(Andy Synn shares his thoughts on the new album from Grant The Sun, out tomorrow)
Remember when – oh, about a month ago now – I mentioned how it was looking like 2023 was going to be a distinctly proggy year for me?
Well then, you may recall that I also committed to reviewing three albums in particular which I had high hopes for, so consider this write-up of Voyage step one in my attempt to fulfil that promise.
The story of New England-based I, Destroyer is an unusual one, perhaps best summed up as a tale of indomitable perseverance in the shadows of the underground. As we write this, the band are on the eve of their 20th anniversary, and yet (with a new lineup in place) are only now about to release their first official EP as a label release.
Those two decades did see the production of four I, Destroyer demos, but they were self-released and usually passed along by hand to friends, fans, and other bands. Moreover, although those four demos collectively included 21 songs, they totaled only about 38 minutes of music. The new EP — Cold, Dead Hands — is nearly 25 minutes all by itself, spread across 6 tracks. If you do the math, you’ll figure out that these songs on average are longer than anything the band have done before.
These songs are also dynamic and expertly executed assaults. And make no mistake, they are indeed vicious assaults, relentlessly pulse-pounding attacks of black thrash and speed metal, but with enough changes in momentum and mood (and plenty of technically eye-popping performances) to keep listeners perched on the edge of their seats. It’s raw and nasty, fetid as well as ferocious, both feral and freaked-out — a wild ride from beginning to end.
And so, it’s with fiendish pleasure that we present a full stream of Cold, Dead Hands today in advance of its June 9th co-release by Eternal Death and Born for Burning. Continue reading »
(Several of us here glommed on to Ironmaster’s recently released second album (via Black Lion Records), but thought it would really hit the bullseye with DGR. We weren’t wrong, as his following review demonstrates abundantly.)
Rarely does a disc go flying by you with such velocity that it could’ve killed someone (ala Hellraiser 3) and found itself embedded in the drywall near your writing desk, but such is the case with Ironmaster‘s sophomore album – and second on a year-over-year churn – Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage.
While we fancy ourselves having an understanding of each other’s musical tastes here, it’s not often that one would gamble fully on handing an album album over with the statement, “This seems like it is well positioned within your wheelhouse”. But that happened with Weapons Of Spiritual Carnage, a release whose promo arrived and was so quickly flung in your favorite long-winded impostor-syndrome-suffering writer’s direction that yes, we’re probably due a trip to the local home improvement store here soon in order to repair ‘promo disc stuck in wall’. It’s not like whatever customer service person we get is going to understand what we’re talking about anyway. Continue reading »
(Here’s DGR’s review of a little-known EP from March that made a favorable impression on him.)
Another one for the short but sweet pile to break things up a bit and from a part of the world we don’t get to travel to too often.
Dragdown are – for lack of a better term – a melodeath group hailing from Japan, hybridizing a few different styles together but mostly hewing close to the groove-focused and galloping offshoots of the melodeath scene and even cramming some metalcore guitar chug into the auditory violence. Dragdown are big fans of the super-aggressive verse and clean-sung chorus approach but have an interesting tact for it in that they don’t really ‘lighten up’ for the glory-chorus segments. Dragdown clearly like the part where the drummer takes a ‘can’t stop, won’t stop’ approach to things.
The group’s newest EP Antisocial arrived in the middle of March and found itself collected up in the great NCS content maw, and wow, has this one taken a while to get around to. It’s hovered in the background for a bit but Antisocial isn’t the easiest EP to get a hold of, and since there was a brief musical lull we now have the time to dive into it. Continue reading »
Today we premiere a full stream of Lithic, the debut album by Hamburg-based Voidhaven, arriving five years and many hardships after their self-titled debut EP. It provides a masterful union of stylistic ingredients from different corners of the vast realm of Doom, sectors where death/doom, funeral doom, and trad doom reign in their haunted, ice-cold castles. Both instrumentally elaborate and vocally multi-faceted, the album is completely captivating.
Perhaps this won’t come as a surprise after you learn that the band’s line-up is composed of veterans, and includes members of such bands as Ophis, Fvneral Fvkk, and Remembrance. Yet as noted above, the writing and completion of the album didn’t come easy, but the time enabled care and attention to detail. And that’s probably a good place to begin, with the band’s own extensive statement of how the album came to exist and what they sought to achieve: Continue reading »
(Andy Synn presents four artists/albums from last month that you may not have checked out)
The list of bands I wasn’t able to write about in May is pretty impressive. And imposing. And, ultimately, a little disappointing.
But, the truth is, there’s only so much time in the day/week/month, which is why I wasn’t able to cover… deep breath… Concilium, Black:I, Olkoth (though we did already premiere a track from this one), Non Est Deus, Usnea, Phlebotomized, Vexing, Chained to the Bottom of the Ocean (that one I really wanted to include) and more.
Still, the four albums I’ve chosen for this article are all ones I feel very strongly about, and are well worth your time, so let’s focus on them, rather than what I wasn’t able to get to!
We’re approaching the halfway mark on 2023’s calendar, but we’ll venture the bold speculation that even by year-end you’ll have a hard time finding an album more overwhelmingly powerful in its sound and mood than Portraits, the forthcoming third album by the French atmospheric black metal band Aodon that’s set for release by Willowtip Records on June 9th. Over and over again, it takes the breath away with the monumental scale and visceral intensity of its music.
The themes of the songs are dark, and unmistakably the music is too, even in its suddenly softer phases, which provide haunting (and occasionally even hopeful) reprieves from the album’s turbulent and towering intensity. It is, to forewarn you, a harrowing series of portrayals, but so immense and immersive that it chains the senses in place, caught and consumed by the calamities and the contrasts. Continue reading »
I won’t repeat everything I wrote here yesterday about why I’ve fallen behind in my usual attempts to keep up with newly released music (you’re welcome). Suffice to say, for this column I followed the same blunt-instrument, cutting-the-Gordian-knot strategy as I did yesterday.
BUT AUS NORD (France)
At the risk of being accused of clickbaiting, or at least bait-and-switch, I’m starting with a piece of welcome news — but it isn’t accompanied by music.
The news is that on August 25th Debemur Morti Productions will release the second part of Blut Aus Nord‘s Disharmonium album series — Disharmonium – Nahab — accompanied by the chilling cover art of Polish artist Maciej Kamuda. That’s an earlier date than a previously announced calendar spot in September. Continue reading »
(In mid-April the Munich-based “Oriental Extreme Metal” band Eridu released their expansive second album, and it caught the welcoming ear of our writer DGR, who prepared the following review.)
Heavy metal as a genre has been especially good at loaning itself out to bands who want to sound absolutely massive. The giant walls of distortion, the huge drums, the intimidating vocals, and big rumbling bass lines have often been a tool/weapon – depending on whose hands are wrapped around it – for groups to appear much larger in scope than they actually are. The ambition and reach of a genre like this are often used by groups wanting to appear cinematic in scale as part of their search for something grander than just the consistent ass-kicking that heavy metal is known for.
With groups like SepticFlesh and Fleshgod Apocalypse at the forefront of full-blown symphonies as backing and integral parts of the band – doing the heavy lifting on the melody end of things most of the time – and bands like Behemoth and Hate making a name for themselves by sounding gigantic despite their band photos basically just featuring ‘four dudes’, it’s interesting to see the bevy of groups that have cropped up on the in-between lines, sounding just as massive and embracing a lot of orchestral and ethnic instrumentation to help break them out from the usual pack of bruisers. They’re just as ambitious as many of their peers and often just as expansive, with releases that come in just short of needing a label in the corner that says ‘soundtrack to the major motion picture!’ on the right hand side of the cover art.
Germany’s Eridu are that style of band, with a weighty fifty-plus-minute release in Enuma Elish, tackling large subject matter and mythology with an equally heavy emphasis on both brutalizing rhythms and folk instrumentation and with a movie-maker’s eye for sound atmospherics and a metal fan’s taste for punching through walls. Continue reading »
Not so long ago we wrote here that while many musical extremists add new layers of brick and mortar to old walls surrounding well-established genre structures, the anonymous Parisian duo Non Serviam take a wrecking ball to genre walls. Their music is about catharsis and confrontation, and to extend the alliteration, it can be confounding — because it goes where the creators’ passions and wild inmventiveness take it, outward into the world from a burning inner core of rage.
You would conclude that the music on their new album Death Ataraxia is confrontational even if you didn’t know what inspires it. It has the effect of getting in the face of listeners and shoving them out of comfort zones and off-balance, teetering but fueled. But what inspires the music is also confrontational, an anarchist and antifascist ethos that condemns the abuses of capitalism and hate-mongering directed against the least powerful among us.
Yet it would go to far to brand the music, or what inspires it, as nihilistic, even if sometimes it sounds ruinous or hopeless. In the midst of superheated resistance there seem to be goals beyond not surrendering or becoming complacent, beyond furiously swinging the wrecking ball at what confines our bodies and minds. Goals like embracing those who need support when we can, (furiously) seizing the opportunities for rapture when they present themselves (no matter how fleeting), or just letting your head spin away from the ugliness of the real into the very un-real.
Another way to put it is that in listening to Death Ataraxia you’ll find times when you might want to sway and bounce, or to let your mind wander in intriguing but dangerous dreamscapes, but plenty of other times that might make you want to put your head back and howl, or hurl yourself like a missile into violent collisions, or feel your brain spin (dazzled) through a kaleidoscopic sonic collage where nightmares thrive. Continue reading »