SEEN AND HEARD: THY CATAFALQUE, VOLTUMNA, TUSKAR, DRAEPT, MONOLITHE, COMANDO PRAETORIO

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Oct 242019
 

 

We all have coping strategies for problems we can’t solve. You know you can’t make the problem go away, so you just… cope… the best you can.

One of my problems, which I’m sure you get tired hearing me whine about, is that I can’t keep up with all the new metal that emerges every day. I try to find time every day to make lists of what I want to check out, but am rarely able to listen to even a significant fraction of the entries.

One of my coping mechanisms for this problem, when I actually have time to do some listening, is just to focus on what I added to the top of the list most recently, and just make myself temporarily ignore how much is seething underneath — which is how I picked the songs in today’s collection.

THY CATAFALQUE

You can tell you’re getting close to the end of the year when you start finding music from releases that are planned for 2020. I’m pretty sure the song I’ve chosen to begin today’s collection is the first excerpt I’ve selected for a round-up that comes from a 2020 album (although the second one is just a bit further down this page). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: LORD MANTIS, ABIGAIL WILLIAMS, STRIGOI, PLOUGHSHARE

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Oct 192019
 

 

It’s been another messed-up week for yours truly. My usual routines have been flipped upside-down by events in my personal life, and I’m not sure when they’ll be right-side-up again. As with the week before last, new-music round-ups were a casualty. I did manage to find enough free time this morning to compile this one.

LORD MANTIS

Five years after Death Mask, Lord Mantis has revived and recorded a new album named Universal Death Church. The line-up this time consisted of a reunion of vocalist/bassist Charlie Fell and guitarist/vocalist Andrew Markuszewski, joined again by guitarist Ken Sorceron of Abigail Williams, and by new drummer Bryce Butler in place of the late Bill Bumgardner. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GRUZJA, VILLAINOUS TEMPLE, CRYPTIC BROOD, CONSTELLATIA, DIPLOID

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Oct 122019
 

 

It’s been a hell of a week, and I do mean HELL. I’ll spare you the details, because no one likes a whiner (except the core supporters of our current President), but mishaps befalling a loved one and demands by my fucking day job have interfered (again) with my NCS time. These round-ups are always the first casualties when such things happen, so I thought I’d use this relatively placid Saturday morning to catch up a little.

I picked the following songs a couple of days ago after a rare opportunity this past week to do a bit of listening. Many other new songs have come out since then, adding to the long list that already existed, but I decided not to listen to anything else new and just get this done.

GRUZJA

Jeszcze Nie Mamy Na Was Pomysłu is the name of the second album by the Polish black metal band Gruzja, whose line-up includes members of Furia, Mentor, and Biesy (among other groups). It’s set for release (CD and digital) on October 22nd by Godz Ov War Productions, but the whole album is already streaming on Bandcamp. Google Translate tells us that the album’s title, in English, is “We don’t have an idea for you yet”. But Google Translate has a habit of mangling its translations of the Polish language, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in that rendition.

When I began the process of selecting music for this round-up, I only found one song from the album (“800 ZŁ”), which grabbed me in a head-lock, and only this morning discovered that the whole record had been launched on Bandcamp. Consequently, my impressions of the album as a whole may be a bit mangled, too, and have certainly been rendered hastily.
Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SARTEGOS, AVSLUT, GOLDEN CORE, TOOTHGRINDER, ZARRAZA

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Oct 072019
 

 

I took the weekend off for a short road trip with my spouse. If I hadn’t been in such a hurry on Friday morning to get out of town I might have thought to mention that, so people wouldn’t get the wrong idea about why we didn’t post anything over the weekend. I didn’t listen to any new metal over the weekend either (my wife has no use for it), at least not until after we got home last night. And I didn’t have enough time to make much of a dent in my listening list after the return home — but enough time to find the new songs you’ll find below, all of which are IMHO great.

SARTEGOS

My introduction to this Galician black/death band came through their 2013 EP, As Fontes Do Negrume (“The Origin Of Darkness”), which demonstrated the band’s impressive ability to combine exotic melody and harrowing ferocity. The conviction only grew stronger three years later when they participated in a split release (Resvrrezionespiritval) with Ysengrin, which Semjaza of Thy Darkened Shade included in his 2016 year-end list for our site, with praise. Early last year we premiered their next release, a split with Balmog, which only strengthened the attraction to their music.

Now, at last, Sartegos has a debut album on the way: On November 29th Blood Harvest Records and I, Voidhanger Records will jointly release O Sangue Da Noite. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS: SNĚŤ, RATTENFÄNGER, VACIVUS

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Sep 292019
 


Sněť

 

I think I’ve figured out what I want to do with today’s usual SHADES OF BLACK column, but before I get to that I couldn’t resist compiling the following stupendous songs by three monstrously good death metal bands. They just seem to belong together. (And because Saturday night carousing led to a slow start to Sunday morning, it may be tomorrow before you’ll see SOB.)

SNĚŤ

In the Czech language Sněť seems to mean gangrene, and that’s the name chosen by the quintet from Prague whose debut demo I’ve chosen to begin the slaughtering. It was released as a name-your-price download in April, and I finally learned about it (recently) thanks to a recent recommendation from Rennie (starkweather), who continues to be a reliable source of great discoveries.

There’s not a lot of music on the Sněť demo, just two compact tracks, the first of which is an instrumental, but man, do they make a titanic impact. Continue reading »

OFF THE BEATEN PATH: STRIGOI, PIERRE NOIR, ALFAHANNE, DOLORE, HELLHOOKAH

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Sep 212019
 

 

I had originally planned to post most of this collection (all but the opening song) nearly two week ago. I obviously didn’t get it finished then, and other obligations and ideas have kept pushing it side in favor of other posts since then. As the days have passed, a couple hundred other interesting songs have surfaced, from which a more “hot off the presses” round-up might have been assembled. But I decided just to pull this one off the shelf instead, brush off the light coating of dust, and present it on this Saturday.

In different ways, the second through fifth songs in this collection are off the usual beaten paths here at NCS, different in different ways from the kinds of music we usually focus on. The first one, which is more recent, is more in the main line of our usual interests, but I’m so excited by it that I didn’t want to defer recommending it. It’s also surprising, and not completely out of place in a post devoted to deviations from the mean.

STRIGOI

It’s not an overstatement, at least among those of us who toil at NCS, that whatever groups Greg Mackintosh becomes involved in (in addition to Paradise Lost) will be worth checking out, sooner rather than later. With Vallenfyre now ended, he has turned to Strigoi, a group he created with the aid of Extreme Noise Terror and Vallenfyre bassist Chris Casket, and so far, no one else aside from drummer Waltteri Väyrynen, who did studio session work on Strigoi’s first album. That band name, we’re told, refers to “the troubled spirits in Romanian mythology who could rise from the grave and assume an entirely different form”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HOUR OF PENANCE, EXHUMED, CREPUSCLE, XOTH, HIGH COMMAND

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Sep 122019
 


Hour of Penance

 

Much as I hate to do this, I’m going to resort to the format I used last Saturday when I was similarly pressed for time — just serve up some of the new songs and videos I’d like to recommend from what I’ve encountered this week, sans verbiage from me (except in one case). I’m probably going to do the same thing tomorrow, because I have a long list of recommendations.

My shortage of time is going to persist from now through the weekend, thanks to travel, meetings, and nose-to-the-grindstone efforts required by that thing that pays all the bills around here (my fucking day job). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: HIDEOUS DIVINITY, CATTLE DECAPITATION, NILE, PEDOPHILE PRIESTS, HELLRUNE

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Sep 072019
 

 

I’m always reluctant to do what I’m doing in this post, i.e., just inserting videos and song streams without any commentary.  Trying to describe music I want to recommend, and to explain why I’m recommending it, is a continuing challenge, but I must admit it’s also fun for me (and cathartic to get my feelings about the music  off my chest). Unfortunately for me, if not for you, I don’t have time for that today. Still, I think there might be some value in the filtering/selection-process itself, and in alerting people to things they might have overlooked on their own.

Even though I’m keeping quiet, I hope you’ll feel free to share your own reactions in the Comments. And with that, here we go… Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: KONKHRA, GATECREEPER, THE HOLEUM, TYRANT GOATGALDRAKONA, ATAVISTIK DEATH POSE

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Sep 042019
 

 

Sometimes there’s a through-line or organizing principle of some kind in the selections I make for these round-ups. Sometimes it’s just what the category tag says, the one I chose almost 10 years ago for posts like this one — Random Fucking Music — just a random scattering of things I’ve happened upon and enjoy.  Today, I do think there’s a through-line: Almost all of the following tracks are neck-wreckers, though I’ve put one track in the middle of the run that’s less brutishly head-moving and more progressively dynamic (though I think you’ll want to move your head to that one as well).

KONKHRA

Formed in 1989, the Danish death metal band Konkhra had quite a run, releasing six studio albums, a live album, and a handful of other shorter releases from 1990 through 2009 — and then the machine ground to a halt. However, now ten years later, Konkhra have revived, and if Metal-Archives is to be believed, the current line-up dates back to the recordings of the early and mid-90s. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS (PART 2): ORTHODOXY, PANDEMONIUM, NEKROSITY

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Aug 302019
 

 

We’re concluding a round-up of new death metal we began here earlier today. All of the following songs come from albums set for release in the coming weeks.

ORTHODOXY

This first selection, “Flame of Primordial Essence“, is one of nine tracks on Novus Lux Dominus, the debut album by the Spanish band Orthodoxy, whose line-up includes members of Domains, Profundis Tenebrarum, and Whoredom. It’s a successor to the band’s 2015 demo, Shaarimoth, which we praised here. Continue reading »

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