HIGHER CRITICISM: SLAYER (PART 7) — “SEASONS IN THE ABYSS”

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Sep 252019
 

 

(This is the seventh installment in an extensive series of posts by TheMadIsraeli devoted to a retrospective analysis of the discography of Slayer, and today’s subject is the band’s 1990 album Seasons In the Abyss. Links to the preceding installments are at the end of this post. Our plan is to continue posting the remaining Parts on a daily basis until the series is completed.)

If you had asked me five years ago or more, I would’ve told you that Seasons In The Abyss is my favorite Slayer album, and the best of them all.  Nowadays, frankly, I look back on it with some fondness but I also wonder what I was smoking.

Seasons… has some of Slayer’s best SONGS for sure, but as an album it’s extremely uneven. It finds the band for the first time re-treading old ground in an uninspired manner and suffers from an awful mix, even by the varied degrees of Slayer. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HORROR GOD — “CURSED SEEDS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 242019
 

 

After a seven-year hiatus (interrupted only by their 2017 split with Techne), the Russian dissonant black/death metal band Horror God are returning this year with their third album, and their most electrifying, unpredictable, and thoroughly explosive creation yet. Bearing the title Cursed Seeds, it will be released on September 27th by Lavadome Productions, but today we present a full stream of the record — and the following thoughts about the impact of listening to it.

The releasing label makes comparative references to Gorguts and Deathspell Omega, to Ulcerate and Aosoth, to Immolation and Sunless, among others. As those references suggest, the music is multi-faceted — delirious and devastating, technically extravagant and ruthlessly bludgeoning, hallucinatory and harrowing. In its rapidly changing and often riotous permutations, it has an experimental, avant-garde quality, yet is unmistakably bestial in its ferocity. Keeping your balance as you listen is difficult; tearing yourself away from it would be even more difficult. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ROUND-UP (PART 1): MURDER MADE GOD, APOSTATE, DISTASTE

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Sep 242019
 


Murder Made God

 

(NCS scribe DGR is catching up after a long hiatus, with a multi-part collection of reviews of 2019 releases, beginning with this one.)

At one point I half-joked with myself that I’d call this column ‘with apologies’. This is due in part to the happening-more-often-than-not real life occurrences taking over my internet-writing time and resulting in missed self-imposed deadline after self-imposed deadline. In fact what you’re seeing right now is only ‘part one’ of this review roundup rather than everything at once, to protect the sanity of both your beloved writer and our beloved editor.

I keep a long running list of albums I’ve been meaning to review, stuff to look at, stuff I think our readers will find interesting, and so-forth, but as mentioned, there was a whole lot of falling behind as life just seemed to cascade one unfortunate event after another in an attempt to crush me. Long story short, by the end of the crushing I wound up with one fewer pet and became a new homeowner, with a whole bunch of bullshit in between. And so in that sense, I feel like there are apologies due not only for the lateness but also for the multiple re-writes that happened behind the scenes as I attempted to shake the rust off of what was essentially two months of exile.

That doesn’t mean music discovery and listening stopped. In fact that was an ongoing activity, and so this archive in all of its Parts covers a wide swath of the year, from January right up to stuff that came out just a few days ago. The same goes for genres and locations, because if there’s anything I do enjoy it’s traveling the world of heavy metal. The world doesn’t stop and wait for us to play catch-up, though, and right now is just as good a time as any to begin again, so if you’ll indulge me doing much shorter reviews than usual, here we go…. Continue reading »

HIGHER CRITICISM: SLAYER (PART 6) — “SOUTH OF HEAVEN”

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Sep 242019
 

 

(This is the sixth installment in an extensive series of posts by TheMadIsraeli devoted to a retrospective analysis of the discography of Slayer, and today’s subject is the band’s 1988 album South of Heaven. Links to the preceding installments are at the end of this post. Our plan is to continue posting the remaining Parts on a daily basis until the series is completed.)

After the commercially successful Reign In Blood shoved Slayer into the limelight of blasphemous metal recognition, I think a lot of longtime Slayer fans, the OG’s, wondered what the band would do next with their newfound widespread recognition.  Would they keep making albums like Reign In Blood, focused on the aggression, the endurance, and the speed that album seized upon so hard?  Apparently much to the shock of a lot of people at the time, South Of Heaven would see the band do a complete 180.  This album proved to be controversial among those who jumped on board with Reign In Blood, but I’m under the impression that the fans who’d been around since Show No Mercy loved it.  I also love this album. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HORSE DRAWN — “NONBELIEVER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 232019
 

 

The Ohio duo Horse Drawn can trace their origin back a dozen years. But both members — vocalist Bryce Seditz (Plaguewielder) and guitarist Jonny Doyle (Coldfells) have been involved in other musical projects, as well as dealing with the usual travails of daily life, and so haven’t been prolific in their output. They produced a pair of EPs in 2012, when the project was known as Horse Drawn Death Machine, and a 2015 demo named Wilted that was released after the change to their current name — and that’s been it, until today. Now, they’ve released a two-song EP named Nonbeliever as a prelude to recording a new album, and we’re helping spread the word through this post.

The EP consists of two songs. The first of them, “Cursed“, is a brand new track. The other, “Early Graves“, first appeared in a different form on one of those 2012 EPs, but has been re-recorded for this new EP. Both tracks, Horse Drawn say, take “inspiration from their Midwest origins, depression, psychedelic experiences, and the raw anger of American Black Metal”. Continue reading »

KLONE: “LE GRAND VOYAGE”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  4 Responses »
Sep 232019
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the French band Klone, which was released on September 20.)

It appears that some people have developed a few misconceptions about this site, so perhaps it’s time to clarify some things.

Firstly, we don’t make any money from NCS. We don’t run ads. We don’t take any money from labels or PR firms. None of us get paid for this. We do it for the love of music, and as a way of expressing ourselves. And, maybe if we’re lucky, what we write makes a connection with someone else along the way.

We also don’t do this for notoriety, or clicks, and while we’re aware that certain opinions or ideas might be controversial we don’t write anything for the specific purpose of courting controversy (despite a few recent examples which might suggest otherwise).

Not only that, but we also don’t have any formal structure for the way we work. No-one is “assigned” anything. No-one is given a specific field or remit or genre to focus on. We just each write about whatever grabs us or inspires us and try to keep everyone else informed so we avoid stepping on each other’s toes as best we can.

We’re also not totally opposed to clean singing, even if the site name suggests otherwise. In fact we were originally going to be called “No Clean Singing That’s Shoehorned In Purely For the Purposes of Increasing Sales or Radio Play” but that was ruled to be maybe a tiny bit too long.

Anyway, now that’s all cleared up, on to Klone. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND AN EP REVIEW): BLASPHEMOUS PUTREFACTION — “GRIEF”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 232019
 

 

The German duo Blasphemous Putrefaction staked their place in the post-apocalyptic wasteland of underground death metal when they chose their name. Through their long-sold-out debut demo tape, 2017’s Abominable Premonition, and now the new EP which includes the song we’re premiering today, they’ve devoted their diabolical talents to the unapologetic creation of foul and festering musical horror — the skull-fracturing sounds of cruelty and the mind-mangling transmission of deviancy and derangement, devoid of hope (and not caring much for melody either), but capable of sending jolts of adrenaline through a listener’s bloodstream.

This new three-track EP of primitive, rotten death metal is appropriately entitled Festering Plagues, and it will be jointly released on tape by Death In Pieces Records and Macabre End Productions in early October. We’ll present a written preview of all three tracks, including the one we’re presenting, but won’t be offended if you just dive straight-away into the swirling cesspool of foul and fetid sensations via the stream of “Grief” below. Continue reading »

HIGHER CRITICISM: SLAYER (PART 4) — “HELL AWAITS”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Sep 232019
 

 

(This is the fourth installment in an extensive series of posts by TheMadIsraeli devoted to a retrospective analysis of the discography of Slayer. Links to the preceding installments are at the end of this post. Our plan is to continue posting the remaining Parts on a daily basis until the series is completed.)

So, I somehow both never sent the original Hell Awaits part of this series to Islander AND then lost it, so I had to rewrite it.  Sorry for the slip-up.  Had to correct this obviously because it’s Slayer’s best old school release.

Hell Awaits in many ways can be viewed as a Haunting The Chapel Pt 2 sort of release.  The style of song-writing and the mood is the same, but what’s changed is that the ambition of both the song-writing and the technical execution has been leveled up quite a bit.  The result is, to me, still Slayer’s most dark and foreboding album (if you can call it that? I’ve always thought of this as another EP) and is one of my all-time favorites from the band’s body of work. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: OKTAS — “OKTAS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Sep 202019
 

 

Genre hybrids within the general ambit of extreme metal tend to be hit-or-miss affairs, and perhaps more miss than hit the further the hybridized ingredients differ from each other. Yet when the creative splicing of divergent ingredients and tonalities truly succeeds, the experience can stand out in ways that don’t often happen in the general run of genre monochromes, and reward the constant search of metal adventurists for something different. In my humble opinion, the self-titled premiere EP by Oktas, which is being released today, is one of those stand-out successes.

By way of background, an okta is a unit of measurement used to describe the amount of cloud cover at any given location. That term became the basis for the name chosen by this group of Philadelphia musicians, led by visual and musical artist Bob Stokes (Drones for Queens), who performs vocals and bass, and including friends of his from previous bands — drummer Rob Macauley and fellow bassist Carl Whitlock of Dirt Worshipper, and minimalist composer Jason Baron from Cloud Minder, who plays the cello with Oktas. (We did mention unusual tonalities, and here we have two bassists and a cellist, but no guitar.)

As forecast, this new EP embraces a range of influences, from ambient minimalism to atmospheric black metal and epic doom metal (and I hear a bit of gloomy post-punk in the mix, too), woven together with a cinematic edge. Lyrically “based in the filth ridden streets of south Philadelphia”, as Bob Stokes has told us, the words transport us “to a world destroyed by mankind’s own hubris, plagued with endless war, constant natural disasters and humanity desperate for redemption”. Continue reading »

ALTERNATIVE RELEASE DAY ROUNDUP

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Sep 202019
 


Apparatus

 

(Andy Synn presents an extra-large Friday round-up of highly recommended new releases, from Apparatus, Consummation, Crypt Sermon,  Eternal Storm, Foscor, Haunter, Soheil Al Fard, Toadeater, Weight of Emptiness, and Witch Vomit.)

Inundated and overwhelmed with new releases as we are here at NCS it’s no surprise that a lot of albums this year have gone unpraised and unremarked upon.

And this situation looks likely to only get worse going into the last quarter of the year, as there’s a frankly astounding number of new albums yet to come before 2019 draws to a close.

Heck, today alone sees highly-anticipated new releases from Cult of Luna and White Ward, an unexpectedly killer comeback from Exhorder, as well as some seriously good new records from less well-exposed, but no less deserving, artists like Coffins, Engulfed, Urn, and more.

But, chances are you’re likely to have already read a lot about all those bands, either here or elsewhere.

So, instead, I’m going to take this opportunity to draw your attention to a bunch of albums (some big, some small) that you may have missed over the last few days/weeks/months. Continue reading »

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