Album Reviews Archives - Page 110 of 545

DEATHGRAVE: “IT’S ONLY MIDNIGHT”

Apr 052023

(West Coast extremists Deathgrave will release a new album on April 14th via the Tankcrimes label, and today we present Todd Manning‘s review.)

To be a dedicated fan of old school death metal often means not seeking out surprises, but rather looking for a vibe. So when one comes across a new band which includes Greg Wilkinson, who has done time with Autopsy along with sludge masters Brainoil and Graves at Sea, one can assume that those vibes will be there in spades. Deathgrave’s latest full-length, It’s Only Midnight, certainly captures that old-school death metal atmosphere, but actually does provide some surprises along the way. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LARVAE — “ENTITLED TO DEATH”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Apr 042023

“Oakland, California has summoned the rituals of many metal legions over the decades. Its stench is filled with dark art, morbid riffs, death and doom. There’s a scorched place in the corner of the crumbling landscape evoking evil and witchy magic where Larvae feast on the remains of those who perished.”

In the press materials, those evocative words precede the release of Larvae‘s long-awaited second album Entitled to Death, which (to quote again from the same materials) “pursues a human experience, traversing the middle realm seen thru the eyes of a defected warrior,” who is bound to a grim and hostile reality “until the final collapse in a land filled with ruin and loss… crossing over into a cosmic abyss.”

In the musical telling of this uncomfortable tale Larvae draw inspiration from such divergent ’90s legends as Runemagick, Paradise Lost, Immolation, Bolt Thrower, Neurosis, and Dismember. How they interweave those influences might be difficult to guess, but today no guessing game is needed because we have the complete album stream for you. Continue reading »

UGLY: “AUTOGRAPH”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Apr 042023

(Arizona doom/sludge quartet UGLY will release their new album Autograph via Satanik Royalty Records on May 5th, and below you’ll find Wil Cifer‘s review.)

Since the ’90s sludge has branched out from crust punk to meld the apocalyptic rumblings passed down from bands like Swans and Killing Joke. This band from Arizona carries all the foreboding of the genre’s forefathers in their sound. They know the value of atmosphere as a tool to empower the aggression of their riffs. The guitars chug with crushing vitriol. One of this album’s strengths is the use of samples to set the mood, in a manner we have not heard since the glory days of Neurosis.

The vocals of the first song are an exercise in raw larynx-scraping They are recorded in a very dry fashion with scant use of effects. Just a crazed man screaming into a mic.

This crazed man is not alone. He is joined by Krysta Curry from Landmine Marathon, who not only shares vocal duties but also helps out with synths, samples, and additional percussion, though her vocal presence is not really felt ’til the second song, which finds an odd syncopation embracing a weird, more grandiose arrangement. Continue reading »

ROTTEN SOUND: “APOCALYPSE”

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Apr 042023

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the new album by Finland’s Rotten Sound, which is out now on Season of Mist.)

The thing to keep in mind with Rotten Sound‘s newest album Apocalypse – arriving almost five years after the group’s last recorded material in the 2018 EP Suffer To Abuse and almost seven years if you want to stick strictly to full lengths in 2016’s Abuse To Suffer – is that it is the sort of grind album that starts and stops. That makes no sense, you say, every album has a beginning and end, what sort of difference does an album starting and stopping have to do with the descriptor of an album?

To refine it a bit, let’s treat Apocalypse this way: There is no build up to Apocalypse and there is no wind-down in Apocalypse, at any point, at all. You hit ‘play’ on the album’s first song and Rotten Sound are already screaming at a thousand miles an hour and every song after that does the same. The start/stop mechanism is the most perfunctory in existence. It’s a quick blast of feedback and the song is over with not a single song getting close to the two-minute mark. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, MARCH 2023

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Apr 032023

(We’ve just barely breached the walls of April, and so our friend Gonzo makes a timely reappearance with a selection of five albums released in March that made a big impact in his listening.)

Before I get to writing this month’s helping of my choice cuts from last month, I gotta get something out of the way first:

I am still absolutely buzzing from last night’s Death to All show here in Denver.

To see the likes of Steve DiGiorgio and Gene Hoglan play music of any kind on stage, in person, is a treat enough by itself, but having them rip through selections from the inimitable Death for almost two hours was an experience that I plan to re-live in perpetuity. Possibly forever. Who knows?

It was an insane spectacle for the eyes as well as the ears, and I’ll get to writing up the entire thing soon enough. If you missed this tour, you have my condolences.

Let’s get to the good stuff from March.

CURSEBINDER – DRIFTING

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Apr 032023

(Andy Synn presents his thoughts on the new album from Cursebinder, out Friday on Avantgarde Music)

First things first, I’d like it to be noted that Cursebinder is a truly excellent band name.

Of course, the… ahem… curse of having such a good moniker like that is that you really have to live up to it, musically speaking. And if you don’t, well… you’re going to hear about it.

Thankfully, however, the band’s captivating concoction of pristine blackened power, dream-like melody, and doom-laden melancholy proves to be more of a blessing than a curse, and fans of of the introspective intensity of Der Weg Einer Freiheit or the darkly melodic majesty of Claret Ash in particular would do well to invite Drifting into their lives.

SHADES OF BLACK: GABESTOK, REVA, THY CATAFALQUE, DAUGHTERS OF SOPHIA

Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK No Responses »

Apr 022023

Gabestok (2019) – photo by Adriana Zak

Every week we receive what mathematicians used to call a metric shit ton of black metal submissions. Maybe it’s because we tend to spend more time than many other metal sites focusing on that ever-expanding genre, and maybe because we try not to limit ourselves to well-known bands with substantial label backing or PR apparatuses.

But as some people still don’t understand, there are very few of us here, and our NCS time comes after paying work, family and friends, and every other demand and distraction that everyone else deals with on a daily basis. So, lots of worthy submissions just don’t get attention in our pages.

From amongst the worthy, there’s truly a high degree of randomness in what we choose to write about, and even more so on days like today when my own NCS time has gotten further compressed by unexpected events (including the Third World quality of internet service on the island where I live).

Yeah, I hear you — “Shut Up and Get On With It, you could have covered one more song in the time it took you to write that pathetic introduction!” I hear you, so let’s get on with it: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECRONOMICON EX MORTIS (SELF-TITLED)

Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET 1 Response »

Mar 302023

What you’re about to experience is likely to be the most electrifying 18 minutes of your day, unless you lose control of your car, the brakes fail, and you’re surging toward a concrete pylon at Formula One speed.

Those 18 minutes of full-throttle, mind-boggling music are wrapped within the self-titled debut EP by the Chicago quintet Necronomicon Ex Mortis, which will be released tomorrow (March 31st). Their brand of death metal is so fast, so technically head-spinning, and so devilishly inventive that it allows no room for any calm contemplation. All you can do is hang on for dear life and enjoy the flame-throwing madhouse thrills while they last — and then yield to the impulse to throw yourself back in right away. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEMONSTEALER — “THE PROPAGANDA MACHINE”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Mar 282023

Sahil Makhija (aka “The Demonstealer“) began a long road to recognition in the global metal community roughly 25 years ago. At least in terms of recordings, the road began with Sahil’s band Demonic Resurrection, whose debut album Demonstealer saw release in November 2000. Four more Demonic Resurrection albums followed, along with opportunities to perform outside their native India, and for a time it’s fair to say that DR was India’s best-known and most-celebrated extreme metal band.

Along the way, Sahil activated other vehicles for his musical output, including Reptilian Death and his solo project Demonstealer, and he gained further recognition through hosting the online cooking show “Headbanger’s Kitchen“, which gave him a chance to rub shoulders with members of metal bands scattered far and wide across the globe. And that’s not to mention his founding of a recording studio, a record label, a PR agency, and a consultancy service.

The road to recognition hasn’t been easy. It still isn’t. As Sahil explained in a recent interview with our man Comrade Aleks, he has experienced a fair share of moments when he wanted to give up, not because of a lack of desire to continue creating music but because of all the shit constantly shoveled up by “the business side” of releasing music and performing. And then there’s the fact that metal music is still an alien art form in India — “culturally strange and also sonically not appealing” to the vast majority of the population. “Metal music, unlike in the west, is music that people of a certain privileged and economic background listen to. It’s not the music of the common man.”

Nevertheless, Sahil forges ahead, with music still the mainstay of his life as he approaches his 41st birthday. And more than ever, disturbing conditions in his native land (and around the world) became the subject matter of his songwriting as he returned to his Demonstealer project. Reflecting that subject matter, the name of the new Demonstealer album which we’re presenting today is The Propaganda Machine, which is now set for release on March 31st by Black Lion Records. Continue reading »

LEPRETHERE – TARNISHED PASSION

Album Reviews No Responses »

Mar 282023

(Andy Synn takes a walk on the weird side with the debut album from Belarus’s Leprethere)

Right from the start, Tarnished Passion is not an easy album to pin down.

The duo who make up the band themselves refer to their sound as a mix of Dissonant Death Metal and Mathcore, and both those elements are certainly present.

But I’ve also seen them referred to as Progressive Metalcore, Technical Death Metal, and even Djent (though that one is really making a mountain out of the proverbial molehill in my opinion) by various different sources, so there seems to be some confusion about how to classify exactly what it is that Leprethere actually do.

And I can’t help but think that’s how they like it.

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