ASHEN – RITUAL OF ASH

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Jan 042023
 

(Andy Synn kicks off 2023 with the highly-anticipated new album from Australia’s Ashen)

As I’ve stated before, 2022 was a good year for Death Metal. Occasionally a very good year for Death Metal. But not necessarily a great year for Death Metal.

That being said, there were definitely some albums which hit harder, and aimed higher, than others, and if Ashen‘s debut had been released in December of last year (as it was originally meant to be) it definitely would have ranked among them.

As it stands, however, Ritual of Ash has the distinction of being the first truly great Death Metal record of 2023.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: CONTRARIAN, DECEIVETH, SKINEATER

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jan 032023
 

 

This round-up of new music will be short, but of course I think it’s also sweet. I have just enough time for three recommendations before my gilded carriage of a morning turns into the rotting pumpkin of my day job.

CONTRARIAN (U.S.)

Until I looked I had forgotten how many premieres we’ve done for Contrarian‘s releases (four of them, going back to 2015). What I didn’t forget was how head-spinning their music has been, and so I jumped at the chance to listen to the first single from Contrarian‘s new album Sage of Shekhinah. The remarkable cover art by Guang Yang just sweetened the pot. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK 1/1/23: LEIPA, KRINGA, BESNA, SONNEILLON, INFERNAL DIATRIBE

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jan 012023
 

Well goddamn it’s a new year. I hope this finds you alive and well, and not in a morgue, a jail, or a hospital ward as a result of whatever you did last night.

My only new year’s resolution is to keep breathing, though that’s not really a resolution because I have no control over it, the breathing or the ceasing to breathe. Que sera, sera. However, I do have a resolution to suggest that you adopt, which is to let no day go by without coming here to have your head rattled and ruined. (Maybe committing to engage in more acts of kindness and caring toward others wouldn’t be a bad idea either, and let some of the music do the hating for us.)

It’s a fitting coincidence that the first day of 2023 falls on a Sunday, allowing me to welcome the new year at NCS by beginning to char it to a crisp, building on whatever fires were started with gunpowder last night. Fitting, because one could argue there is no realistic hope that 2023 will be better than 2022. People will continue being shitty to each other, the Earth will continue taking revenge for the pomposity, the greed, and the negligence of humankind, and the temptation to just hunker down in a bunker for self-preservation will be strong.

On the other hand, some things will still make life worth living, even if the point of existence remains obscure, and one of those is the enjoyment of art in all its forms, even the kind of art that wants to turn the world black. Examples follow. Continue reading »

FLESHGORE: “CARNIVAL OF FLESH”

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Jan 012023
 

(The Ukrainian band FLESHGORE hurled us toward the end of a miserable 2022 in a rampage, and DGR says hello to 2023 with a review of this brutal monster in our first post of the new year.)

If nothing else, FLESHGORE are brave for multiple reasons given the state of the world. One of them being that they are brave enough to unleash an album on December 20th, right in the midst of the year-end list season and into the lead-up to void week where nothing happens on account of the holidays, unless you live in a war zone.

I’ve often joked around here that the subjects of today’s writeup must have their name always written in ALL CAPITAL letters. The sort of rock-crushing brutal stupidity that powers their world of death metal is the type in which caveman grunting is the norm, and honestly, having a name that consists of nine letters may be a little bit intense for the type of person this music embodies. That’s why you’ve often seen us joking that their name is always going to be FLESHGORE around here.

Of course, you don’t get to be that way without having struck upon a vein of brutal death metal so pure that you could be considered a lighthouse of the genre, as if anyone hunting for what the world of brutal death metal was up to these days need look no further than the mighty FLESHGORE. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LUMEN AD MORTEM, NUNKTHUL, VURVARAT, NANSARUNAI, KEXELÜR

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Dec 272022
 


Lumen Ad Mortem

On THAT HOLIDAY last Sunday I was going to wish everyone good tidings of joy, because joy is so often impoverished in this age, but the burden of laziness weighed me down as I thought it might. I was looking forward to darkening that holiday with un-joyful music via this column. It’s not as satisfying to darken National Fruitcake Day (yes, today is National Fruitcake Day here in the U.S.), but I’ll take what I can get.

As I was making my way through music I thought might make good fodder for this column I unexpectedly severed a certain musical vein, one that spurted its black blood through the first four selections below. You’ll need cotton wads to sop the blood from your lacerated ears, though no sponge will absorb the terrors and torments of these deleterious but captivating anthems to all that is wrong. They seem to exclaim damnation to trends, quite comfortable in their desolate burning castles first built in by-gone ages of black metal, and let’s hoist a chalice of blood to their devotion, shall we?

And do gird your loins, because there is A LOT of music here, straight up through the EP that ends the collection with what might be the maddest songs of all. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: IRON FLESH – “AS GHOULS MARCH ON”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 262022
 

Over the last five years we’ve devoted no fewer than seven articles to the music of the French death metal band Iron Flesh, most recently Andy Synn‘s review of their second full-length Summoning the Putrid in 2020. But just last month Iron Flesh released a third album, that one entitled Limb After Limb, and we can’t let the year go by without paying attention to them once again.

In commenting on the last Iron Flesh full-length before this most recent one, Andy suggested you “think Grave/Dismember meets Autopsy/Hypocrisy, with a little bit of early Paradise Lost and Edge of Sanity added for good measure”.

The newest album, out now on War Anthem Records and Cudgel Metal Mailorder, is a weighty offering, featuring 10 tracks of widely varying lengths, and they provide varying experiences as well. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PAGAN RITES AND VULCAN TYRANT

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 232022
 

This aging year will soon expire, but is still capable of birthing metal releases as if it were still young and fecund, right up to the bitter end. And so on December 30th Horror Pain Gore Death Productions will reissue a storming split of unholy (and unconventional) black thrash that features the savage talents of Pagan Rites from Sweden and Vulcan Tyrant from the Netherlands.

You have ears and we have thoughts to prepare them for the onslaught to come at the end of this feature. Continue reading »

MUTE OCEAN: “CARAVAN”

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Dec 232022
 

(NCS contributor Axel Stormbreaker returns today with a review of the new album by the multi-faceted Mute Ocean black metal project from Saint Petersburg, Russia.)

Despite how metal implementations have been maneuvering their way around jazz themes for more than two decades, few existing examples manage to present an approach equally concise to Mute Ocean’s Caravan. A record inspiring, unifying, as well as controversial to the beliefs of the few; or the many, depending on a random reader’s viewpoint. An in-depth review follows.

I seriously don’t like most lyrics. My elusive boredom may well reach a point when I’d rather sit all day watching the paint dry, than reading the actual verses of most songs I enjoy. Before anyone feels offended, lemme clarify here: I state this while I too used to be an awful lyricist back in the day. Especially, since the art of great lyricism rivals poetry; a tree that bears fruit, only when thoughts stretch the very fabric of reality.

Did that sound pretentious? Well, not really. See, myself, I function more like an old-school computer. Analytical, methodical, calculative, with a dry sense of humor on top of everything. Aspects that could probably help anyone become somewhat of a bearable writer, yet a horrible lyricist in any regard. Reading interviews, liner notes, as well as finding out the deeper thoughts that construct an artist’s view do always seem interesting. But reading the said lyrical part? Man, that tends to feel nothing besides a colossal waste of time. Continue reading »

MISÞYRMING – MEÐ HAMRI

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Dec 222022
 

(Andy Synn chooses the new album from Iceland’s Misþyrming as his final review of the year)

It’s crazy to think, now that I’m forced to reflect upon it, how long my (admittedly one-sided) relationship with Misþyrming has been going on.

After discovering them just prior to the 2015 edition of Inferno Festival (where I was fortunate enough to see them perform as part of a truly stacked three-band line-up of them, Sinmara, and Svartidauði), I’ve since written glowingly about them multiple times (and included both their previous albums in my annual “Great” list without hesitation) and also caught them live on several subsequent (and, arguably, superior) occasions.

And now, once again, Misþyrming have returned – almost without warning, and with very little fanfare – with a new album (and a new drummer) to give us all the punishment we deserve.

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OCCULSED — “PARTURITION OF ADULTERATION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 202022
 

It’s the time of year when many of us are reflecting on what we heard in 2022, sorting it out, making lists, reducing our bank account balances… but for the moment I’m thinking about a musical plague that infected me last year for which a cure hasn’t yet been developed.

That plague, Crepitation Of Phlegethon, was the full-length debut of Occulsed. It ushered listeners into a world of terrors, a world created from sounds that spawned electrifying visions of horror and disease, of madness and mayhem, and of blood-freezing intrusions from spectral realms. As I wrote at the time we premiered it:

“It takes a rare kind of talent to make an album like this one, a death metal album that creates such a viscerally disturbing impact, one that preys upon its listeners’ most deep-seated fears and does so in such thrilling and paradoxically enthralling fashion…. It’s all rotten to the core and as creepy as confinement in a coffin filled with wriggling maggots…. The moods change as well, though almost all the moods are ghastly. The music is both predatory and hopeless, noxious and deranged, horrifyingly imperious and seemingly gleeful in its deviant revels”.

Where in the world did that plague come from? How was it spawned, how did it grow into such a mal-formed but unforgettable monstrosity? We have answers today. Continue reading »

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