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 »

GRANT THE SUN – VOYAGE

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Jun 082023
 

(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.

Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): I, DESTROYER — “COLD, DEAD HANDS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 072023
 

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 »

IRONMASTER: “WEAPONS OF SPIRITUAL CARNAGE”

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Jun 072023
 

(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 »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DRAGDOWN — “ANTISOCIAL”

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Jun 062023
 

(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 »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VOIDHAVEN — “LITHIC”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 062023
 

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 »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jun 062023
 

(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!

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AODON — “PORTRAITS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Jun 052023
 

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 »

SHADES OF BLACK: BLUT AUS NORD, SVARTKONST, DEVISER, BLOOD STAINED DUSK, VERLETZEN, LANZERRATH

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 042023
 

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 »

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