CONTRASTS: SAND WITCH, OSI AND THE JUPITER, HRVST, EINVIGI, BENEATH THE SOD

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Sep 182017
 

 

I had a busier than usual weekend that left me little time for NCS, and so I wasn’t able to compile a SHADES OF BLACK post yesterday. I did spend some time here and there exploring new music, and it occurred to me that the collection you’re about to hear would make for an interesting playlist to start the week.

I don’t know whether you will find this as interesting as I did, but I chose these songs and the order in which you’ll hear them in order to juxtapose very different sounds, alternating between extremely heavy, harrowing music and music whose emotional effect is more sublime, or more uplifting. (Thanks to Miloš for links that led to most of these discoveries.)

SAND WITCH

I chose to lead off with the Vancouver sludge/funeral-doom band Sand Witch, because the first song from their new demo (“The Cushion of Roosevelt’s Wheelchair“) itself provides a dramatic contrast that kind of encapsulates what I tried to do in arranging everything in this post. It moves from a slow, reverberating, elegiac guitar instrumental that’s beautiful and mesmerizing… to a shockingly heavy and abrasive apocalypse of sound, also slow, but soul-shuddering in its brute intensity. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: KARTIKEYA, IN-DEFILADE, DOM ZŁY, GASSED, NIHIL EYES, THREAT SIGNAL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 152017
 

 

It’s another Friday, and what are people feeling? No one answer, I’m sure. Some people are looking forward to a blow-out Friday night or just a soft weekend to clear the head. Others have jobs that will just keep on surging through the weekend, so no relief in sight (but maybe better-than-average tip hauls). And others, out of work, are just experiencing another day of hard-scrabbling and gloom.

For me, I’m looking ahead at a wedding of one of my wife’s nieces on our property, with the bride wearing a sword, and Samoan blessings before and after the ceremony, and great volumes of Mexican food and tequila, and people playing Magic after the vows have been exchanged. It’s going to be different, but I have a feeling it will be a blast.

Beyond that, I’m feeling like playing you some metal, just skimming the surface of what I’ve collected over the last 48 hours, and maybe continuing the round-up tomorrow if I get going before all the visiting family members crawl out of bed.

KARTIKEYA

On October 19th, 10 years to the day after the release of their debut album, the Russian band Kartikeya will deliver unto us a new album named Samudra via Apathia Records. We are told that the release date is also “27 Ashvina 5119 of Kali Yuga, the holy day of Diwali, on the day of the Victory of Good over Evil, by the fire of the divine light”. And we are further told that it signifies “the decimal foundation of the Hindu universe and the symbolism of Trimurti – the three highest creator-gods, the ternary power of creation, preservation and destruction”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AT THE GATES, PERIHELION, NEKRASOV, FORGOTTEN TOMB, CLOAK, PLAGUE CROSS, LARES, BILLY BOY IN POISON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 132017
 

We’ve arrived at the middle of the work week and I find myself in the mood to round up and share with you a couple of news items and six new songs, two of which are accompanied by videos that are well above average. I’ll cut this introduction short and just dive right in…

AT THE GATES

Three years ago At the Gates returned with their first new studio album in 19 years. The reception seems to have stoked the fires even further, because they’ve written 11 new songs that they plan to begin recording soon. And according to their announcement from earlier this week, they are feeling “more inspired than perhaps ever before”. They also allege that the new record will be “by far the most comprehensive album of the band to date, and will span all the way across the different elements of the band’s sound”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SPECTRAL VOICE, RITES OF DAATH, DRUJ, PNEUMA HAGION, FUTURE TERROR, COMPLETE FAILURE, THE FIVE HUNDRED, PROFUNDUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Sep 112017
 

 

Up to a point, you may detect a pattern in the arrangement of the music I’ve selected for this eight-band Monday round-up.

The new Spectral Voice song put me in a certain frame of mind, and that influenced the next three selections after it (my ever-burgeoning list of good new things to write about is so mammoth that I look wherever I can for inspiration to overcome the agony of having to make choices). And then I made a radical change of course for the fifth item, and it in turn inclined me toward the sixth one.

And then we have a video for a song that’s off on a different tangent that was inspired by the writing of our own Grant Skelton, followed by a finisher that’s off on another tangent again (but has a connection to something that precedes it in this collection).

SPECTRAL VOICE

The debut album by this Colorado band (with the same line-up as Blood Incantation, apart from the drummer) is entitled Eroded Corridors Of Unbeing. Based on their previous releases (a sequence of demos and splits) and the staggering live performance I witnessed at California Deathfest in 2016, this album has been on my personal list of most eagerly anticipated 2017 releases for a long time. It’s now set for release by Dark Descent on October 13. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: COMMUNIC, EXHUMED, THE KENNEDY VEIL, ORIGIN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 072017
 

 

This will be a very busy day at our site. We’ve posted one review already, we have another one coming, and we have four (!) very good premieres lined up. But thanks to DGR, we also have a brief round-up of new songs and videos that have recently appeared elsewhere — to which I’ve added one news item at the front end, one wisely suggested by my comrade Mr. Synn. So, you’ll have to tolerate a bit of my verbiage for the first item, and then I’ll turn you over to the words and selections of DGR.

COMMUNIC

This has been a banner year for metal album covers, and Berlin-based Eliran Kantor has been responsible for many of the best ones, including the one above, which accompanies a new album by the Norwegian progressive metal band Communic. And the fact that we will have a new Communic album this year is itself very welcome news.

The name of the album is Where Echoes Gather, and it will be released on October 27 by the band’s new label, AFM Records, following four previous albums released by Nuclear Blast. Continue reading »

HELLRAISERS: MIDNIGHT, ANIMA DAMNATA, SOL DE SANGRE, ANTICHRIST HOOLIGANS, OXYGEN DESTROYER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 062017
 

 

From day to day, we have very few plans here at the NCS HQ, or at least very few that I know of. As the editor I rely mainly on my reflexes, which are like coils of rusted springs, ready to creak into action on a moment’s notice. Our other writers may have plans, but I usually learn of them only when our intrepid pigeon aeronauts arrive with stained scrolls of text wrapped around their legs. I do my creaky best to get their writings ready to go by the next day… or the same day… and quite often those surprises unexpectedly fill up our site with content when only the day before I might have wondered what the hell I would have for you beyond my own frenzied scribbling. Beyond that, the rest of my life occasionally intrudes with other reflex tests.

And so it was that I promised Part 2 of my latest SHADES OF BLACK column would be posted on Monday, and then got surprised… and then was surprised again on Monday… and today will also be full of surprises (at last count, we’ll have six posts today). Anyway, no SHADES OF BLACK today either, but I am going with this selection of new music from five bands, most of which I originally intended to include in that missing Part 2 and a couple that I came across since starting on it. I’m calling this “Hellraisers” because… well… you’ll find out why soon enough.

MIDNIGHT

This is one of the items I discovered most recently — last night, in fact. It’s a new release by Ohio’s Midnight, a cover of “I Don’t Need Society” by D.R.I. It’s a Bandcamp, download-only release, and all profits will be donated to the Red Cross in their efforts to help those affected by Hurricane Harvey. Various other Midnight CDs, LPs, tapes, patches, and t-shirts are available in bundles along with the new download, and profits from those sales will also be donated to the Red Cross. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): DYSCARNATE, BROKEN HOPE, HIDEOUS DIVINITY, ARCHSPIRE, VOLTURYON, FLESHKILLER, THE RITUAL AURA, SEPTICFLESH, THE HAUNTED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 052017
 


Dyscarnate

 

(DGR has again stepped forward for round-up duty and has pulled together 9 new songs and videos that caught his eye between last week and yesterday.)

Last week saw a tremendous on-rush of heavy metal news, and of course, since many people knew that we here in the States (or at least many of us) would get a long three-day weekend, a lot of it hit in the back half of the week. As the site’s resident hoover vacuum, I’ve compiled an itemized list of nine… items… that caught my interest over the course of the week that we didn’t get a chance to cover that I will now lovingly shove right into your faces.

If you’re a big fan of death metal and its chugging ilk, this roundup is mostly for you, as it seemed like a large chunk of what I found came from that sphere of influence. There’s definitely the requisite world-traveling element as well, as we go from England to Canada to Italy to the States to Greece to Sweden (twice), and you can see where this is going from here. So let’s quit goofing off and get to the fun stuff. Continue reading »

SUNDAY SLAUGHTERING: HAMMR, MORPHOSYS, BLOODSTRIKE, COUGHDUST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Sep 032017
 

 

After being prevented by my day job from listening to much new music during the last half of last week, I binged on new song streams yesterday. The furnace of metal continues to pour out molten steel at a breathtaking rate. I found enough new sounds solely from the black realms to warrant a 4-part SHADES OF BLACK column, but I’ll probably throttle myself and limit it to two parts, with Part 1 coming later today. But in the meantime I couldn’t resist putting together this collection, which at a minimum will wake you up better than a flash-bang grenade and at a maximum may blow your minds to smithereens.

The first three selections are advance tracks from forthcoming albums. The last one is a complete full-length release. Different styles of metal, but all of them both highly infectious and explosively good. Let the slaughtering begin….

HAMMR

There’s enough electrifying energy in “Satanic Raid” to power a large metropolis and enough speed to lap the pack at a NASCAR race, not to mention more than enough feral barbarism to put smiles on the faces of those of you who live to slash and burn (at least through your music). There’s also some kind of immediately addictive poison coursing through the veins of this beast, which is transmitted directly into the listener’s bloodstream. Continue reading »

SYMPHONIES OF SICKNESS

 Mosh Pit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Sep 022017
 

 

(Andy Synn is now lobbying the Oxford English Dictionary for recognition of a new word.)

In case you didn’t know, yesterday saw release of the brand new album by Symphonic Death Metal titans Septic Flesh (yes, I’m still spelling it as two words).

Now while I’m not planning on reviewing it here (that honour will, in all likelihood, fall to DGR), I will say that Codex Omega feels like a big step up from The Great Mass and Titan, the latter of which in particular suffered (in this author’s opinion at least) from a noticeable lack of balance between the “Symphonic” and the “Death Metal” aspects of the band’s sound, with the lion’s share of the effort put into the orchestration, while the drums and riffs (or lack thereof) were treated very much as an afterthought.

And as Codex Omega is such a big improvement on its predecessors in this regard, I felt it might be high time we all got together to discuss the costs/benefits inherent in “symphonisizing” (a word I’ve just invented) your sound. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ALL PIGS MUST DIE, LO!, INSURRECTION, REAL COPS, CAPTURE THE SUN

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 012017
 

 

I finished my work on the U.S. east coast last night, and for reasons I won’t bore you with, it turned into a sucky day. A few stiff drams of the amber bead improved my mood, which improved further as I listened to the music collected here. This was one of those interesting listening sessions where the things I picked to stream just kind of fit together (at least in my addled brain), as if someone had chosen them for a playlist.

I’m going the airport now for the trip home. There’s a premiere coming your way a bit later this morning, but otherwise this will be another short day for posts at our site. Things will get back to (ab)normal around here this weekend and next week.

ALL PIGS MUST DIE

I discovered All Pigs Must Die for the first time watching them kick the holy bejesus out of an audience at a Seattle club back in August 2011. They were taking part in Southern Lord’s The Power of the Riff tour. The next month they released their debut album, God Is War, which was a hard-to-define amalgam of punk, hardcore, crust, black metal, and death metal that was downright beastly. Continue reading »

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