Album Reviews Archives - Page 146 of 545

UNRU – DIE WIEDERKEHR DES VERDRÄNGTEN

Mar 072022

(Andy Synn catches up with the new album from Germany’s Unru, which came out last Friday)

It may surprise you to learn that, more often than not, I don’t have much control over what I listen to.

Oh, sure, I try (heavy emphasis on “try”) to pre-plan what I need/want to listen to for NCS-related purposes, but when it comes to what I listen to for my own pleasure I’m much more at the mercy of my urges and impulses.

Case in point, while I started out the year listening to a lot of Metallic Hardcore or Hardcore-influenced Metal, of various shapes and stripes, more recently I’ve found myself unconsciously gravitating back towards the Black Metal side of things.

What a coincidence, then, that German Blackened Crust crew Unru appear to find themselves undergoing a similar transformation on Die Wiederkehr des Verdrängten.

WORM SHEPHERD: “RITUAL HYMNS”

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Mar 032022

(Unique Leader Records released the second album by Massachusetts-based Worm Shepherd in January. DGR finally caught up with it and now delivers this extensive review.)

I don’t know how and I don’t know where, but for a while I was pretty fucking convinced that we had sat down and reviewed the first album from the Massachusetts-based symphonic deathcore crew Worm Shepherd last year.

In The Wake Of Sol had actually been released in December of 2020 but the fact that they had then signed to Unique Leader – who have become a bastion for artists like this – and re-released the album with one new song attached to it in late March always felt like a good enough excuse.

We covered a few of the music videos but turns out we never got around to writing about the album as a whole, which means that this discussion of the group’s followup album Ritual Hymns – which saw release in the middle of January – is likely going to sound like we’re dancing between discussing both albums. Continue reading »

ALLEGAEON: “DAMNUM”

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Mar 032022

(In late February Metal Blade Records released a new album by Colorado-based Allegaeon, and our old friend TheMadIsraeli has re-surfaced with the following review.)

I’ve been taking a sizable break from NCS to recover from the holidays, to the point where I decided not to submit year-end lists or any of the usual annual stuff you see from us here, and… I’m glad I took the break. To be real for a second, sometimes it can just get exhausting to keep up with the constant barrage of new shit. Sometimes you want to just listen to old stuff, sometimes you don’t want to listen at all. At the peak of my NCS output I legit listened to 300 albums a month guaranteed. ALL while juggling college and family that needed taking care of to some degree or another.

However, that doesn’t mean I still don’t get a rush out of hearing the new stuff, whether that’s from underdogs or reliable all-stars. Allegaeon’s Damnum was always my album from the start as a way to come back to the site reviewing. It was the first thing I had knowledge of that I was truly excited about coming into 2022. Also, it just felt fortuitous that it came out the same day as Elden Ring if I’m being honest. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

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Mar 032022

(Andy Synn catches up with a few things you may have missed last month)

Is it just me or – after two years where time itself seemed to grind to a soul-crushing halt – does 2022 seem to be trying to throw everything at us all at once?

Honestly, it feels like I’ve barely had time to turn around and two months have already passed me by, leaving a ridiculous number of artists and albums unremarked and unreviewed.

Heck, I didn’t even do one of these columns for January (though if I had, it would probably have included Directional, Dysnerved, Mathan, and Wiegedood) so I’m even more behind than I thought.

It doesn’t help that February was absolutely packed with impressive new releases – including a number of unexpected surprises – so picking what and who to feature in this article was more difficult than usual this time (though, don’t I say that every time?).

Still, I hope you’ll like at least some of what I’ve chosen to feature today, which includes two bands from a little bit outside our usual spectrum, and two more overtly extreme artists making their long-awaited comeback after an eight year absence!

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, FEBRUARY 2022

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Mar 022022

(Our friend Gonzo has shown up with reviews and streams of four February 2022 releases that hit the spot for him.)

February. What a dull, useless month.

That’s what I’m telling myself, anyway, to justify the fact that the end of this month ambushed me, causing this column to be late. As long as we’re assigning blame, my day job is also a culprit.

Enough of that, though. This month saw the release of some albums I can’t stop listening to. And many of them were a complete surprise. Continue reading »

THE NEOLOGIST: “ORACLE”

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Mar 022022

(We present DGR‘s review of the new album by Pittsburgh-based The Neologist, which was released a couple weeks ago.)

It’s probably a sign that I miss Sybreed more than anything else but the combination of neck-turning whiplash and thoughts of ‘y’know what, more melodeath albums should have an out-of-left-field techno breakdown in them’ at the same time was enough to leave my head spinning.

Yet that was only one of a smattering of thoughts that crossed my mind while listening to Oracle, the newest release from Pennsylvania-based melodeath project The Neologist – a group we haven’t really checked in with since the early 2010s. Continue reading »

NIGHTRAGE: “ABYSS RISING”

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Mar 012022

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the latest album by the melodic death metal band Nightrage, which was released a bit earlier this month by Despotz Records.)

It’s been a weird review batch given that February has granted a small collection of classically inclined melodeath acts.

Nightrage have had a surprisingly long-running career. They can count themselves as among a small handful who have had a surprising number of lineup changes throughout many years, yet through force of sheer stubbornness have somehow managed to continue not only to exist but also to put out quality melodeath releases.

Yes, nowadays they’re on the lighter side of the metal scale but Marios Iliopoulos has been a hallmark of consistency throughout his musical career and also criminally good at writing earworm guitar leads. Nightrage have been an ever-present underdog, even after having some famed vocalists and guitarists pass through their lineup. They’re a sleeker band now but one that hasn’t really seen too much movement in recent years in terms of people coming and going – save for the drummer position – meaning that the Nightrage you see now has become a pretty solid musical landmark, and one that since 2015’s The Puritan and 2017’s The Venomous have been terrifyingly good at the surgical strike of a melodeath song.

Abyss Rising makes no moves to change that. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: THE SPIRIT, SLAGMAUR, CULTED, THEBES, MOTSTAND, LENGUAJE DE VIBORAS, UNITED COLOR OF BLACK METAL

Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET 1 Response »

Feb 282022

In normal times I would have posted this column yesterday, but I decided to devote yesterday to playlists of Ukrainian metal, which I hope you’ll explore (here and here) if you haven’t yet.

For this week’s black metal column I picked a variety of new songs and videos from among what I listened to in recent days, plus one big curveball of an album at the end that’s more than 18 months old.

THE SPIRIT (Germany)

To launch the column I picked the second single (with a video) to be released from this German band’s new album, Of Clarity and Galactic Structures. The new one, “Celestial Fire“, was preceded by the title track, which I’ve already written about here. True to its name, the new song blazes. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HUMATOR — “CURSE OF THE PHAROAH”

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Feb 252022

More than a dozen years have passed since the Italian/German death metal band Humator released their debut album Memories From the Abyss, but with a revamped line-up in place, and armed with a musical arsenal of obliterating and head-spinning proportions, they’re returning with a second album named Curse of the Pharoah that was inspired by Egyptian mythology and classic fantasy. It’s set for a February 28th release by the Italian label Time To Kill Records, but we have a full stream of it for you today.

This long-awaited return truly is an explosive one. With a modern production job that delivers both bunker-busting power and mind-piercing clarity where needed, the album spawns references to such old-school masters as Cannibal Corpse, Monstrosity, Suffocation, Sinister, and Morbid Angel, as well as the likes of Dying Fetus and The Black Dahlia Murder. The music is ruinously brutal and technically impressive, but displays a deft use of dynamism and melody that gives the tracks character and contagiousness. Continue reading »

BEYOND THE STYX – SENTENCE

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Feb 242022

(Andy Synn goes a few rounds with France’s Beyond the Styx and their new album, Sentence)

As I’ve said several times before, my journey into Metal began with my discovery of Punk/Hardcore.

Beginning with bands like Thrice, AFI, and BoySetsFire I eventually gravitated towards more overtly “metallic” Hardcore groups like Earth Crisis, Zao, and Vision of Disorder, and it wasn’t long until I fell/dived headlong into the even heavier side of the Metal scene.

The thing is, while I never really felt like I fit in as a Hardcore kid – I wasn’t really into the fashion (I probably wear more basketball vests now than I ever did back then), I wasn’t vegan or straight-edge (I do about one non-meat day a week these days, and have been known to drink the entire NCS crew under the table), and always felt like karate-dancing in the pit was stupid (and even, arguably, contrary to what “the scene” was supposed to be about) – I never lost my love of the music.

And while recently this has manifested itself in a series of reviews of some killer Death Metal/Hardcore crossover albums (check those out if/when you have time), it was the release of Sentence by French Metallic Hardcore crew Beyond the Styx, which really took me back to my roots this month.

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