VOLCANDRA: “INTO THE AZURE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 062020
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the debut album by Volcandra from Louisville, Kentucy. With cover art by the great Adam Burke, it was released on February 28th.)

Kentucky isn’t exactly a place where you imagine black metal springing from, especially good black metal, but new blood Volcandra are an interesting case study in that regard because not only are these guys really good, they may well be one of the most talented American black metal bands to rise up in the 2010‘s (I’m going to be pedantic and be that “the new decade isn’t till 2021“ guy).  Quite simply, through channeling a combination of Norwegian and Finnish influences on top of an adoption of more American progressive death-metal window dressing, Volcandra may very well have released one of the first great black metal records of 2020. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BORGNE — “Y”

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Mar 052020
 

 

Originally the solo project of Bornyhake (whose name has been associated with a significant number of other groups), but eventually expanding into a full band, the Swiss entity Borgne released their first album in 1998, and their path since then has resulted in eight more full-lengths. The most recent of those, entitled Y, on which Bornyhake is joined by keyboardist Lady Kaos and other guests, will be released by Borgne‘s new label Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions tomorrow, and on the eve of that event we’re presenting a full stream of the record.

Borgne‘s musical hallmark has been the integration of industrial music into black metal, with an increasingly atmospheric quality that combines with the compulsive mechanical rhythms and intense, ravaging aggression. All those qualities are very much present and accounted for within Y, yet the combined impact of them on this new record reaches levels of staggering power and immersive intensity that may be the zenith of Borgne’s work to date, putting us in the presence of forces almost unimaginably more vast than we puny humans. Continue reading »

DEVANGELIC: “ERSETU”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Mar 052020
 

 

(Here’s Vonlughlio’s review of the new album by the Italian death metal band Devangelic. It will be released by Willowtip Records and features cover art by Nick Keller)

This time around I feel fortunate to write about Devangelic’s third opus, Ersetu, to be released via Willowtip this upcoming May 15th.  They are one of my favorite BDM bands from Italy, and this release is their most mature work to date.

This band was formed back in 2012 by Mario Di Giambattista and Paolo Chiti, and they released a two-song promo that just blew everyone away and made me a fan on the spot.  Two years passed and they grace us with their debut album Resurrection Denie”, that is one of my top 10 debut albums from any BDM bands out there. The cover, music, and lyrics represented the full scope of this project with songs that were raw, fast, and in-your-face — 30 minutes of pure madness. Continue reading »

KROSIS: “A MEMOIR OF FREE WILL”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 052020
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by the North Carolina band Krosis, which was released last month by Unique Leader Records.)

These last three or four years we have witnessed a rather interesting demographic shift in US extreme metal that’s a bit unique to the current era. We’re seeing this in long form with bands such as Fit For An Autopsy, but in the case of bands like Krosis we’re hearing these guys in the middle of their musical journeys. To put it simply, a LOT of people who grew up with or got into heavy music via deathcore and djent primarily are now moving away from those sounds.

It’s only inevitable I think that these bands eventually realize how stifling those sub-genres are, and thus they turn to retaining the best parts about those sounds while embracing more front-and-center extreme metal along with modern progressive tendencies to create something that is wholly a post-2015 or ’16 phenomenon and that’s resulted in some of metal’s best modern music. Continue reading »

KANNUSTAA: A REVIEW OF “KANNUSTAA” AND THE PREMIERE OF “MOTHER”

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Mar 042020
 

 

One glance at the track list for the self-titled debut release of the multinational band Kannustaa will clue you in that their music is not conventional black metal. Song titles such as “To Give and Forget”, “Don’t Leave Me”, “Encourage”, or the track we’re premiering today — “Mother” — point in different directions than more typical misanthropic, anticosmic, or blasphemous lyrical outbursts of the genre. Truth be told, the music isn’t conventional either.

To be sure, Kannustaa are full capable of viciously stabbing your neck with high-voltage electrification. That much was evident from the first track they released, “Don’t Leave Me”. The wild yowling tone of the opening riff is so potent that it almost drowns out the rampant drumming and the throat-ripping vocal madness. The drumming switches gears into more measured cadences, but the thermonuclear guitar work continues to dominate, rising and falling, twisting and turning, flickering in anguish and moaning in despair, slashing and scything and whirring with incredible vitality. Near the end, the bass becomes a bludgeoning presence, helping to send the song out in an explosive, vertebrae-cracking finale. Continue reading »

A DUAL REVIEW: NAPALM DEATH (“LOGIC RAVAGED BY BRUTE FORCE”) / HUMAN SERPENT (“SHROUDS”)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 042020
 

 

(In this column DGR has combined reviews of two EPs, both of which are out now, one by Napalm Death and a charitable endeavor released by the Greek black metal band Human Serpent.)

 

NAPALM DEATH: “LOGIC RAVAGED BY BRUTE FORCE”

It’s wild to think that we’re a little over five years since the release of Apex Predator – Easy Meat, Napalm Death‘s most recent full-length album, but here we are with something new.

It’s always a bit of a struggle to review a Napalm Death disc. The band have become such a weirdly monolithic cultural force in the grind substratum of heavy metal that at this point you can almost take the band in sight unseen (or rather, sounds unheard) and know that the ever-prolific crew are going to find some way to beat your skull in. Yet across their immensely vast discography there remains a healthy bit of experimentation as the group fling themselves from the now traditional high-speed blasting grind to chunky death metal to songs with a fairly defined sense of groove to the noisier and more industrialized chaos that Apex Predator started to hint at. Continue reading »

CREMATIONS / DAWN PATROL / LACASTA

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Mar 042020
 


Cremations

 

(In this post Andy Synn combines reviews and streams of three albums released in February.)

Sticking to the theme which I’ve already established this week, here are a few words (and pictures, for those of you with a less literary disposition) on some recently released albums that err more towards the Hardcore side of the spectrum than our usual Death/Black/Doom fare.

First up we’ve got some heavyweight Metallic Hardcore from Hanover quartet Cremations, then there’s the punky, abrasive attack of Dawn Patrol, and, last but by no means least, the bristling blackened assault of Italy’s LaCasta.

So, something for (almost) everyone really. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TRAUMA — “OMINOUS BLACK”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Mar 032020
 

 

At a point in their long career when the Polish death metal band Trauma might be expected to slow down or even get stuck in their tracks, there is zero sign of malaise in their forthcoming eighth album, Ominous Black. Instead, they have created a record that’s explosively exuberant and persistently inventive.

To be sure, the music is unmistakably ferocious and fully capable of bludgeoning you black and blue, but what drives the album to heights of great fascination are all the head-spinning instrumental pyrotechnics and wildly mercurial permutations that mark the twisted path of each song. It’s almost tempting to call this music “progressive death metal”, except this album seems too weird and wondrous, and maybe even too malevolent, for that kind of label. On the other hand, just calling it “death metal” seems inadequate, because it’s so out of the ordinary in its ingenuity.

It’s our fiendish pleasure to throw a full stream of the album at you today, in advance of its March 6 release by Selfmadegod Records, and to imagine the looks on your faces when you figure out what’s happening to you. Continue reading »

MY DYING BRIDE: “THE GHOST OF ORION”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Mar 032020
 

 

(DGR prepared this review of the new 13th album by My Dying Bride, which will be released on March 6th by Nuclear Blast.)

 

Releasing “Your Broken Shore” in advance of My Dying Bride‘s newest album The Ghost Of Orion may be one of the shrewdest moves in music history. The “holy shit, they’re onto something with this release” comes early on during The Ghost Of Orion — during the first growled chorus of “Your Broken Shore”. While the shifting dynamic from gothic melodrama to the oppressive heaviness that My Dying Bride conjure during that section of the song may be an easy thing to sketch out musically, denying just how hard that section hits is an exercise in futility.

It’s indisputable just how heavy that moment is, and it grabs you as a listener and basically holds you in place for the rest of the song — making a near-eight-minute journey fly by as the My Dying Bride crew really hammer home why they’ve had a career as long as they’ve had and how they’ve maintained the miserable engine that has kept them going.

It’s also something of a revelation, in that “Your Broken Shore” is so strong a song that you almost wouldn’t believe you’ve got another fifty-or-so minutes of music to dive into after it. You could even say that My Dying Bride started The Ghost Of Orion with a show-stopper — if the band hadn’t left other weapons laying around in The Ghost Of Orion‘s track list. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ULCERATE, NOMAD, LIKE RATS, HOT GRAVES, BOMBS OF HADES, CHURCH OF DISGUST, HOLY DEATH

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Mar 022020
 

 

At the risk of overloading our readers with new music in light of what we’ve already sent your way over the weekend and this morning (a risk that obviously means nothing to us), here’s a carefully curated collection of chaos to begin the new week. If death metal is your meat and potatoes, this will explode your gastrointestinal tract.

ULCERATE

It didn’t take long for a new Ulcerate song to cause a flurry of comments within our internal NCS group. Not long after the title track to the band’s new album surfaced this morning, my colleagues uttered such exclamations and opinions as “tasty”, “oh shit”, “this is probably the cleanest and least reliant they’ve been on recorded-in-a-cave-next-door style mixing they’ve had yet”, “it’s DEFINITELY more melodic, and the production is warmer, but those are GOOD things”, and “it’s a natural progression from what they were doing on Shrines of Paralysis“. Continue reading »

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