Jul 272016
 

12 Jacket (3mm Spine) [GDOB-30H3-007}

 

I have a confession to make: I’m a political junkie. For the good of my mental and emotional health, I wish I could cut back (there’s no point in trying to quit), but right now I probably couldn’t get clean if my life depended on it. I’ve been glued to the Democratic Party convention coverage the last two nights, which explains why we haven’t had the usual volume of posts since the weekend. Things aren’t likely to get back to normal until after this particular circus comes to an end.

I did manage to pull this round-up together this morning, as well as a hell of a premiere earlier  today — and a bit later we will have another Neill Jameson post about black metal. I’ll start with two citing news items and then move to some new song streams.

KHEMMIS

I still remember when I first heard the music of Khemmis at the Denver Black Sky festival in the summer of 2014. It was a real eye-opening experience. Even someone as half-witted as me could tell they were something special. Lots of other people figured that out last year when they heard the band’s debut album, Absolution. And now we have a second album to look forward to, as revealed in an announcement late yesterday. Continue reading »

Jul 262016
 

40 Watt Sun-Wider than the Sky

 

Yesterday I loaded up a Seen and Heard round-up with music from 9 bands I had discovered in a single morning, most of them of the more obscure variety. Today I’ve again decided to focus exclusively on things I discovered through a whirlwind tour of our in-box and Facebook this morning, but this time the bands have a higher profile than yesterday’s group. Of course, these things are relative; the odds are that none of the people you encounter today who aren’t already your friends will have heard of any of these bands. And of course that is their loss.

40 WATT SUN

This first item him me like a bolt from the blue. Although I haven’t been regularly searching for news about 40 Watt Sun, I think in the recesses of my mind I just assumed we would never have another album by this particular project of Patrick Walker (ex-Warning) — but indeed we will, in less than three months’ time. Continue reading »

Jul 252016
 

Aephanemer-Memento Mori

 

I had a few ideas for a Monday round-up that percolated over the weekend. And then this morning, when I crawled through what had arrived in the NCS in-box since I went to sleep last night, all those ideas were shoved aside and put on the shelf for later retrieval. I do have poor impulse control, and therefore decided I would devote this post to nothing but what I discovered this morning.

Mind you, not everything I found in our in-box was worth spreading around (e.g., news about a new device for preventing snoring), but an unusually high percentage was. And what I especially liked about what I found was the serendipitous fact that the songs were quite varied in their styles of heaviness.

Now there’s quite a lot of music here, and so I’m going to do my best to keep my verbiage to a minimum. I’ve arranged the tracks in alphabetical order by band name, except for the last one… because I think it’s best experienced as a conclusion to this playlist.

AEPHANEMER

Until seeing the wonderful cover art that I put at the top of this post I had forgotten that Dark Tranquillity’s Niklas Sundin was a visual artist as well as a musical one. This creation adorns a new album named Memento Mori by the band Aephanemer from Toulouse, France. It will be released on September 16, but the band have already made one song from the album available for streaming and free download at Bandcamp. Its name is “Unstoppable”. Continue reading »

Jul 242016
 

Windfaerer-Coniuratio Nigrum Atlantika

 

Greetings from Seattle and welcome to another edition of Shades of Black. I wasn’t able to prepare one of these installments last Sunday due to fucking off, so I’ve accumulated an especially large list of recent discoveries that I would like to write about. From that list I’ve selected blackened music from six bands to recommend.

WINDFAERER

The name Windfaerer will likely be a familiar one to our readers. Last year we premiered two songs from the band’s marvelous second album Tenebrosum and named one of those to our list of 2015’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. What a nice surprise it was to discover that two days ago Windfaerer released more new music.

These new songs (three of them) appear on a three-way split by Windfaerer and two other Northeast bands, WolfCloak, and Dumal. The name of the split is Coniuratio Nigrum Atlantika. So far I’ve only listened to Windfaerer’s tracks, but they are predictably excellent. Continue reading »

Jul 232016
 

Wormrot-Voices

 

Getting a very slow start on this Saturday.  Went to sleep very late last night without having begun writing the post you are now reading, and then slept for 9 hours — and still didn’t want to get out of bed. I can’t remember the last time I slept for 9 hours, or anything close to that. I felt groggy as shit for a couple of hours after waking up. Pretty sure that was sleep grogginess rather than the after-effects of all the wine I consumed last night with my spouse and some friends. Pretty sure.

Either way, I now feel more alert and invigorated, having listened to the music collected in this post. This collection doesn’t really make much of a dent in the long list of new tracks and videos I came across since the last round-up I assembled. As usual, there’s not much rhyme or reason to why I picked these selections rather than others. Austin Weber also contributed one of these items, as you’ll see below.

WORMROT

On July 20, Singapore’s Wormrot announced that they will be releasing a new album named Voices on October 14, and they revealed the great cover art you see above by Zahir Sanosi (aka Kilas). Voices comes five long years since their last album, Dirge. Wormrot made a video to announce the new album, and it includes a new song from the album called “Fallen Into Disuse”. Continue reading »

Jul 202016
 

Heaven Shall Burn-Wanderer

 

In yesterday’s Part 1 of this large round-up, I said I would post Part 2 later the same day. Someday I will learn that part-time metal bloggers who have actual paying jobs and/or families who occasionally need their attention should not make forecasts of what they plan to do on the blog. Not even what they think they will accomplish later the same day, or even in the next hour. That’s just laying the groundwork for stepping on your own crank, so to speak.

Anyway, here’s Part 2, which unlike yesterday focuses on new or newish music that I wanted to recommend rather than simply announcements. One silver lining to the delay is that it enabled me to add the first item in this collection, which appeared late yesterday.

HEAVEN SHALL BURN

Our small band of beleaguered writers at NCS includes some ardent (perhaps even slavish) fans of Germany’s Heaven Shall Burn. I count my own self on the slavish end of the spectrum. And so yesterday was a banner day, because… Continue reading »

Jul 192016
 

MDF XV revised flyer

 

Ten days have passed since the last time I put together a round-up of news and recommended new music, which is an unusually long gap. Perhaps needless to say, trying to catch up is out of the question. What I’m going to do instead is just pull together some big news announcements from the last 24 hours in this post (plus one related recent song), and then collect a few more recent music streams in a second part that I’ll post a bit later today.

MARYLAND DEATHFEST ANNOUNCES SECOND ROUND OF CONFIRMED BANDS FOR 2017

On June 30, as we dutifully reported, the organizers of Maryland Deathfest announced the first round of confirmed bands for the XVth edition of the festival, scheduled to take place on May 25-28, 2017, in Baltimore. Just minutes ago, MDF announced a second round of confirmed bands — plus some surprising news about where the festival will, and won’t, take place next year. Here are the new confirmed names: Continue reading »

Jul 172016
 

Argonauta-Devouring the Mountains Vol III

 

As explained yesterday, I intended to take a break from blogging this weekend. I have paused a few times in my eating, drinking, and merry-making long enough to scan what’s happening on Facebook, and I happened to see a status which revealed that Italy’s Argonauta Records just released a free compilation of songs from 16 bands on the Argonauta label, which tends to focus on sludge, doom, post-metal, stoner, and drone. The name of the comp is Devouring the Mountains (Vol. III), and the songs come from Argonauta releases over the last 12 months.

We’ve written previously about half of the bands included in this comp (Hollow Leg, Beneath the Storm, Among Gods, Surya, Wows, Filth In My Garage, Return From the Grave, Eyes Front North), praising them all, and that gives me high hopes for the songs from the other eight bands. Continue reading »

Jul 162016
 

Badr Vogu-Wroth

 

Happy Saturday, motherfuckers (and I say that in the fondest possible way). I hope it will not make your Saturday less happy by telling you that what you’re reading now will probably be our only post this weekend.

I’ll be spending the rest of today and all day tomorrow at an annual two-day outdoor party with the people I work with at my fucking day job. They are great people and they know how to party, and I’m looking forward to it. However, it will be difficult for me to prepare anything for our putrid site until Monday, and since I’m usually the only NCS slave who ever posts anything on the weekends, that means we’ll likely be going dark for two days.

That means we probably won’t have a Rearview Mirror post or a Shades of Black post for this Sunday. I say “probably”, because my blog compulsion is so great that I might figure out some way to post something — but probably not. I do want to leave you with one new music stream before I check out, because I hate posting anything at NCS that doesn’t include some metal. Continue reading »

Jul 132016
 

Near-Our Sun

 

This is the delayed second part of a two-part collection of blackened metal that I began (here) on Sunday. The sharp-eyed among you will notice that I now have music from six bands instead of the four that I said would be included in this second installment. I actually wanted to add many more than two, but that would have caused the same problem that led me to split up Sunday’s post, so I’ll save them for another day.

This collection includes four full albums or EPs for which I haven’t written the kind of complete reviews that they deserve or that you might prefer. As usual, I’m squeezed for time. But please don’t mistake my meager write-ups for lack of enthusiasm — I’m very high on everything included here and hope you’ll explore all of them.

NEAR

Once again I must thank my overseas comrade Miloš for sending me links to the first two releases in this collection. The first of them is an album named Own Sun by the Italian band Near, which was released last week by De Tenebrarum Principio, a faction of ATMF. This is Near’s second album, following 2010’s The Opening of the Primordial Whirl. (The cover art bears the title “Our Sun”, but the ATMF Bandcamp page identifies Own Sun as the title.) Continue reading »