SHADES OF BLACK: SAMMATH — “GREBBEBERG”

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jun 182023
 

In yesterday’s round-up of new music I mentioned a risk that might imperil today’s column, and the risk became a reality. It’s a minor miracle that it’s here at all, though it’s shorter than I planned and comes much later in the day. In fact, it’s limited to thoughts about a single new album, which I hope you will find worthwhile.

And by the way, Happy Father’s Day to any fathers who happen to drop in here (it’s a U.S. holiday, but the good wishes extend to good fathers everywhere).

SAMMATH (Netherlands)

Sammath are a true rarity — rare in part merely because they have survived for nearly 30 years as a band. As we all know, life expectancy is low for bands in the metal underground, where no one can make a decent living doing it and even minor obstacles thrown up by life can rapidly derail promising futures. But Sammath are an even greater rarity: They haven’t just survived and persisted for such a long stretch of time, but somehow they’ve just released an album that I dare to say is the finest one of their 30-year career. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SNORLAX — “THE NECROTROPHIC ABYSS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Jun 162023
 

It’s not as if we didn’t already know that the Australian project Snorlax (the solo work of Brendan Auld) was capable of making music that causes listeners stop suddenly in their racing tracks, and leaves them feeling kind of gob-smacked. Especially on the band’s debut album II, that became vividly evident. But still, the band’s new album The Necrotrophic Abyss is astonishing, and we’re lucky to get to premiere it today.

Here, the band’s evolving unification of black and death metal has reached full fruition, flowering into compositions that are bludgeoning, violent, and bewildering, elaborate in their constant permutations but both viscerally frightening and soul-crushing in their renditions of desperation and downfall — and all of it executed with jaw-dropping technical skill and captured with remarkable production quality.

On this album, to put it more succinctly, the unexpected becomes expected, and the result is a compact record that stands well out from the pack as we near the halfway point of 2023. It’s not the kind of thing you hear once and move on from. It’s the kind of thing that’s like your own personal Pandora’s box, waiting to be opened again and again, to witness with stark fascination its manifold evils fly into the world over and over. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HOLY DEATH — “NECK WOUND SESSION”

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Jun 142023
 

We’ve been fans of the underground California death/doom band Holy Death ever since coming across their second EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, soon after its release in February 2020. We’ve followed them closely ever since, like a pack of hounds chasing after a car, witness the fact that we’ve written about them on seven separate occasions over these three years.

And so my heart sank last September when I read a statement by the band’s vocalist/guitarist Torie John that jut a few days after the band released their 2022 Moral Terror EPs he was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer, and that it had spread from his thyroid to his lymph nodes.

Torie also explained that the cancer could be treated with surgery, and that it was curable. At the time of that first announcement, he was still searching for a surgeon and hospital to perform a complete thyroidectomy and removal of lymph nodes. Ultimately, the search was successful, and the extensive surgery on his neck was scheduled to take place last November.

What did he do to prepare for the surgery? Of course, he and his bandmates spent November 5, 2022, recording a new release with Raul “Riff” Cuellar at his Riff Audio studio in Burbank. Naturally, they named the record Neck Wound Session. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: AEFFECT / THE BLEEDING / WALLOWING

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Jun 142023
 

(Andy Synn presents three more prime-cuts of British steel)

The ever-fertile UK scene has produced a lot of new releases so far this year.

Some of them I’ve loved, some of them I’ve not been too fond of, and some of them… I just haven’t had a chance to listen to.

But these three stood out to me recently (even if I’m a little late getting to them) and felt like they deserved more attention, both from me and from our readers!

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLUT AUS NORD, HORRENDOUS, BLAST SHIELD, THUNRAZ, DØDSFERD

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Jun 132023
 

In part, this roundup of new songs and videos (plus a recent EP and two complete new albums) is an effort to make up in part for the absence of Shades of Black two days ago, when an unexpected intervention by my fucking day job de-railed my plans. So, there’s blackened metal here, but not exclusively so. I do think that despite the considerable stylistic variation within the collection, it’s all mind-bending in different ways.

BLUT AUS NORD (France)

The last time I mentioned the news of Blut Aus Nord‘s new album Disharmonium – Nahab I had artwork to share, but no music. Now I have music, but wouldn’t have had it for a Shades of Black column two days ago because the song was just released over the last 24 hours. Continue reading »

DYSEASE: “ERA OF DECAY”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 132023
 

(In the following review DGR catches up with one more release from the now-vanished spring of 2023, and this time it’s a debut EP by the German band Dysease.)

Sometimes genre-tags for a band can be amusing, mostly when it comes to the times where the ‘progressive death metal’ tag is applied. Such is the case with Germany’s Dysease – whose name lights up the dopamine centers of the brain over here because we love a good smashing-rocks-against-each-other level pun – and their debut EP Era Of Decay.

Released in the middle of March, the Dysease EP arrived in the hallowed NCS burnt-out corner office sometime in April, but as you’ve noticed, one of the more common refrains around here is how the day job tends to take everything from us. However; that doesn’t mean we’re willing to fully let something go, and in the case of Era Of Decay the constant return to the idea of being ‘progressive death metal’ was enough to keep one wondering what exactly was happening within the EP. Continue reading »

THE ANCHORET – IT ALL BEGAN WITH LONELINESS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 122023
 

(Andy Synn examines how it all began with the new album from The Anchoret, out next week)

Allow me a few moments, dear reader, to get a little “meta” and write a few words about the act of writing (specifically, the act of writing about music, as opposed to actually writing music).

No matter how good you are, the truth is the written word can only ever give you so much insight into an artist or album, dependent as it is on language’s ability to, at best, only approximate our unique sensory experiences.

Let’s face it, there are only so many synonyms, similes, and similitudes we can use – words that can imply, yet only incompletely capture, what we mean when we refer to something as “heavy” or “progressive”, and so on – before we begin repeating ourselves, saying the exact same thing using only slightly different permutations of the same old clichés.

That’s why comparisons – though I know some readers find them overly reductive – are so important. Because they make it easier for us to share our knowledge and understanding.

After all, we’re all hearing the same things, even if we’re not necessarily hearing them in the same way.

So I hope you’ll forgive me for all the various references I’m about to use to illuminate the brilliant new album by The Anchoret.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: UNDERGANG, SPECTRAL VOICE, INVOCATIO, SPELLSWORD, ETERNAL ROT

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 102023
 

Tough choices to make today, but that’s every Saturday morning, even when I manage to round up some recent selections the day before (which I did this week). Knowing that I’ve got a third chance to make recommendations tomorrow (via Shades of Black) makes it slightly easier, though I didn’t shove off all the black metal into tomorrow.

There’s no real theme to today’s choices, other than the tennis-ball-in-the-tumble-dryer theme that I also used yesterday. Prepare to get bounced around again. (I did decide to book-end the collection with horrors.)

UNDERGANG (Denmark) / SPECTRAL VOICE (U.S.)

I’m drawn to new Undergang releases like a fly to honey, though in their case the better analogy may be flies drawn to a steaming pile of fresh viscera. Even sweeter, the latest Undergang release is a split with Colorado’s Spectral Voice. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GRAND CADAVER, JØTNARR, FEN, ACID MAGUS, ENTERRÉ VIVANT, KARRAS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 092023
 

I was supposed to premiere and review an EP today. Despite knowing better, the label and band decided to publish the stream and circulate it to fans without waiting on us. Not the first time something like that has happened around here, but I no longer ignore it when people care so little about our unpaid efforts to help. Time is better spent in other ways, and so rather than finish that premiere write-up I decided to pull together this round-up of new songs and videos that mostly surfaced just this week.

I’ve not put much thought into some clever way of arranging the flow of them, in part because there are so many stylistic twists and turns in what I chose. Just think of yourself as a tennis ball thrown into a dryer with a lot of other tennis balls and start tumbling.

GRAND CADAVER (Sweden)

This week Grand Cadaver released a third single from their new album Deities Of Deathlike Sleep. They sum up the album as “Swedish Fucking Death Metal, the way we love it”, and the lack of pretension extends to the name of the newest song: “Vortex of Blood“. Continue reading »

KRUELTY: “UNTOPIA”

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Jun 092023
 

(We’re nearing the end of a long string of reviews DGR prepared in advance of his travels to Seattle for Northwest Terror Fest, and in this one he talks about a new album by the Japanese band Kruelty that was released in March by Profound Lore Records.)

At some point we’re going to have to come up with some sort of clever portmanteau to describe the level of ‘stupid’ that takes place within the scraping-hands-on-ground style of music that is working its way through the current death metal scene, and is especially present on the latest album Untopia from Japan’s Kruelty.

The best we’ve come up with so far is ‘Ridicudumb’ but it feels like three syllables too many for the type of low-end rumbling, brain-turned-to-jelly style of music that is happening here. You start to feel a little like Tom Hardy in Mad Max: Fury Road, pointing out of the car and declaring ‘that’s bait’ after instantly recognizing the situation around him. So too, can you listen to something like Kruelty‘s Untopia and know near-exactly what the hell it is aspiring to do within the first two minutes as the drums settle in to the solid and consistent groove that forms the backbone of death metal like this.

We’ve been to many a show where the vocalist has proclaimed to the crowd at one point or another that ‘now is your chance to hurt somebody!’. Kruelty’s Untopia is written to be just like that; it is an album that has set out for the sole purpose of hurting somebody. Continue reading »

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