SEEN AND HEARD: ANAAL NATHRAKH, BEYOND CREATION, DEMONIC RESURRECTION, HATE ETERNAL, MALEVOLENT CREATION, NUCLEAR PERVERSION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Oct 152014
 

 

As I write this I am sitting on an airplane at about 40,000 feet somewhere over the Rocky Mountains. I am having to fly across the country because of my fucking day job, and once I get where I’m going, I will have to fucking work — pretty much day and night until I make it back to Seattle on Saturday night.

I tell you this not to pique your curiosity — because I can’t tell you what I’m doing, or I could, but would then have to kill you — but as an explanation of why there will be some scarcity in our posts between now and Sunday. Also, the “Seen and Heard” title is only half true:

The wi-fi on this plane isn’t good enough to let me stream music, so I actually haven’t heard anything — other than the guy sitting next to me snorting his phlegm every 10 minutes, the dude in front of me snoring, and the dull roar of the engines. Also, I have to fucking work on the plane beginning pretty damned soon.

Well, enough of my whining. Here are some things I’ve seen in my scampering through the inter hole this morning, and some things I would like to hear when I have the chance. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLOODBATH, DARK FORTRESS, GHOST BRIGADE, KAUAN, ODYSSEY, SCHAMMASCH, VARATHRON

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Oct 142014
 

 

Here’s a rather large selection of new songs and videos released in the last few days that I decided were worth your time — and who better than me to decide how you should spend your time?  Exactly.

I’ve arranged these offerings in alphabetical order by band name. It’s quite a varied selection, so I’m hoping everyone will find something to like.

BLOODBATH

We’re now two songs into the ramp-up for one of the most highly anticipated extreme metal releases of the year — Grand Morbid Funeral, the first album by Bloodbath since 2008. The second song, “Famine of God’s Word”, was revealed yesterday through a lyric video. I’m of two minds about the song.

On the one hand, the instrumental music is just downright vicious — a brutally heavy, galloping, squalling, skin-flaying, gut-punching romp, with an eerie lead guitar melody that floats through the song like a phantasm. Continue reading »

VOMIT METAL: DEATH VOMIT (CHILE), WÖMIT ANGEL, DEATH VOMIT (INDONESIA), RADIOACTIVE VOMIT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Oct 132014
 

 

I’ve had vomit on my mind, and not for the usual reason after a weekend. This time it’s because I happened to notice that I had promos for three new albums by bands with the word “vomit” in their names, and at about the same time as I figured that out, I heard a new song from yet another vomit band on Facebook that I liked. It’s definitely not a distinct genre, this vomit metal. As you’ll see, vomit comes in all kinds of different chunks.

And although I’m joking around about vomit, some of the most fun I’ve had all year with my clothes on has come from listening to the music featured in this post. I do hope you’ll devote your time to it.

DEATH VOMIT (CHILE)

You may have noticed from the headline of this post that it includes two bands named Death Vomit. This first one is from Chile, and their debut album Gutted By Horrors was released this past July by Xtreem Music. I wrote about the first advance track from the album last June, but idiot that I am, I never listened to the whole album until Kunal Choksi reminded me of its existence via a recent e-mail.

I’m so glad I finally paid attention, because Gutted By Horrors punches a whole shitload of my buttons — it’s a supremely well-executed assault of ancient death metal lethality, like a strain of plague bacterium that has begun virulently festering after being unearthed from a crypt and exposed to air once again. Continue reading »

DECKARD CAIN’S MALADIES OF THE EAR!

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

(Our friend and fellow blogger deckard cain re-joins us with a fresh set of musical recommendations.)

Greetings!

While Diablo constantly devises plans, doomed to fail of course, to conquer the world and the rest of the world lets out a collective sigh, I sit here thinking. Thinking about penning down yet another scroll on the most infectious maladies of the ear, and lo, here we are!

“Stay awhile and listen.”

1.  DESERTED FEAR

OSDM with an extremely glossy finish, courtesy of Dan Swanö.

I’ve written about these guys from Germany before; in fact it was on my best of 2012 list here on NCS. What probably separates them from the old guard is their knack for using grooves that are more reminiscent of modern metal. One could say that they’ve got one foot each in the past and the present. This German trio’s got a new LP out titled Kingdom of Worms via FDA Rekotz. Stream their first single below. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLASPHERIAN, CLOUDKICKER, DISSVARTH, EASTFRISIAN TERROR, FEN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

After a two-week hiatus from listening to new songs, watching new videos, and preparing these round-ups, I’m easing back into the gig. I didn’t finish as many reviews during the hiatus as I had hoped, and so I still won’t prepare these round-ups as frequently as before, until I make more headway on some reviews I desperately want to finish. With luck, Leperkahn will continue to pitch in as he did during my break. Speaking of which, how about a big round of applause for Leperkahn?

The good new metal continues to come in a flood: The following offerings are all new things I saw and heard just over the last 24 hours. The bands are presented in alphabetical order. The music is all over the map, both stylistically and geographically.

BLASPHERIAN

Iron Bonehead Productions has announced plans to release a new 7″ EP by Houston’s Blaspherian by the end of November. Its name is Upon the Throne… Of Eternal Blasphemous Death. The last time I wrote about Blaspherian (here) was more than three years ago, just before the release of their debut album. The fantastic cover art for the album had caught my eye, and the art for this new EP is certainly eye-catching, too. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 6

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

 

(In this 6th installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory forays through the underground. Previous installments are linked at the end of this post.)

DUNGORTHEB

Let’s start off this installment with the technical death metal band Dungortheb, a French group from the world of Lord Of The Rings that I’ve been a fan of for years. Somehow, in spite of being a massive fan of their first two albums, Intended To… and Waiting For Silence, I failed to realize they had a new record out until recently, when I was checking out the roster for Great Dane Records on Metal-Archives. Seeing their name on the roster inevitably led me to click on the Dungortheb page on M-A where I saw the new album. Luckily I was not too far behind, as this latest release, Extracting Souls, just dropped on August 30th of this year.

Not only is it a continuation of their heavily lead-focused, melodically entrenched, often mid-paced death metal style, but it’s quite an evolution as well. Extracting Souls sees an influx of Death– and Coroner-style thrash influences seep into their sound, giving their latest a Gory Blister-type headbangable take on technical death metal. Continue reading »

DOOM AND DEATH RITUALS: FAMISHGOD, STORMVOLD, NANGILIMA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

So here’s how this collection of songs came together:

I saw a Facebook post yesterday about a new band named Famishgod. It’s the creation of some people who know what they’re doing. I listened to their first single on Soundcloud. If you don’t stop after you listen to a song on Soundcloud, it moves you right into another one… and then another one… and I went with it. And voilà!

FAMISHGOD

Dave Rotten has loaned his inhuman voice to many projects, his best-known one being the long-running death battalion Avulsed. What I saw on Facebook yesterday was an announcement that he has now partnered with a Spanish musician named Funedëim (Svipdagr, Morkulv) to create a new entity under the brand of FamishGod. With Funedëim on guitars and bass, FamishGod have recorded an album entitled Devourers of Light divided into seven tracks, each of which lyrically forms a chapter in a a conceptual story, with cover art and additional artwork created by Tommi Grönqvist from Finland’s Desecresy.

Along with this announcement came the premiere of the album’s title track and first chapter, “Devourers of Light”. Rotten’s vocals are monstrously deep and horrific, the kind to which words like “cavernous” and “abyssal” really don’t do justice. And the radioactive riffs and massive bass hammers are monsters in their own right, spreading a thick miasma of putrefying doom that moves from funereal dirge to methodically skull-clobbering assault, with a malignant lead guitar melody eventually uncoiling in its midst like a serpent. Great intro to the song as well. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 5

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Oct 092014
 

(In this 5th installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory  forays through the underground. The first installment is here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here.)

KATAPLEXIS

Let’s start today’s edition with a bang, the kind of loud and ear-shattering ruckus you might associate with a mortar shelling or rapid machine-gun fire flying out of an unnecessarily huge extended clip. The time has come for the death-grind fun-free happy hour, cue Kataplexis.

This Canadian wrecking crew are relentlessly crushing, suffocating, and pummeling in approach. They offer a fair bit of contrast not readily present in most deathgrind, vacillating between short, purely grind-blasted death bursts and longer grindcore-fed chaotic death metal numbers. All of which pairs nicely with the occasional black metal poisonous riffs in their veins, coursing a darker shade of rot into the proceedings. Continue reading »

STUFF LEPERKAHN DONE FOUND AND DONE LIKED, PART 5: SHORES OF NULL, OLD MAN GLOOM, INTER ARMA, WORMWOOD, WHORLS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 082014
 

 

(Leperkahn soldiers on with the round-ups while I’m AWOL from round-up duty. Here’s his latest collection of new things.)

Hello all. This version’s gonna be a bit short on the descriptions, since I have a boatload of Adam Smith to read, and a paper on the The Iliad that won’t write itself. That said, I figured I needed a break from that, and you all needed some wonderful metal in your lives.

SHORES OF NULL

I know I remember seeing some good press behind Shores Of Null’s recent Candlelight-released album Quiescence, and probably even watched one of the earlier music videos they made for one of the tracks. Yet, dunce that I am, I never actually checked out the album, and the just-released video for “Ruins Alive” is proving that was a mistake.

It mixes some doom-y/death-y instrumental work not unlike Insomnium, or something doomier than Insomnium, with Davide Straccione’s absolutely stunning vocals, both his cleans, used heavily and tonally in the vein of Enslaved’s Herbrand Larsen, Extol’s Ole Børud, and Black Crown Initiate’s Andy Thomas (therefore at once stunningly melodic and entrancingly proggy), and his cavernous, funeral doom-y growls. Listening to some of their other music videos, the quality put forth on “Ruins Alive” seems to carry throughout Quiescence. Add that to the long and growing list of albums I need to check out

https://www.facebook.com/shoresofnull Continue reading »

SÓLSTAFIR PREMIERE THE VIDEO FOR “LÁGNÆTTI”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 072014
 

 

Sólstafir’s “Fjara” from Svartir Sandar is one of my all-time favorite songs in any genre of music. It has been the subject of numerous videos, most of which have been live recordings. My favorite is still this one (in part because it’s the first Sólstafir video I ever saw), but a close second is the official video (here) made by directors Bowen Staines and Gunnar B. Guðbjörnsson, which follows a young woman in a thin wedding dress dragging a timber coffin across a stretch of Icelandic wilderness and encountering spirits along the way, culminating in a memorable scene at the Skógafoss waterfall.

The team that produced that striking video for “Fjara” has returned with a video that premiered within the last hour for the song “Lágnætti” off the band’s latest album, the remarkable Ótta. It is every bit as striking as the “Fjara” video, and is a beautiful match for the song. Continue reading »

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