THE SYNN REPORT (PART 114): VACIVUS

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Oct 302019
 

 

(In this October edition of THE SYNN REPORT Andy Synn compiles reviews of all the releases by the UK death metal band Vacivus, including Annihilism, an album just released by Profound Lore.)

Recommended for fans of: Incantation, Teitanblood, Sulphur Aeon

Despite my current status as an all-seeing, all-knowing, font of metallic wisdom (…cough…) I still find it difficult to say which bands are going to get “big”, and why some of those bands do when others don’t.

Take UK death-dealers Vacivus, for example. Despite receiving a wealth of critical praise for their work over the last few years, the quintet have yet to have that one “breakout” moment that might put them on the fast track to stardom.

Quite why this is I’m not sure, as the band’s blending of guttural growls and gut-churning riffage, all tinged around the edges with a touch of murky atmosphere and poisonous blackened melody, instinctively hits all the right notes to appeal to an impressive cross-section of extremophiles.

So if you’re a dedicated disciple of Death Metal overlords like Incantation, Immolation, and Morbid Angel, a lover of more modern upstarts like Sulphur Aeon, Blood Incantation, and Tomb Mold, or the sort of person who enjoys wallowing in the Death/Black hybrid horror of bands like Abyssal, Portal, or Teitanblood, you owe it to yourselves to check these guys out. Continue reading »

MONTE LUNA: “DROWNERS’ WIVES”

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Oct 302019
 

 

(This is Todd Manning‘s enthusiastic review of the new album by the Texas band Monte Luna, which is out now via Argonauta Records.)

In 2017, Monte Luna dropped their debut full-length on an unsuspecting world, a sonic concoction of crushing sludge and doom mixed with psychedelic tones of weird horror and fantasy. Now they have returned like a lost tribe of barbarians charging across the wasteland. Their follow-up, Drowners’ Wives, was released on October 4th. courtesy of Italian label Argonauta Records.

For those who heard the massive sweep of the duo’s self-titled debut, they will be glad to know that the band have held onto their previous ambition. Yet the path to Doom-ridden bliss is different than before. Where in the past guitarist/vocalist James Clarke pounded out massive Conan-inspired riffage while drummer Phil Hook hammered away at Godflesh-like beats, Drowners’ Wives lets the Melvins influence shine though, primarily through massive vocal hooks. At the same time, there is a thick layer of psychedelia applied liberally over the proceedings that contributes greatly to the overall character of the album. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DIE KUNST DER FINSTERNIS — “REVENANT IN A PHANTOM WORLD (QUEEN OF OWLS ADDENDUM)”

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Oct 292019
 

 

“Die Kunst der Finsternis plays Horror Metal exclusively.” So says this Sweden-based band, the macabre solo project of Deacon D. (also a fixture in Hetroertzen), and truer words were never spoken. There is equal truth in the title of the band’s third album, Revenant in a Phantom World (Queen of Owls Addendum), because the music does indeed sound like the expressions of one who has known death and returned from its domain to haunt the living, or to feed upon their blood. It also captures the transformation that listeners risk by becoming immersed in its deeply chilling sensations.

It’s the kind of album that kindles the imagination, in very discomfiting ways, and perhaps is best described by the visions it spawns rather than by a dissection of its ingredients, which include bits and pieces of black metal, death metal, gothic melody, and a cavalcade of demonic voices, all interwoven through the experimental and expressionistic imaginings of its creator. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LVXCAELIS — “MAHER SHALAL HASH BAZ”

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Oct 282019
 

 

Now fourteen years into their existence, the Chilean black metal band LvxCaelis have produced their strongest work yet, a ravishing third album entitled Maher Shalal Hash Baz that will be released by Lamech Records, fittingly on October 31st.

Pursuing ancient occult and mystical themes across seven tracks, the trio of Irad (guitars/vocals), Nimrod (bass), and Frater B. (drums) create a sonic tableau of varying sensations, from plundering cruelty to chilling reverence, from crushing bleakness to carnal swagger, from terrifying splendor to chaotic ecstasy — and all of it cloaked with a mantle of menace and mystery. Today we give you the chance to hear all of it. Continue reading »

SARTEGOS: THE PREMIERE OF “AS DEVESAS SOM DOS LOBOS” AND A REVIEW OF “O SANGUE DA NOITE”

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Oct 282019
 

 

(On November 29th I, Voidhanger Records, in collaboration with Blood Harvest Records, will release the debut album of the Galician black metal band Sartegos. Today we’re premiering a song from the album, preceded by a review of the album by guest contributor Conchobar.)

 

“Behold, may that night be barren; may no joyful voice come into it.
May it be cursed by those who curse the day — those prepared to rouse Leviathan. May its morning stars grow dark; may it wait in vain for daylight; may it not see the breaking of dawn.…”

Job 3:7-9.

Darkness has an odd ontology; the metaphysics of night are pluripotent but also polysemic. Shadow has with it the dusky, twilit sense of a lessening, but also the waxing of a distance from daylit realities. There is, as night advances, a thickness and a viscosity in its tendrils – it stains and layers the fading of light. And as it advances, it consumes. Not ravenously, but purposively, relentlessly, indefatigably. The negentropic islands of solar reality are slowly blotted out by the obscurations of a lunar regime.That nocturnal density – its flows and coalescences, pulses and coagulations, are the blood of the night – o sangue da noite. Continue reading »

A DIRTY HALF DOZEN (SHORT BUT SWEET EDITION)

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Oct 252019
 

 

(In this column Andy Synn compiles reviews and streams of six new EPs — by Engulf, Lvcifyre, Maladie, Ordeals, Phobocosm, and Ultha.)

Damn, today is a busy one for big releases isn’t it?

We’ve got Alcest, The Great Old Ones, Vastum, Leprous, Hour of Penance, Fit for an Autopsy, Vacivus (more on them soon), Dawn Ray’d, and about a bajillion others all coming out on the same day.

So, to address this overload of new albums… I’ve decided to write a piece covering a bunch of recently released EPs instead.

Who said I wasn’t helpful? Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLDEN BATS — “VII”

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Oct 252019
 

 

Roughly one year ago the distinctive one-man mauling machine known as Golden Bats, then located in the vicinity of Brisbane, Australia, released an album named Residual Dread, the first official full-length after more than a dozen demos, splits, and EPs dating back to 2011. As recounted in this review, it was a titanically heavy album, steeped in a kind of gothic gloom, and so haunting in its laments that it threatened to split the heart even as it was splintering bone. With both a persistently brutal punch and an emotionally devastating conveyance of grief and pain, the music repeatedly hit home with staggering force on multiple levels. The songs were mainly slow or mid-paced, and relatively simple in their composition, but the music was tuned like a Stradivarius of suffering, supremely well-calculated to deliver punishment with tremendous primal force, and the songs so well-written that they were very hard to forget.

Since then, Golden Bats‘ alter ego Geordie Stafford has moved to Rome, Italy (just a couple of months ago), and is nearing completion of a follow-up album. In the meantime, he has decided to release some of his older but previously un-released creations, the first of which we’re premiering today. Denominated VII, to place it in line with a sequence of earlier demos, it includes four tracks, two of which are covers, and all of which again demonstrate the crushing power and mind-bending, emotionally wrenching impact of Golden Bats‘ formulation of sludge. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PRAISE THE PLAGUE — “TORMENT”

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Oct 252019
 

 

We would like to offer two rounds of applause to begin this premiere. The first goes to Berlin’s Praise the Plague for the wrenching emotional power channeled by their song “Torment“. The second is for Sven Liebold, whose surreal video for the song is a nightmarish feast for the eyes, one of those ever-changing visual collages that you can’t look away from, and which in this case integrates frighteningly well with the music.

The song comes from a two-track EP by Praise the Plague that was released digitally, and on vinyl by Argonauta Records, on September 13th. Entitled Antagonist II, it follows the band’s debut full-length Antagonist, which was released last year. Both tracks are powerful mood-changers, amalgams of black metal and doom that have the capacity to make you forget about whatever you were doing or feeling before listening, and to transport you into the indigo-dark dimensions where this band dwell. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MUR — “BRUTALISM”

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Oct 242019
 

 

With their self-titled debut EP released in 2014, the French band Mur (whose six-person line-up includes former members of Today is the Day, Glorior Belli, Mass Hysteria, Comity, and Four Question Marks) began feeling their way, searching for an identity for their music and beginning to establish one. When you listen to their new full-length record, Brutalism, which will be released on October 25th by Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions, it becomes apparent that they have arrived — at a place where their confidence is strong and their identity (albeit a multi-faceted one) well-defined. It isn’t so much a sea-change in sound compared to the EP as it is a giant, adventurous stride ahead on the path they began five years ago.

The album is a fascinating experience because it is such a dynamic one. It offers constant surprises, but does so without losing the bonds that forge all the experiences together into a whole, and without sacrificing the explosive, searing intensity that’s the main hallmark of the record. Previously we premiered a song from the album (“Third“) and separately reviewed another one (“I See Through Stones”), but today we have for you a stream of the complete album — and a few more impressionistic thoughts about the music (okay, more than a few). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ODIOSORDO — “CON IL BUIO NEL SANGUE”

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Oct 232019
 

 

We’re told that “Odio Sordo” is the Italian translation for “Deaf Hate”, a phrase that connotes bitterness, fury, holding a grudge. And while the Italian trio Odiosordo have embraced those words in their name, and those sensations in their musical hybrid of hardcore and black metal, their new album Con Il Buio Nel Sangue becomes a musical journey in which different experiences also come to the surface. As they tell us, the name they’ve chosen represents internal struggle against personal challenges — “born by the need of merging a strong sense of discomfort, deep disorientation, but also the will of fighting back and finding a way through life.”

As you will have probably guessed by now, the music isn’t “easy listening”. It’s raw, bleak, and ravaging, stripped of pretense, authentic in its channeling of despair and rage, and of misery and defiance. Alternately bruising, oppressive, searing in its intensity, and soaring in its grasp for a way out of harrowing times, it proves to be a relentlessly gripping experience — and we’re giving you the chance to learn that for yourselves through our full-album stream today, before the record’s October 31 release by Third I Rex, VBMF (Italy), and the Third I Rex affiliate, Imperatrix Mundi Records. Continue reading »

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