motörhead-style rock, first-wave black metal, and even elements of the classic NWOBHM in a way that’s as infectious as a rampaging new plague virus without a cure.”

The news is that Graven Earth Records, a small cassette-based label out of Colorado, is releasing a limited-run (200 copies) cassette of Bewitcher’s debut on April 28th. Go here to check that out (the rest of their catalogue looks pretty cool as well). Continue reading »

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