DEATH RITUALS (PART 1): KRISIUN, ABYSMAL TORMENT, BLOODPHEMY, BURIAL SHRINE

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Jul 242018
 

 

This is basically a SEEN AND HEARD round-up of new music, but it dawned on me that a big portion of what I’d chosen either fits under the big umbrella of death metal or draws strength from the worship of death, so I’ve gone with a post title I’ve occasionally used before. And I picked so many new songs of this nature that I had to break it up into two parts. The second one will be up tomorrow, because we’ve cut a pretty wide swath through your head with new music today already.

KRISIUN

The cover art painted by Eliran Kantor for Krisiun’s new album, Scourge of the Enthroned, is so damned cool, and therefore it’s no surprise that Krisiun and Century Media chose a lyric video featuring the album art as a method for premiering the album’s first advance track, “Demonic III“. Continue reading »

QUICK HITS: SENZAR AND ONTOGENY

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 202018
 

 

I really wanted to end this week with a big fat juicy round-up, overstuffed with new songs and videos that I’ve latched onto over the past week but couldn’t cram into other round-ups over the last two days. Alas, I’ve run out of time. But rather than just scuttle morosely out of sight, head down and small tears dribbling down my cheeks, I thought I’d at least give you a couple of quick hits.

SENZAR

Today the Irish band Senzar, which rose from the ashes of Coldwar and embraced a name reportedly based upon the works of different philosophers, including Ernst Cassirer and Russian occultist Helena Blavatsky, released their first EP, which has their name on it but has no title, through Hostile Media.

After seeing a press release I had made a note a few days ago to check out a new video the band had released, but it wasn’t until receiving encouragement from starkweather’s Rennie today that I did so, and then moved from there to the EP as a whole. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): SCORCHED, PREZIR, BOSSE-DE-NAGE, ROTTING CHRIST

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Jul 192018
 

 

Continuing where I left off in Part 1 of today’s round-up (and I do plan on yet another round-up tomorrow, by the way), I’ve selected four more tracks that really can’t be grouped in any kind of logical order, and there’s really almost nothing that any of the songs have in common other than their appeal to yours truly. I’ve again kind of up-ended my usual tendency to move from better-known names to lesser-known names.

SCORCHED

This Delaware band is certainly better-known than they used to be, due in part to 20 Buck Spin’s release of Excavated For Evisceration earlier this year, which compiled the band’s non-LP material in one place, but they still need to become a lot better-known because THEY’RE SO GOOD! I have a feeling that will happen when the same label releases their new album on September 28th. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): UNIFORM, ANAAL NATHRAKH, VREID

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  13 Responses »
Jul 192018
 

 

Well, my fine fiends, yesterday was a very interesting day (and no, I’m not talking about the bizarro-world mind-fuck of American politics at its zenith of gob-smacking grotesquery). I’m talking about the flood of new metal, at least one wave of which proved to be crashingly controversial, and I’ll get to that.

Damned hard to figure out what to shovel into this round-up, which is a big reason why it’s so voluminous, but really not voluminous enough even though it comes in multiple parts today. As usual, I just let my mind percolate a bit, and trusted that whatever twisted thing lurks within it would make the right choices.

UNIFORM

I have a tendency to organize these posts in order from bigger names to lesser names, and sometimes because my subconscious mentation perceives a certain pleasing flow from one to the next, but this time I’m starting with a song by Uniform because last night it pounced on me like a wolf appearing in Aisle 9 in the grocery store — about that surprising, and about that effective in triggering a fight or flight response. The video is a mind-fuck too. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOID ROT — “ANCIENT SEED”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 182018
 

 

Consumed By Oblivion is both the name of the debut EP by the Minneapolis band Void Rot and a synopsis of the atmosphere created by the band’s titanic, soul-consuming brand of death/doom. When the title track surfaced earlier this month, it seemed to capture the sensation of being swallowed by a cold, hungry void and allowed to slowly rot. Massive and monstrous, heavy enough to crack bedrock and sickeningly morbid enough to sink all your hopes, it also transformed into a spine-shaking, head-hammering, skin-scissoring marauder, laced with buzzing riffs and squalling leads that sounded like pure evil.

That was a tantalizing (and mortifying) teaser for this new record, and today we have another, as we premiere a song called “Ancient Seed” in advance of the EP’s joint release on August 3rd by Everlasting Spew and Sentient Ruin. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PLAGUEWIELDER, AWAKENING SUN, HADAL MAW, ÆVANGELIST

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Jul 182018
 

 

Here are four songs, two of which come with videos, from forthcoming albums that I’m pretty excited about. A slew of other songs have appeared since late last week that I’m also excited about, and no doubt more will appear today. The thorny garden of metal is riotously fecund. We poor harvesters with bleeding fingers and bleeding ears can’t keep up, try as we might.

PLAGUEWIELDER

Ohio’s Plaguewielder made an eye-opening debut with their 2015 album Succumb To Ash on Dullest Records. They followed that last year with a single named “Writhing In Mental Torment“, which I had some positive things to say about, and just a few days ago they released another new single, “In Depths of Cold Hell“, which is a prelude to a new album entitled Surrender To the Void that will be released on August 12th. Continue reading »

TOURISM: BEHEMOTH AND OBSCURA ANNOUNCE HEADLINING NORTH AMERICAN TOURS (WITH SOME VERY IMPRESSIVE SUPPORT)

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Jul 162018
 

 

I’ll make this quick:

First, within the last hour or so, Behemoth announced a North American tour (Ecclesia Diabolica America 2018) with support from At the Gates and Wolves in the Throne Room. It begins on October 20th in Phoenix and ends on November 24th in Los Angeles, and includes stops in Montreal, Toronto, Calgary, and Edmonton, as well as 18 U.S. States. Here’s the current schedule: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (HGD EDITION): DEICIDE, CARNATION, BAEST, INNUMERABLE FORMS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jul 162018
 

 

Editor’s Note: NCS patron HGD, who has been kind enough to send us recommendations of new music in the past, prepared the following round-up of new music, which we’re presenting here with his own introductory comments, and with our thanks. As he wrote, “The overarching theme here is death metal of the old school variety, but having said that there are still significant differences from song to song.”

DEICIDE

Deicide are the highest profile group amongst the bunch included here so it’s best to start with them. NCS has already covered the announcement of their new album Overtures of Blasphemy, due out September 14 on Century Media. The first single from that album, “Excommunicated“, was released last Friday. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BONEHUNTER, HATE, HORRENDOUS, INFERNAL COIL, MESARTHIM, SOREPTION

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Jul 132018
 

 

This is obviously a big end-of-week round-up. Today the size of the round-up will be in inverse proportion to the volume of words in my descriptions of the music, because I have three premieres to write and there would have been more except I exercised some rare restraint and started saying No.

What is it about this day that makes it so popular for premieres and releases? Could it be that there is only one other Friday in 2018 like it (and that one occurred three months ago)?

I arranged the music in alphabetical order by band name because I couldn’t think of a more logical way to stitch these sounds together.

BONEHUNTER

This time Bonehunter chose to keep the rampaging bear’s penis less prominent on the magnificent cover of their new album (rendered by Joe Petagno), to the disappointment of some and the relief of others (as long as they don’t look to closely at that tongue). But how does the music on Children of the Atom compare to the tunes on this Finnish band’s more prominently erect last record, Sexual Panic Human Machine? Continue reading »

WHERE DOOM MEETS DEATH (PART 2): ORGAN, TEMPLE OF ABANDONMENT, DISPIRIT, DESCHAIN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 112018
 

 

On Monday of this week I began a two-part collection of music whose title was intended to have a dual meaning. Some of the music I chose was recognizably death/doom metal. Other tracks had very little to do with death metal, yet death loomed large in their atmosphere, even envisioning the extinction of all human life.

In this concluding part of the post, doom is still (in widely differing degrees) a through-line in the music, and visions of extinction still uncoil in the mind as the sounds flow through it. But as in Part 1, there’s considerable variety in the music.

I’m indebted to HGD, a faithful reader and a frequent source of recommendations, for urging the last three of these selections upon us, and for allowing me to use his own words as brief introductions to the streams. But we’ll begin with one choice of my own.

ORGAN

Eterno, the new three-track EP by this Italian band presents enormous contrasts of sound and mood. It is usually slow, and as heavy as anything I’ve heard this year — heavy enough to shatter granite boulders as if they were tiny brittle pine cones leached of moisture by the sun… massive, mountainous, megalithic music, and equally immense in the scale of its bleakness. Continue reading »

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