SEEN AND HEARD: BASTARÐUR, CARONTE, NECRONAUTICAL, LOW FLYING HAWKS, DAGOBA, ZAKULA, ANNIHILUS

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Jul 212021
 

 

This is one of those days when we risk overwhelming even the most voracious listeners who visit our site. I’ve already posted a round-up of blackened metal and a full album stream, but can’t resist using some unexpected free time to pull together another collection. This one is rife with videos, most of them accompanying advance tracks from forthcoming releases, but there’s another full album stream in the mix as well. There’s a lot of stylistic variety in the mix too.

BASTARÐUR (Iceland)

This first track came as a big surprise (at least to me). It turns out that Bastarður is the crust punk project of Sólstafir singer/guitarist Aðalbjörn Tryggvason, drawing upon the influence of such bands as Entombed, Napalm Death, Terrorizer, Motörhead, and Disfear.

He made Bastarður’s debut album, Satan’s Loss of Son, with drummer Birgir Jónsson (Dimma), and the album also includes guest vocals by Marc Grewe (Morgoth, Insidious Disease) and Prmordial’s Alan Averill, as well as guest guitar leads and soloing by Ragnar Zolberg (who has performed live bass for Sólstafir) and Þráinn Árni Baldvinsson from Skálmöld, among others. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY (PART 2): INSOMNIUM, FIRST FRAGMENT, COGNITIVE, WORMWOOD, DROTT, DESALMADO, KEHLVIN, AETHEREVM, HAMMERHEDD

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Jul 172021
 

 

This may be the only NCS post of the weekend, and even this one is hurried. I have a work meeting this morning. There’s also a celebration planned for tonight that I have to prepare for. What the hell kind of party requires hours of preparation? One that involves speech-making. But it’s still a party, and has all the earmarks of one that’s going to keep me up past midnight, which means a very late awakening on Sunday and some unpredictable degree of mental incapacitation, which is why there may not be a SHADES OF BLACK column tomorrow.

As for today’s metal roundup: I posted a big one yesterday exclusively devoted to new songs with videos, but big as it was it still didn’t exhaust all the good new tracks that surfaced over the last week. And of course it didn’t include the usual Friday flood of new song reveals. A few of my NCS comrades made sure I didn’t overlook what that Friday flood flung up on the beach, and I’ve included a few of their suggestions as well as a few of my own picks that I left out of that video-only roundup yesterday. Coincidentally all the songs included here also came with videos, hence the title of this post.

What’s missing today, for the most part, is my own commentary. I’ll give you a minute to dab the tears from your eyes… and then on we go…. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: BENIGHTED, BEYOND GRACE, THE BREATHING PROCESS, BURN IN HELL, CHOKE, DDENT, DEVIANT PROCESS, GHOROT, PREY FOR NOTHING

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Jul 162021
 

 

As you can see, I had time enough yesterday to make my way through a lot of music that surfaced over the last week or so, and found a lot to like — even more than you’ll see here, because I decided to devote this round-up exclusively to songs with videos and leave the others for another time. The visual approaches are quite wide-ranging and so is the music. I decided to set them out in alphabetical order by band name, and that coincidentally turned out to make for an interesting sonic sequence.

Get popcorn, or whatever else you like to chew on while glued to a screen, and perhaps a preferred intoxicant, then sit back and get ruined or rapt or both.

BENIGHTED (France)

Benighted teamed up with Metal Injection for the premiere of a lyric video for a new digital single, “A Personified Evil,” which includes guest vocals by Francesco Paoli from Fleshgod Apocalypse. As if the song weren’t slaughtering enough without him. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BRILLIANT COLDNESS — “PHANTASM”

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Jul 152021
 

 

Last month we had the pleasure of premiering a mind-blowing song off the new album by the Ukrainian technical death metal band Brilliant Coldness, and today we’re premiering another extraordinary adventure from the album, a song named “Phantasm” that will be released as a single on July 16th. And although we’ll later repeat some of the background info we provided in our first premiere, what we’re going to do now is jump straight to the music.

Brilliant Coldness are the kind of band who don’t waste time. It’s as if there’s a timer ticking down and they’re going to explode if they don’t eject the music as fast as they can and without delay. And so “Phantasm” immediately discharges wild, cavorting riffage that feverishly needles at the listener’s mind over bullet-spitting drumwork and equally febrile and fantastical bass escapades. Continue reading »

SHADES OF SPEED: DUNGEON STEEL, WRAITH, BONEHUNTER, PHANTOM FIRE, SCHIZOPHRENIA

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Jul 132021
 


Bonehunter

 

(Our Norwegian friend and long-standing NCS supporter eiterorm steps up today with a round-up of new music, and we’ll let him give his own explanation of it. [And yes, we were trying to trick him, and yes, it worked.])

“Shades of… wait, what? That’s not a thing! And why is this black metal dude sending speed metal all of a sudden?”

That is how I started my latest e-mail to Islander, which contained a few recommendations about new music. I send him such e-mails from time to time, but I haven’t done so in a little while, because lately I’ve had a bit of a music backlog. So by the time I’ve gotten to the news, they have already been posted on the blog, or they’re no longer “news”. And this blog seems to cover most of what I’d recommend even if I don’t send tips as quickly as usual. It’s almost as if I’m not the only person following great labels like World Terror Committee, Iron Bonehead, Ván, etc…

This time, however, Islander wanted to post my message as a guest post on the blog, for some reason. (I think he’s trying to trick me into writing more posts for the blog.) The e-mail I sent him didn’t quite suffice as a blog post, though, so I decided to add a few more words to what was mostly a list of links to recommended music.

Now, to answer that opening question: I’ve been listening to a lot of speed metal lately, which is why this post is all about the speedy stuff. It’s not at all unlike me to listen to that kind of music, but not so much that it outweighs everything else. And coincidentally, some bits of speed metal news surfaced lately, so I thought I’d round them up here. Well, not all of it is news at this point, but none of it has been featured on the blog, so you’re getting it anyway. Let’s go through them in order of newsiness: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GROZA, APATHY NOIR, EYES OF PERDITION, THUMOS, KAAMOS WARRIORS, KASCK

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Jul 102021
 


Groza

It was one of those weeks when my day job jackhammered me into submission. I fell far behind even in saving links to new songs and videos I might want to check out, and the hundreds of emails we receive every day went mostly un-read. And man, what a week to fall behind in. As people used to say 5 or 10 years ago, there was a metric shit-ton of new releases and song or video premieres.

I did obsessively spend a chunk of time this morning just making lists of links, and felt overwhelmed at the end of that exercise. If I had total control over my life I’d spend most of the rest of the day plowing through all those links and compiling round-ups, or at least one gigantic one. But my day-job project isn’t finished, and I’ve got to turn back to it, even on a fucking weekend. So I’ve just dipped my toe in the ocean, and this is what dripped off of it.

GROZA (Germany)

To begin, I chose a video for “Elegance of Irony“, a song off a new album named The Redemptive End by these Bavarian black metallers. Continue reading »

DIRTY BLACK SUMMER PT. II

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 082021
 

 

(A couple months ago we published (here) a “dirty black summer” playlist compiled and written by Neill Jameson (Krieg, Poison Blood), and now we’re happy that he’s followed that with a second installment of recommendations for your summer listening, presented below.)

Normally for me summer means a change of listening habits to old Swedish death metal, Danzig I-IV, and early Queens of the Stone Age, but this year’s been a little different; seasonal listening hasn’t really come into play for me in the way that it has in years past. I understand there’s a bit of a stigma attached to the idea of seasonal listening anyway but that’s the sort of shit boring people with boring existences have to come up with to shit on people with richer emotional lives. Anyway, if you’ve got a moment here’s another list of things I’m listening to.

You’ll see a batch of Death Kvlt Productions releases in nearly any list I put together these days, which I understand can be a little frustrating if you’re into owning physical releases since the label tends to sell out within minutes only to be flipped to kids who won’t actually listen to the fucking records but post pictures of them incessantly on their social media feeds, almost like a roadmap to letting people know they’re assholes without actually getting to know them, saving everyone a lot of time. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: OBSCURA, DISENTOMB, HAIL SPIRIT NOIR, DIRTY SHIRT, EMPLOYED TO SERVE, GADGET

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Jul 022021
 

 

I’m scurrying. I was all ready to launch an album premiere and review, but the provider of the stream code seems to have been swallowed by the earth. So, to fill the gap I’ve quickly pulled together a bunch of new songs I encountered this morning, most of which come with entertaining videos. I’m pretending I’m a DJ and just inserting some very brief comments before each one, and adding some release info below the clips.

OBSCURA

The tech-death arms race shows no signs of diminishing, and, with manes and drapery blowing in the wind and fingers and limbs flying at blinding speed, Obscura rejoin the melee. Minds will be boggled…. Continue reading »

GONZO’S BEST OF BRUTAL SHIT: JUNE 2021

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 022021
 


Photo by Jørn Steen

(Today we launch what we hope will be a long-recurring column by our contributor Gonzo in which he spotlights favorite releases from the month just ended.)

No matter how much ground we cover at NCS on a daily, weekly, and even monthly basis, there’s always some music lurking in some dark corner of the metal universe that gets overlooked somehow. Some of that is, of course, by design – we don’t typically highlight the bigger names you’ll see in larger publications; we tend to reach farther down the smoldering depths of the metal underbelly for the stuff that doesn’t get as much exposure.

Earlier this year, I tried to keep up with a New Music Friday weekly column that was, unfortunately, all too short-lived. I blame my day job, in which I also write for a living (though it’s much less satisfying than heaping profanity-laced praise upon my favorite music.)

So, given the aforementioned constraints, Islander has been kind enough to green-light my latest idea: A monthly column dedicated to the bands, songs, and albums that I want to highlight from that month, without double-dipping into territory that’s already been covered.

Enough backstory – let’s dig into what kicked ass in June (and late May, since this is post #1.). The lead band was once in a deep, dark corner, but no longer is. Continue reading »

DEATHLY DELIGHTS: CRAVEN IDOL, DECREPISY, SHRIEKING DEMONS, OBRIJ

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Jun 282021
 


Craven Idol

This is another SEEN AND HEARD collection, but I decided to give the title a twist today because I’ve leaned so heavily into death metal with the following four songs. The first three come from forthcoming records, and the fourth seems to be a stand-alone single.

CRAVEN IDOL (UK)

I could have sworn I’d already written something about the first single from the new Craven Idol album, but can’t find any evidence that I did. So, time to make up for lost time. But first, gaze upon the full gatefold cover art created by Eliran Kantor — which is stunning: Continue reading »

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