SEEN AND HEARD: AMORPHIS, YOB, GRAVE SUPERIOR, ZARRAZA, INTERNAL SUFFERING (AND MORE)

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 252018
 


photo credit: Lars Johnson

 

For this mid-week round-up I was again up to my eye-brows in worthy new music to choose from. I decided to do something a little different from usual, combining the formats of these SEEN AND HEARD collections and the occasional OVERFLOWING STREAMS columns. In other words, I’ll begin with some new songs and videos that I’ve introduced with my own descriptive verbiage (beginning with a couple of “exceptions to the rule”), and then followed that with a few more music streams that will somehow have to represent themselves through sound alone, difficult as that may be to imagine. (I also intend to present a rare week-day edition of SHADES OF BLACK later today or tomorrow in order to foist some more recent music on you.)

By the way, did you see that on July 6 Nuclear Blast will be releasing the first new Immortal album (Northern Chaos Gods) since All Shall Fall? It’s just Demonaz and Horgh, of course, but with Peter Tägtgren as session bassist. Even without Abbath in the line-up, I’m kind of excited.

AMORPHIS

I was also kind of excited about the prospect of a new Amorphis album when I first learned of it. That band has been the source of many joyous moments for yours truly in the past, and they put on a hell of an exciting show the only time I’ve seen them live (at Maryland Deathfest). Of course they and I have evolved to the point where their music isn’t as “extreme” as most of what I listen to these days, but when they’re on their game, even in these later days they still produce a thrill. Continue reading »

W.A.I.L.: “WISDOM THROUGH AGONY INTO ILLUMINATION AND LUNACY VOL. II”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Apr 222018
 

 

Out of nowhere, this album appears like a comet blazing in the heavens.

I nearly didn’t bother to listen. On the surface it seemed like a daunting undertaking — one track more than 24 minutes long and a second one almost 35, and a title just as linguistically daunting: Wisdom Through Agony Into Illumination and Lunacy Vol. II. And it seems that this Finnish band’s name is simply a selective acronym for the same collection of words: W.A.I.L. (I might add that the band’s description of the album’s conceptual foundation (a quite articulate one) runs to 461 words.)

However, after receiving recommendations for the album from a couple of esteemed sources (Miloš and eiterorm, the latter of whom I must credit for the “selective acronym” phrase), I girded my loins and began listening — and emerged stunned. “Visionary” seems like too pretentious a term for this, but the magnitude of the ambition and the scale of the achievement are exceptional, and at times astonishing. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: TAPHOS, SARINVOMIT, MATTERHORN, MORTUUS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 202018
 

 

Happy 4/20. For those of you already feeling a little hazy (correction: even hazier than usual), we have one premiere a bit later today that will suit you very well. But I decided to start the day with a selection of new songs that will scrape the haze right off of you with razors. Sorry about that.

TAPHOS

If you’re a lover of hammering and hideous death metal that thrives on upheaval, Come Ethereal Somberness should be on your radar screen. That’s the debut album by the Danish band Taphos that’s set for release on June 8 by Blood Harvest Records and Helter Skelter Productions. I’ve been too harried to listen to all of it yet, but the two songs you can stream on Bandcamp are very, very promising. I featured one of them (“Impending Peril“) at our site months ago, but now there’s a second one: “Thrive In Upheaval“. Continue reading »

DOOM AND DEATH: ZEIT, …UNDER A FULL MOON, SHAMBLES, BURIAL STONE, BISMUTH, LEGION OF ANDROMEDA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Apr 192018
 

 

I’ve been meaning to do this for about a week, and finally found time. I came across all of the following music in the course of surveying new releases for a SEEN AND HEARD round-up here at our putrid site, and thought it would make sense to package them together for extra catastrophe.

The music ranges from catastrophic funeral doom to catastrophic death metal with a heavy doom component, to something doom-centric but less easily describable at the end. I arranged the music in a way that would provide a bit of back-and-forth flow, so your blood doesn’t completely congeal and your heart doesn’t completely slow to a stopping point.

While I was writing this I thought about Andy Synn telling me that he’d come across a metal forum in which NCS was criticized by one or more idiots people for concentrating on “mainstream” metal. Yeah, right. Mainstream this right up your bungholes:

ZEIT

I’ve written frequently about this German band, who’s usual stock-in-trade is an amalgam of sludge and black metal (and some other ingredients). But for their latest EP, null., they decided to give the funeral-doom treatment to two of their previously released songs, and I’ll be damned, it turns out they’re just as strong in this other genre as they are in their main line. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 4): ABSTRACTER, OPERATION NEPTUNE SPEAR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

 

And with this I bring to a close today’s four-part round-up of new and newly discovered music. Unlike the pairings in the first three installments of this column, there’s not much that ties these two together, other than my own liking for them.

ABSTRACTER

I liked the hell out of this Oakland band’s last album, 2015’s Wound Empire, so much so that their new one, Cinereous Incarnate, has been high on my eagerly-anticipated list. I had been holding off writing anything about it until there was a full song that I could share (which is supposed to become available sometime next week), but what the hell. I might as well make sure this is on your radar, because it has the earmarks of something stupendous — and at least I have a video album trailer created by Chariot of Black Moth if you haven’t caught it yet. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 3): OXYGEN DESTROYER, BESTIAL SIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

 

I’m continuing today’s four-part round-up of new and newly underground sounds with two more selections — two bands widely separated in geographic terms but both very adept at putting a megawatt charge straight into your spine.

OXYGEN DESTROYER

I first encountered the music of Seattle’s Oxygen Destroyer early last fall, when their single “Vanquished by the Unrelenting Devastation of the Celestial Behemoth” sucked the air out of my lungs with the speed, ferocity, and obliterating power of its assault. As I reported then, they were at work on a debut album, and now it’s out, having been released on April 5th. Its title is Bestial Manifestations of Malevolence and Death, and it’s one hell of a rocket ride. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): SECTIONED, VOCES MAGICAE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 172018
 

 

We shall now have a block of Scottish noise.

SECTIONED

Sectioned have been releasing singles from their new album Annihilated, each one with its own separate photographic cover portraying images of decay and abandonment. They’re up to three singles now, the most recent of which is “Release“.

The appearance of these songs has been sort of like landmines going off. You’re walking along, minding your own business, and the next thing you know pieces of you are rocketing in all directions, enveloped in obliterating sound. “Release” is a particularly explosive experience — electrifying drumwork; punishing riffs you can feel in your bones; crazed string flurries; maniacal vocals. It savagely ravages, brutally pounds, and sprays blood like a hellish firehose. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): VERBERIS, NOVAE MILITIAE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 172018
 

 

Let’s take a quick tour through the underground, shall we? Just to see what kind of carnage is happening down there right now, where the sun don’t shine and no one sleeps easy in their beds.

I collected music from 8 bands for this round-up. Normally I would have put all of it together in one humongous post. Today I decided to split it into four parts and scatter the parts around today in between the other things we’ve planned, which include a review and a bunch of premieres).

VERBERIS

If you have any kind of anxiety disorder, extreme fear of the unknown, clinical depression, or deep-seated paranoia, you probably shouldn’t listen to this first song. It’s such a brutally grim, tension-creating, tension-ratcheting, frightful experience that you’d better have your emotional moorings firmly in place before going into it. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CRAFT, OVATE, NICK VASALLO, JØTNARR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 112018
 

 

I’ve been away from home since last Friday morning, mainly working on the things I do when I’m not throwing music at your heads at NCS, but having some fun here and there. I shudder to think what havoc the loris horde have wrecked at the NCS compound while I’ve been gone. I’ll find out tonight; I’ll be leaving for the Philadelphia airport, bound for Seattle, as soon as I post this hurried collection.

The huge list of new songs I had created before leaving Seattle torments me; I’ve grown more tormented looking at what popped up in my e-mail and web-surfing last night and this morning. Just too damned much intriguing metal being vomited forth every day. This is a tiny fraction of what I found most recently.

CRAFT

White Noise and Black Metal is the name of the new album by the long-running Swedish black metal cult Craft, their first one in seven years. The release date, through Season of Mist, is June 22nd. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THE KONSORTIUM, VARATHRON, DEATHWARDS, FISTULA, HOMEWRECKER, THE EVER LIVING, MUN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 292018
 

 

Here we are just past hump day for this week, and I have a big mountainous hump of music to choose from for this round-up. Much has been left on the cutting room floor, but this particular collection of recent songs and videos by seven bands felt like a good musical trip, one with changing moods and varied forms of intensity, and of course I quite enjoyed all of it. If you find just one thing that gets you excited, then my time here will have been well spent.

THE KONSORTIUM

“Who Is The Konsortium?” That was the title of a post I wrote back in May of 2011 after coming across a striking track named “Lik Ulven” by a mysterious Norwegian group whose line-up included guitarist Teloch (from Mayhem and Nigingr) but was otherwise masked and shrouded in secrecy. I still didn’t know who was in the band when I reviewed their self-titled debut album the following month, but the music spoke for itself in quite charismatic tones.

Roughly a year later, still masked, The Konsortium played Inferno Fest in Oslo, and yesterday I enjoyed re-reading Andy Synn’s comments about their performance: Continue reading »

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