SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY (PART 1): GAAHLS WYRD, IMPERISHABLE, MY DEMENTIA, ORTHODOX, A FLOCK NAMED MURDER, DISPYT, FAMILY GARDEN

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Apr 122025
 


Gaahls WYRD – photo by Jørn Veberg

(written by Islander)

It’s good to have friends. Friends can give you useful advice. Sometimes friends can also give you advice that makes you think, “I wish they hadn’t said that.” Case in point:

Since the middle of last week my wife has been 1,100 miles from where we live visiting her favorite sister. Home alone, I spent way more than the usual amount of time yesterday getting ready for this column. I listened to bits and pieces of 30 new releases, most of them singles and some of them EPs or albums. I picked 10 of them for today that I thought provided a good amount of variety. I even arranged them in a way I thought made sense.

I was so happy that I shared the list with my old friends Andy and DGR. Between the two of them they then pointed out 4 more new songs that I’d missed, all from known culprits we all like. Fuck me, what to do? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MIDNIGHT, ALIGN, FURNACE, STREGA, ARV, FLUISTERAARS

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Apr 052025
 

(written by Islander)

I don’t have a “physically active lifestyle” these days, yet some nights my body acts like I just ran a marathon. Last night was one of those. I conked out and woke up more than 9 hours later. Not even the part of my brain that always nags me, even asleep, about the need to get this Saturday column in shape could resist the bear-like compulsion to hibernate.

So, a very late start today, made later by the time needed to overcome grogginess. Still groggy, even after reading godawful global news stories while inhaling a cocktail of caffeine and nicotine, I glanced at the godawful big NCS in-box. Here’s the first message I saw:

Please take a moment out of your day to listen to the new track from Casa Mondo “Same Words.” It is a taste of Afro Reggae Summer Niceness and would give your followers a warm fuzzy feeling 🙂

I nearly wrote back to ask how in the world we got on this person’s list. We must be on many lists that have zero to do with what we do, because I see dozens of e-mails like this every day from musically remote planets (remote from our own ugly little asteroid).

Of course I didn’t write back, but I thought, the only warm fuzzy feeling our followers might want from music at NCS would be a feeling of fungal infection. And “niceness”? I think our definition of “nice” is not what Casa Mondo had in mind. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SERPENTES, GOLEM OF GORE, CRUST, ANZV, CAGED BASTARD, SKUGGOR

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Apr 042025
 

(written by Islander)

I keep an electronic calendar and a paper calendar of premieres I agree to run for NCS. Belt and suspenders, as people use to say before suspenders went the way of the Dodo. But sometimes my pants fall down anyway, like when the plans of a band or label change and I’m being distracted by something else when I see that and then forget to change either calendar.

That’s what happened today. I had an album premiere on the calendar, but when I went hunting for the “assets” for the premiere I saw the e-mail chain where a schedule change had happened. So I found myself with time I didn’t expect to have today, and decided to make this roundup of new songs and videos as a bit of a head-start on the weekend roundups. My selection strategy was to pick the newest things I saw that I liked this morning. Hope you enjoy what I chose.

(In case you’re wondering, I do have assistants in my NCS work, but mainly they delete things I’ve written and introduce typos by walking across the keyboard. They’re less useful in keeping my pants up.) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: OBSIDIAN TONGUE, HATE, OBSTRUKTION, JORDSJUK, APPLE OF BASILISK, SERIAL HAWK, CONTEMPLATION

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Mar 292025
 

(written by Islander)

I didn’t expect I would be able to pull this Saturday column together, or the usual one tomorrow either. I thought my spouse and I would be leaving home very early today for a weekend trip. I even prepared a short notice to post this morning saying there would be no music at our site this weekend. But for reasons there’s no need to go into, we canceled those travel plans late yesterday.

That left me flat-footed this morning. I mean, I’m usually still scrambling on Saturday mornings to get this column figured out and finished, but today was set up to be an even bigger scramble because I’d given no thought to which songs and videos I might include. I had done a pretty good job over the last week of saving links to potential choices as I saw news about them — 30 or 40 links! — but no way could I check out most of those.

So, aside from picking a couple because the band names made me feel I’d be in good hands, sheer impulse ruled the rest. It’s a sign of how healthy metal is these days that making choices by impulse still turned out to be good choices. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: AMENRA, NECHOCHWEN, BLOOD CHARIOT, STONE CROWN, BLOOD MONOLITH, THE GREAT SEA, WARFIELD, SLIDHR, JACK QUARTET

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Mar 222025
 

(written by Islander)

As usual, I had an enormous number of things to choose from for today’s collection. As usual, I had no preconceived idea how to do it. I just put one foot in front of the other, stumbling along until I ran out of time.

As I sit here and look at what I chose, I see that I defaulted to some old favorites but also went with debuts from some bands I’d never heard of. (I also siphoned off a few that will make good shades for the usual blackening of the Sabbath tomorrow.) I also added a couple of live-performance videos at the end, one of which is a genuine brain-scrambler. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: RALE, MONDOCANE, JADE, MINUTTI HULLUUTEEN, SLUDGE KEEPER, THAT GODFORSAKEN WRETCH

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Mar 152025
 

(written by Islander)

I had an attack of spring fever this morning. It’s definitely not springtime weather here in the Puget Sound (it’s quite cool and wet, the wind is howling, and if that keeps up our power will inevitably go out). I just didn’t want to do anything that seemed remotely like work, and compiling these roundups is remotely like work.

But the old obsession not to let any days go by at NCS without spreading the word about music eventually won out over laziness, though it may not win out over wind, and so I will attempt to be not too windy in what I write.

I thought about leading with some of the bigger names who have recently released new music in an effort to draw people toward more obscure names in today’s collection (I was thinking about the likes of Cancer, Gaahls Wyrd), Benediction, and Rivers of Nihil) but so many of the more obscure names are so appealing to me that I decided to just get right to them. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MÜTTERLEIN, CARONTE, CAUSTIC WOUND, AUSTERE, KORSAKOV, WAR MAGIC

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Mar 142025
 

(written by Islander)

I had a narrow opening in today’s schedule for a roundup of new songs and videos, and not a lot of time with which to fill it, so I won’t waste the time with further introductory remarks. We’ll get right to it, beginning with:

MÜTTERLEIN (France)

Ever since seeing the recent announcement of a new Mütterlein album a group of metal-loving friends and I have been greedily rubbing our blood-stained hands (contrary to rumor we don’t have talons and the blood is from paper cuts). The rubbing has become more intense since hearing the album’s first single (not that kind of rubbing, get your minds out of the gutter). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: NITE, MAGUS LORD, DISPYT, CABINET, CHIAROSCURO, POLISH, BANK MYNA

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Mar 082025
 

(written by Islander)

I can’t think of any reason to criticize Bandcamp for renewing their Bandcamp Fridays in 2025. Unless I’m missing something, it’s good for bands and labels that use the platform, not only because it lets them keep more of their sales revenue but also because it incentivizes fans to spend.

But it does make my life harder, because in weeks ending with one of those days the volume of new music swells significantly. Even in more normal weeks I can’t listen to everything I’m interested in. That’s an even greater impossibility in weeks like this past one.

But of course I did make some picks. Three of the picks are live videos that I’ve included at the end without much commentary, but the bands’ names ought to be inducement enough. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BEHEMOTH, CYTOTOXIN, FALLUJAH, GHOST

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Mar 072025
 

(written by Islander)

Only five days ago Bandcamp announced that it would continue Bandcamp Fridays in 2025, with the first one happening today. Before that, it wasn’t clear that they would continue, so it caught most of us by surprise. But word obviously spread very fast. What was already unfolding as a packed week for new music became a typhoon over the last few days. I was already agonizing about what the hell to do for tomorrow’s usual SEEN AND HEARD roundup, but now I feel like someone caught on the beach as a towering tidal wave rushes ashore.

Bandcamp Fridays are always an ideal time to spread the word about new music, but because of other duties around here I rarely have enough time to pull something together until the day after. I really don’t have much time for it today either, but felt like I needed to do something to make tomorrow’s task even a bit less overwhelming.

What I decided to do is a bit out of character for myself and the site as a whole: focusing exclusively on some of the bigger names in metal (or in one case, metal-adjacent). We don’t ignore the big names around here, as long as what they’re doing is good, but we often use them as a way of luring people into music from bands whose names are much more obscure. If I’d had more time, that’s what I would have done with this small roundup. It was just easier and faster to stick with these four.

But of course, none of these four new songs and videos would be here if I didn’t think they were worth recommending. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THE WEEK THAT WAS, AND MUSIC FROM NINE BANDS

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Mar 012025
 


Marcus Larson (1825–1864) Ocean at Night with Burning Ship (detail)

(written by Islander)

It has been a week in hell. I don’t mean the stuff you’ve seen every day in the national news reports, including the vile treatment of Volodymyr Zelenskyy in the White House yesterday (I’m addressing the 3 of you who can still bear to read the national news), but hellish events closer to home that impacted our putrid precious site.

Specifically, beginning last Sunday night and carrying into Monday the Puget Sound area of Washington where I live got walloped by lightning storms, heavy rain, and very high winds. Windstorms are fairly common during the winter months here, and the results are predictable: In the heavily forested island where I live, trees fall, limbs break off, and they hammer themselves into the power lines, all of which are strung above ground close to trees. And pop! The power goes out!

Which it did in the early hours of last Monday. And when the power goes out here, so does the internet, because my ISP’s local servers and routing stations apparently don’t have generators or human beings close by to keep them going. And when the internet goes out for everyone in my neighborhood (and this time for nearly all of the 30,000 people who live on the island), the strength of cell phone signals drops to borderline non-existent. I guess because everyone is trying to use their phones in place of the stricken net service. Continue reading »

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