Time flies when you’re having fun. Time also probably flies when you blindly stumble into the path of a rushing freight train.
What brought that morbid thought to mind? Well, you can guess from the title of this feature. It’s the obliterating new EP The Summoning by the Puerto Rican death metal band Omnifaiam, and in particular the EP’s powerhouse opening song “Deceivers of the Bleak“. Continue reading »
(Late October brought forth MNRK Heavy‘s release of a new album by Spanish Noctem, a band we’ve been following closely and happily for a long time, and now we catch up to the new album with this extensive review by DGR.)
Over the course of six albums Noctem have placed themselves in an interesting spot musically, where it has seemed like the only point of reference for comparison in terms of their musical history was the album prior and nothing more.
The group have gone through some sizeable leaps and shifts in their sound over the years, and many of them are well-documented on this here site. While it seemed like they may have found a niche within the black metal world with their triptych of Oblivion, Exilium, and Haeresis, the following disc The Black Consecration moved away from the overwhelming chaotic madness of those three albums and into a realm much more deep and cavernous than before.
The Black Consecration was Noctem proving their worth to the black metal abyss, and that is really the biggest point of reference when it comes to this Spanish group’s latest album, Credo Certe Ne Cras, because after the band laid their foundation through that preceding album, they have now built upon it by becoming “bigger” in just about every sense imaginable. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn gives Dream Unending another chance to win him over with their new album)
If you know anything about us here at NCS – beyond our charm, good lucks, and our unwavering loyalty (and, yes, I am riffing on a previous intro, what of it?) – you’ll know that we’re not afraid to admit when we’re wrong.
That being said, I still stand by my decision to include Dream Unending‘s first album in my list of the most “Disappointing” albums of 2021 as, while I didn’t hate it by any means, the amount of hype around it was completely unjustified.
It wasn’t really the band’s fault, to be fair, but, from the reactions by some of the Metal Media (a lot of which seemed content to just lazily regurgitate the press materials) you might have thought that they were the first (and only) band to ever consider combining the dolorous heft of Doom with the dreamy dynamics of Post-Metal (or that Paradise Lost had never existed).
However, I am happy to report – very happy, as a matter of fact, as I always felt this project had promise, despite being so critical of their debut – that Song of Salvation is a huge step up, and a huge step forward, that just might live up to most (if not all) of the hype around the band.
(A new three-track ChestCrush EP has been out in the world for about a week, time enough for DGR to feel comfortable giving it the following review, for those who might have overlooked it.)
ChestCrush is a project we arrived at late in the year 2021. The international group’s first full length Vdelgymia was one that had hovered on the periphery for some time that year, and whenever we got the chance to share it with people, we would bring it up. It’s how the song “Grudge” wound up being spun during one of our Gimme Metal invasions, and we even argued for the brutally rock-headed “Different Shepherds, Same Sheep” as one of the most infectious songs of last year before that list performed its duties and was sent out on an ice floe.
Given that ChestCrush have resolved themselves into a year-over-year churn at the moment, it seems like you can’t discuss the group’s latest EP Apechtheia without lookng at its older sibling, because these are two very distinct releases from one another, not just in terms of musical content but also in terms of lineup: Apechtheia marks the first time that main musician Evangelos Vasilakos has united with Australian drummer Robin Stone and Texas-based death metal vocalist Topias Jokipii. Continue reading »
Exactly what constitutes the precise definition of “Technical” Death Metal is a controversial topic at the best of times.
After all, doesn’t Death Metal – above a certain number of bpm, at least – actively require a certain amount of technical talent to properly pull it off?
And where exactly does one draw the line? After all, no-one would go around referring to Cannibal Corpse as “Technical Death Metal”, obviously, but many of their riffs (and particularly their bass-lines) are pretty finger-flensing, while Dying Fetus (to pick another “big name” out of the hat) are pretty famous for their face-melting fretwork but are arguably just as well-known for their willing embrace of bone-headed brutality.
Perhaps it’s just an age thing – maybe some of today’s “Technical Death Metal” bands wouldn’t have been referred to as such “back in the day” – or maybe there’s more to it than that.
Whatever the answer is… I don’t have it for you here. But I do recommend you check out all three of the artists/albums featured in today’s article, whether you’re a fan of “Technical” Death Metal or not.
(Andy Synn is here to host our premiere of the new album from Fell Ruin, out this Friday via Tartarus Records.)
One thing everybody knows about us here at NCS is that – in addition to our dashing good looks and stunning sexual prowess – we are loyal.
If we write about your band and like what you do then we’re prepared to wait as long as it takes to hear more from you.
Case in point, Fell Ruin‘s debut album, To The Concrete Drifts, hit me like… well… like a tonne of concrete when it was released back in 2017, so when we were asked if we wanted to host the premiere of the band’s long-gestating follow-up I immediately jumped at the chance to do so.
After all, I’ve had Cast in Oil… for a while now, and since I had already planned to review it this week it just made sense to take advantage of this offer.
A word of warning though – the band’s second album is a far different beast than its predecessor. So expect the unexpected.
The mysterious Italian duo Diĝir Gidim made their recording debut five years ago, bursting out of nowhere via the ATMF label with an album named I Thought There Was the Sun Awaiting My Awakening. Lacking any precedent for it, I was taken by surprise. As I wrote at the time when we premiered it, what I heard left me gasping and unnerved, emotionally stretched taut, and wide-eyed in wonder at what these two had achieved. I felt myself enthralled by the unsettling sorcery of masters practicing a very dark but transportive art.
Thinking back on that album now, I’m not shocked that it took five years for Diĝir Gidim to return. That previous record was astonishing in its complexity, in the care and ingenuity of its conception and execution, and in the deep and unpredictable emotional effects it produced. As I again wrote then, it resembled a musical odyssey, or the unfolding of an arcane pageant, or the sound of a labyrinthine ritual within a cosmic ziggurat — not an easy trip, not an experience that was intended to comfort listeners but one designed to up-end their view of reality.
And so, that it would take them this long to create a follow-up is unsurprising. I’m just very glad that they did it. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn has a lot to say about Til Klovers Takt, the new album from Black Metal icons Kampfar, set for release by Indie Recordings on November 11th.)
It is often true, in Black Metal as much as any other genre, that the “best” bands don’t always become the “biggest” bands (and vice versa).
That’s not necessarily an attempt to belittle those acts and artists who – whether by luck, graft, or demonic intervention – have risen to the top, but it’s patently obvious (to me, anyway) that quality and popularity aren’t always correlated.
Case in point, having seen Kampfar perform multiple live shows which, in a just world, would long since have qualified them as festival headliners, and having lavished well-deserved praise on their recorded output for years now, it still galls me – as a fan of the band, and a fan of good music in general – to continually see them overlooked and ignored in favour of (arguably) lesser acts who are simply better at “playing the game”.
Let’s face it, seemingly ageless frontman (and veritable force of nature) Dolk, both live and on record, possesses the sort of natural charisma that other, more attention-hungry figures (naming no names) have clearly had to practice and rehearse very hard to achieve (or, at least, to fake), while the entire band have continually, and consistently, demonstrated themselves to be undisputed masters at crafting epic, instantly-infectious Black Metal anthems whose intensity, and integrity, is beyond reproach.
But, for whatever reasons, it still feels like the Norwegian quarter don’t get anywhere near the respect, or the acclaim, that they deserve.
Let’s hope that Til Klovers Takt will change that. Because it’s about damn time.
(Distortion Music Group released a new album by the Italian marauders Hiss from the Moat in late October, and DGR now gives it an extensive review.)
The Hiss From The Moat story as it has developed over the years is an interesting one. The group started out straddling the line of -core and full-blown brutal death metal, before leaning heavily on the brutal death metal side on their debut album Misanthropy. On top of that, it was a disc that was also pretty indulgent in its own subject matter, packing a tremendous amount of skull-shattering into a little over a half hour]s worth of music.
It seemed for a bit that Hiss From The Moat were more than happy to hop into the wave of drum-kit destruction that was hailing from Italy during the mid-2010s, and drummer James Payne especially proved to be a machine when it came to answering the call. Layering over-top a heap of Satan and general anti-christianity and you’ve got the general recipe for Hiss From The Moat at the time. Continue reading »
If you live someplace that observes Daylight Savings Time did you remember to move your clocks back one hour last night? I did not remember. But when I opened my eyes at 6:30 a.m. today I somehow did remember that it was really only 5:30 a.m., and I fell back asleep.
That might not have been a smart move, because I didn’t wake again for a couple of hours. Rather than use the time-change to get a head-start on this column, I’m left scrambling to get it done before too much of the day disappears. Words, therefore, are sometimes in relatively short supply, though the music is abundant.
P.S. For those of us in the US this might be the last time we have to remember to “fall back”. In March of this year the US Senate unanimously passed a bill that would make Daylight Savings Time permanent beginning in 2023. But the bill hasn’t been voted on by the House of Representatives, and time is running out for that to happen in the current session. Who knows? Continue reading »