AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: BIFID CORPSE — “REAL RAW DEATH”

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Sep 062022
 

(In this feature Chris Luedtke introduces our premiere of a new EP by Chicago’s Bifid Corpse, which is being released today via Bandcamp and features a logo by Warhead Art.)

Since 2016 Chicago two-piece Bifid Corpse have been punching out heavy, punishing tunes that largely walk a fine line between death metal and grindcore. Frantic blasts, brutally heavy guitar, gruff throat-ripping screams and growls. On top of that, sprinkle in a little bit of beatdown and the occasional doomy section and you have an idea of what you’re walking into. After a slew of shorter releases, a three-way split with Surfer James and Pythian, it looks like the band decided to go out and smelt a bigger hammer, namely their latest release Real Raw Death.

The title could not be more fitting. Bifid Corpse have cranked up the heaviness and recording quality without sacrificing any of the rawness. Real Raw Death is an immediate sledgehammer shot to the speakers. Opening with “Severed Skewed Consumed” the band lead in blasting and swinging. The heaviness and riding that grind/death wave sets up the album well. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON LABOR DAY: INTO THE SILO, HUSSAR, FIRTAN

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 052022
 

In our never-ending mission to drown people in heavy music we have another roundup to start the new week. We’re doing this even though today is a national holiday here in the U.S., and the culmination of a 3-day holiday weekend. Canada also celebrates the same holiday today, the first Monday in September. Much of the rest of the world observes a similar celebration, but does it on May 1st.

The holiday is generically in honor of “workers”, but really began as a celebration of the labor movement (or “labour”, as they spell it in Canada). “Union” has become something of a dirty word in the U.S. over the last 40 years (in that time the percentage of American workers who belong to a union has fallen by half), though labor organization seems to be experiencing at least a modest resurgence in places like Starbucks shops, Amazon warehouses, and Google’s cafeterias. More power to them.

The holiday has really become just another excuse to have a 3-day weekend of sleeping, eating, drinking, and hanging out with friends. Here in the U.S., tradition also has it that you’re not supposed to wear white after Labor Day, since it unofficially marks the end of summer. But you probably don’t wash your underwear very often anyway, so you’re good. And who wears white band shirts, I mean other than Andy Synn?

Where was I?

Oh yeah… drowning visitors in heavy music. That mission goes on, ’cause we don’t observe holidays at this clinically obsessive place (as if you couldn’t tell from the three posts that preceded this one today). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ADAESTUO, VOLLOÍOM, HYNGWAR, VOAK

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Sep 042022
 

For this Sunday’s column I’ve included three complete releases and one from a forthcoming album. I venture to say that you’ll find the first two releases formidably frightening and the third one more head-hooking and heart-exploding, while the advance track is an amalgam that’s fiery, feral, and defiant.

ADAESTUO (International)

I’ve written with admiration about all three of Adaestuo’s previous releases — the 2016 debut EP Tacent Semitae and the band’s two albums, Krew za krew (2018) and Manalan virrat (2020). So there was no chance I wouldn’t make the dive into Purge of the Night Cloak, a new EP they released just last week, but which seems to consist of recordings conceived in 2016 and first made in 2020. They describe it as an effort “to bring the intrepid beholder into a more Faustian Gnosis”. Continue reading »

“FASTER THAN THE FUCKING DEVIL”: WRAITH, BLACK KNIFE, GRAVERIPPER, AND UNHOLY NIGHT

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Sep 022022
 

(Today Wise Blood Records is releasing a kick-ass four-way split whose title says a lot, and Todd Manning says a lot more about it in this review.)

For those paying attention, record label Wise Blood Records has been spitting out pure fire with their releases since their inception less than two years ago. The latest release from the label is called Faster Than the Fucking Devil. It gathers together four blackened thrash acts from around the world, each spitting their own brand of blasphemous madness over the album’s thirty-seven-minute runtime.

Hailing from Northwest Indiana, Wraith kicks things off properly. Their sound draws on the early thrash classics like Exodus’s Bonded by Blood, Dark Angel’s Darkness Descends, and Metallica’s Kill ‘em All, but interjects a good dose of Motörhead as well. With tracks like “Demons of Doubt” and “(Call Me) The Destroyer” we get served the hooks of old-school metal with the rawness of black metal. They close their three songs with “Seven Serpents” which sports an awesome Slayer-inspired bridge. Continue reading »

GONZO’S BIGASS END-OF-SUMMER ROUNDUP, PART 1

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Sep 012022
 


Final Light

(Our Denver-based friend Gonzo has brought us the first installment in a round-up of new albums that emerged this summer which caught his attention and kindled his enthusiasm.)

Look, I know it’s customary to open these kinds of seasonally themed posts with some quip about “WOW, THE SUMMER REALLY FLEW BY, DIDN’T IT?” but frankly, that sort of cheekiness is an abomination I simply won’t fucking stand for, let alone perpetuate.

What I will say is that this summer delivered. It was the sort of long-overdue event that saw yours truly being able to travel to some US-based festivals, which was something I’d been longing for. Fire in the Mountain was by far the highlight. I also managed to hit an average of two shows a week during all of this, mostly around Denver. On top of all this, I pulled a requisite turn-and-burn in Vegas earlier this month for a single night of Psycho, in which I finally saw Emperor take the stage and proceed to blast my face into another dimension. To say it was worth the 22-year wait would be the understatement of the year.

The point of me saying all this is during all of the above, I was a bad NCS writer and couldn’t quite keep up my monthly tradition of yelling at the internet about the new music I’ve been listening to. So, consider this me making up for lost time:

This is part one of my end-of-summer new music roundup, with albums spanning from June to August. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SVART VINTER — “MIST”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 312022
 

Forecasts of a temperature drop radiate from Svart Vinter‘s new album Mist, communicated not only by the band’s name and the record’s title but also from the gray fog blanketing black forests on the album’s cover. Most of the world may be baking in record heat waves right now, but winter is as much a state of mind as a season.

It is, in fact, many states of mind. The season brings gale-force turbulence as well as oppressive chills, death and decay as well as huddled loneliness, and the kindling of fires in an effort to keep the dark and the cold at bay. In some areas it’s also a time of beauty and wonder. In all these ways the season itself reflects and spawns a range of moods. After the roasting many of us are now enduring, it may be more welcome than in many past years at first, before dread and difficulties settle in during the long months until spring.

Mist manages to capture many of the sensations of the dark season, sketching portraits of what happens to the Earth as it turns away from the distant blazing orb, but even more so portraying the human emotions that find their simulacrum in the outer world. Continue reading »

ESCUELA GRIND: “MEMORY THEATER”

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Aug 312022
 

(Chris Luedtke is back at NCS with a review of the sophomore album by Mass.-based Escuela Grind, due for release on September 30 by MNRK Heavy.)

Escuela Grind are no stranger to the, well, grindcore genre. Though being a thoroughly grindcore-centric band, they exist in their own space that sounds like they are channeling Fuck The Facts but from peaks and valleys away. Maybe it is the way they carry their sound, maybe it is their aggressive touring style and their savvy ability to PR themselves. Likely, it is a combination of all (they have some killer merch).

Escuela Grind have been kicking up their discography, especially since the pandemic happened. During which Indoctrination dropped, as well as two EPs titled PPOOWWEERVVIIOOLLEENNCCE and GGRRIINNDCCOORREE. Now, the band’s sophomore LP Memory Theater is up to bat.

It is difficult to put into words when an album feels good but not great. Like a dull ache or even a soft blow. That’s how Indoctrination hit me. I queue it up on occasion and remember that it is a good slab of chaos but a return is not frequent. Maybe it needs to grow on me still. So the question becomes, can Memory Theater step up the game? The short answer is yes. Continue reading »

AETERNAM: “HEIR OF THE RISING SUN”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 302022
 

(DGR wrote the following extensive review of a new album by Aeternam, which is coming out this Friday, September 2nd.)

The career path that Quebec’s Aeternam have taken in the lead-up to their latest album Heir Of The Rising Sun – their fifth overall –  has an interesting amount of twists and turns in it for a group whose genre descriptors boil down to a blackened death metal/folk metal hybrid. It’s the case with many other bands as well, but obviously those are dealing in differing shades, and in Aeternam‘s it feels more like a fight between two different styles, with each album a different snapshot at different points in that battle.

To say that the folk metal side has been winning out would be putting it politely of course, but that descriptor is inadequate here because “folk metal” often tends to conjure up imagery of a bunch of extra musicians with accordions, hurdy-gurdys, and flutes rather than a means of highlighting the music’s cultural aspects. Aeternam have often pulled from Middle Eastern history and mythology, and so too you often hear instrumentation from that region.

At first Aeternam used this effect in combination with a heavy Behemoth influence but over the years the band have lightened up – with perspective here, the band remain fairly heavy in comparison to a lot of other bands – and instead have become something more of a show, allowing themselves to stretch in a variety of different directions. In the case of Heir Of The Rising Sun, Aeternam have decided to make a thematic concept album focused on one period of time centered on the closing song ‘The Fall Of Constantinople’ – with all of the flavorings suggested therein. Continue reading »

CONAN: “EVIDENCE OF IMMORTALITY”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 292022
 

 

(This is Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by Britain’s Conan, released earlier this month by Napalm Records.)

Conan the Barbarian from Cimmeria is one of my favorite fictional characters, so a band named after him did not sit well, nor would I want a band called Bruce Banner or Frankenstein’s Monster sitting in my iPod. This set my mind against this British band when I checked out their first album. It felt like burly but otherwise nondescript sludge that did not impress me. Now, four albums worth of time has passed and I have put that behind me and was ready to listen to their newest album objectively.

It carries a great deal of thundering thump that resonates with more sonic heaviness than their first album. The vocals are howled with more conviction. Often labelled as doom, rather than a depressed plod, they lunge into an aggressive tempo for “Levitation Hoax” , and have a rawer, more sludged-out apocalyptic darkness to their sound. They even delve into more traditional, almost modern metal, grooves on songs like “Ritual of Anonymity” to create a flowing pulse of menace. “Equilibrium of Mankind” has a heavier weight to its throb. The tempo is less aggressive than the previous song. Continue reading »

REVOCATION – NETHERHEAVEN

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Aug 292022
 

(Andy Synn gets to grips with the new album from Revocation, due out 09 September on Metal Blade)

It’s always seemed odd to me that some people seem to equate “being a fan” of a band with “never, ever criticising or questioning what they do”.

Maybe it’s because they’ve invested so much of their identity into their fandom (which is never healthy), or maybe it’s because that’s just what they’ve been told by “the internet” and don’t want to rock the boat, but some folks act as though even entertaining the mildest of criticisms about a band is tantamount to a full-blown betrayal.

That’s obviously not the case, of course, and I’d argue that it’s not at all helpful for a band’s fans to just blindly praise them, since honest feedback from their audience potentially provides one of the best ways for an artist to learn and improve (but that’s an issue for a whole other article).

Case in point, while I think most would agree that Revocation have at least two top-tier classics under their belt(s) – namely 2011’s tech-tacular Chaos of Forms and 2014’s bombastically burly Deathless – it’s worth acknowledging that not every one of their seven (soon to be eight) albums hits quite the same heights (the self-titled in particular is a real clunker), and the band definitely aren’t perfect (nor do I think they’d claim to be).

But if all that has you worried about what I’m going to tell you about their newest album… don’t be, because this preamble has actually just been a clever bait-and-switch, since Netherheaven is easily on par with the band’s very best, and might even be the new standard by which all their work will be judged going forwards.

Continue reading »

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