(Andy Synn takes on the titans in Immolation for the start of a new week here at NCS)
One of the things we love doing here at NCS is pushing new and up-and-coming bands and helping them find their audience.
This, however, is not one of those times.
Because what we also love doing is celebrating seminal artists undergoing a well-deserved career-resurgence, and few bands deserve recognition in that regard more than Immolation.
(This is DGR’s review of the first new album by The Duskfall in a dozen years. It was independently released earlier this month.)
There is no such thing as the phrase “did not have that on my bingo card for the year” when said bingo card has effectively been shot to shreds and has existed as confetti since mid-January. While loathe to make predictions for the year outside of trying to will albums into existence by virtue of bringing them up at end-of-year season, a lot of that has basically been a smoking hole in the ground and replaced with a lot of new band and genre explorations in its place.
While we aren’t unfamiliar with bands returning from hibernation at this site – we’ve had a few premieres over the years for groups taking another shot after a decade-plus away – there are times when albums you expected to happen or were even being hinted at just kind of don’t. For whatever reasons, the group will go silent, the assumption being that they’re basically done, so that upcoming album forever exists on a hard drive somewhere but otherwise won’t be seeing the light of day. Eventually the thought just leaves your recollection and a group’s standing catalogue becomes its cenotaph. This was the case with The Duskfall, who it seemed like might have quietly called it a day after five decent-to-great albums. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn has a long history with Lantlôs, and that continues on their new album, out 03 April)
As we have seen so far this week, there are Black Metal bands, and there are Post-Black Metal bands… and then there are bands like Lantlôs who used to belong to the second category (and were, in fact, a seminal part of its genesis and evolution) but who are now truly “post” Black Metal, in the most literal sense of the term.
Though, to be fair, that’s been true for a while, with 2014’s Melting Sun (still a huge favourite of mine) and then 2021’s even more provocatively poppy (but still absolutely stunning) Wildhund (which earned a spot in my Critical Top Ten) demonstrating that Lantlôs, aka Markus Siegenhort, have long since shed any remnants of their old skin in favour of a kaleidoscopic rainbow of shades and colours that has more in common with – among others – the likes of the Smashing Pumpkins, Deftones, Foo Fighters, and Devin Townsend.
And, wouldn’t you know it, on Nowhere In Between Forever they’re at it again.
(Here is DGR’s review of a new album by one of his old favorites.)
Having a retraceable history with a project is always fun. Holding up the hourglass of time and attempting to gaze backwards through it is a fun way to hold oneself accountable, or as has more often proven to be the gaze, to serve as a cattle prod to the memory centers to let one know how you felt about a previous few releases. It is grounding in that way, having an artist’s releases serving as particular stopping points in time that you can center yourself on and remember the many years back. The musical adventures of the decidedly non-metal electronics and heavy metal guitar instrumental work of The Luna Sequence has been one such project.
This is a musical venture that has been mentioned in some form or another for a hair over a decade since your’s truly has set up camp in the corner of the site’s vast musical catacombs. The Luna Sequence has traveled with artist Kaia Young across the country and through multiple genre influences, absorbing ideas like a sponge and slowly adapting itself around them. It has seen permutations that have been aggressively heavy, surprisingly relaxed, introverted and meditative, and more often than not some unholy combination of all of the above depending on which ideas might’ve excitedly crashed into each other to form an energetic explosion. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Commas are critical units of punctuation. “Let’s eat Grandpa!” is not the same as “Let’s eat, Grandpa!” Or, as in the joke about pandas and firearms, “Eats shoots and leaves” is not the same as “Eats, shoots, and leaves”. But even though Aggressive Perfector named their new album “Come Creeping Fiends“, I’m still reading it as “Come, Creeping Fiends” or “Come Creeping, Fiends”, i.e., as an invitation to people like us rather than a preview (or warning) about what happens within the course of the album.
Well, now that you have that interpretation of the title in your head, which you now won’t be able to forget, we’ll provide our own invitation to listen to the album, an invitation that goes on for much longer than the grammatical contortion we’ve applied to the record’s name.
Or, you could skip the invitations, scroll down, and just listen to all the evil songs now, before Dying Victims Productions releases this magnificently diabolical album on March 27th. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn has something a little grimmer and grimier for you all to enjoy today)
By sheer coincidence today we’re talking about the second masked band in as many days.
But whereas Gaerea‘s semi-anonymous aesthetic has started to feel more and more like a calculated attempt to craft a marketable mystique, Calvana‘s decision to conceal their identities reads more as a purposeful rejection of anything and everything that might otherwise distract from their music.
And what music it is… as rough and as raw as their Portuguese cousins are polished and pristine, these unknown Italians continue to eschew the trappings of modernity in favour of a more primal and primitive sound that remains firmly rooted in the ancestral dirt of Black Metal.
(This is Daniel Barkasi’s review of a new album by the Scottish band Hellripper that’s set for release on March 27th by Century Media Records.)
The story of Hellripper is quite a humble one, and the project’s meteoric rise in the metal scene has been exciting to witness. The brainchild of sole songwriter and multi-instrumentalist James McBain, it all started as an EP in 2015 – The Manifestation of Evil – that he hoped a few folks in the local Aberdeen, Scotland scene would dig, and it’s been quite the rapid ascent since.
His approach to black/speed/thrash is deeply rooted in the black metal classics like Bathory and Venom, the punky thrash of Toxic Holocaust, and the rock ‘n’ roll swagger of Motörhead, but done so in his own highly singular amalgamation of those aforementioned influences. Having gained further steam with each album, his 2023 effort Warlocks Grim & Withered Hags has been the most complete thus far, adding a sense of refinement within the raw, pacey attack that makes Hellripper so damn fun and memorable.
With his fourth full-length Coronach, which is titled after a traditional improvised song during a wake in the Scottish Highlands, McBain continues fine-tuning Hellripper’s sound with added instruments and songwriting techniques, while not straying from the firmly established overarching approach. There’s enough primal intensity in the album’s 44 minutes to power a freight train at full throttle, and the newfangled elements bring a fresh purview to the riff-centric chaos, ensuring that this isn’t a mere rehash or more of the exact same. Continue reading »
(This is our Gonzo’s review of the first new album from Neurosis in a decade, a surprise drop last week from the band’s Neurot Recordings.)
We live in a world where it’s exceedingly difficult to keep secrets.
When it comes to new music, fans tend to catch wind of things well in advance. That’s all by design, of course. The ubiquity of streaming platforms and social media has long since given a bullhorn to every band on the planet that wants to tease “big news coming soon,” and honestly, I think we’ve all grown a little numb to those tactics.
So, when I woke up to the news last Friday (March 20) that Neurosis had not only reunited some time ago under a veil of total clandestineness, but also added post-metal demigod Aaron Turner as a fulltime member, and dropped a new album with zero fanfare, zero advanced warning, and zero indications that the band was anything other than long-dormant, the shock factor probably could’ve been mistaken for actual Bay Area seismic activity.
Obviously, this left me with a lot of fucking ground to cover. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn attempts to separate fact from fiction when it comes to the new album from Gaerea)
A lot of people are probably telling you a lot of different things about Gaerea at the moment, running the gamut from pre-emptively calling Loss a total failure for “abandoning their Black Metal roots” to claiming that it’s a contender for “Album of the Year” that “redefines the Post-Black Metal landscape”.
But while that’s not, in and of itself, a bad thing – diversity of opinion and a variety of viewpoints can lead to rich and rewarding discussions – the main problem is that a lot of these opinions were set in stone before the album was even released, and now everyone is just digging in and doubling down in their ideological trenches, lobbing accusations and recriminations back and forth so fast that any sense of nuance in the conversation has long been… well… lost.
So let me clarify a few things right up front.
One, despite what some of the self-proclaimed “defenders of the faith” have been saying, Gaerea have not suddenly “turned into Sleep Token” (even if some of the more overtly saccharine, pop-friendly moments might occasionally hint at the comparison).
And, two, Loss is absolutely not the “new musical paradigm” that some of the more hyperbolic pre-release promotional materials would have you believe (and the suggestion that they’ve somehow embraced “the openness of Post Rock” by including a few quiet parts is almost insulting to the audience’s intelligence).
So what is it?
(DGR has made a fortunate new discovery, one outside his usual musical wheelhouses, and seeks to spread the word about it in the following review.)
Every year brings a cycle in which I swear up and down to try and expand my musical horizons, which for the most part I absolutely fail at. The early reaches of the year are usually the prime territory for this grand venture to have any hope of success though, because it is somewhat reliable – save for an odd plotting of years wherein January saw a giant flood – that those early parts will have plenty of room for new artists to take a shot at being out there and get some spotlight.
That beginning part of the year is a time of discovery, and every year does have a few interesting acts manage to break through the white noise in comparison to the summer exploraitons of old reliables and groups timing their releases around festival runs. This year, like I have in years past, has had me attempting to explore the doom genre some more, because if there’s any blind spot that I can openly admit to, the fuzzier side of doom is absolutely one of them. These ventures are a lot of fun because you can break past a surface-level understanding of things and actually acheive some sort of musical growth. If nothing else, it provides a new perspective point from which to see things.
The shaggier, fuzzed-out, and stoner side of doom will always have its fair share of oddballs. The walls of reverb and slow to mid tempos must be artistically freeing, and in that respect you do get groups who will name themselves some eyebrow-raising things just for the sheer fun of it. To explore this side of the genre is to be willingly caught off-guard from all ends, and that is how you wind up with a name like Mr. Crabman & The Seaweeds crossing your desk, amplified even more by their home location of the obviously well-known yet clearly easily missed psychadelic doom capital of the world…Finland. Continue reading »