(Andy Synn reviews the new album by The Great Old Ones, which will be released on October 25th by Season of Mist.)
My relationship with the French coven who refer to themselves as The Great Old Ones has been a long and fruitful one.
And it’s for this reason, among many others, that I feel a certain responsibility to provide you, our loyal readers, with the unvarnished truth (at least, as far as I perceive it) about their newest album, which is set for release next week. Continue reading »
It’s been a hell of a week, and I do mean HELL. I’ll spare you the details, because no one likes a whiner (except the core supporters of our current President), but mishaps befalling a loved one and demands by my fucking day job have interfered (again) with my NCS time. These round-ups are always the first casualties when such things happen, so I thought I’d use this relatively placid Saturday morning to catch up a little.
I picked the following songs a couple of days ago after a rare opportunity this past week to do a bit of listening. Many other new songs have come out since then, adding to the long list that already existed, but I decided not to listen to anything else new and just get this done.
GRUZJA
Jeszcze Nie Mamy Na Was Pomysłu is the name of the second album by the Polish black metal band Gruzja, whose line-up includes members of Furia, Mentor, and Biesy (among other groups). It’s set for release (CD and digital) on October 22nd by Godz Ov War Productions, but the whole album is already streaming on Bandcamp. Google Translate tells us that the album’s title, in English, is “We don’t have an idea for you yet”. But Google Translate has a habit of mangling its translations of the Polish language, so I wouldn’t put too much stock in that rendition.
When I began the process of selecting music for this round-up, I only found one song from the album (“800 ZŁ”), which grabbed me in a head-lock, and only this morning discovered that the whole record had been launched on Bandcamp. Consequently, my impressions of the album as a whole may be a bit mangled, too, and have certainly been rendered hastily.
Continue reading »
(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Norwegian black meal band 1349, which will be released on October 18th by Season of Mist.)
It’s been well-documented, on several occasions, that my favourite 1349 album is 2010’s Demonoir.
As you can imagine then, I was particularly excited when it was revealed that the band’s new album (released next Friday) was a pseudo-sequel (or is it a prequel?) to that hallowed record.
The only question is, could it be as good? Continue reading »
(TheMadIsraeli introduces our premiere of the new EP by the Norwegian band Fleshmeadow, which will be released via Bandcamp on October 11th.)
I try to avoid hyperbolic statements about how a new or new-ish band to the scene are paving the way for their style or how they’re the sickest fucking thing I’ve heard in forever, but Fleshmeadow are one of those bands to me.
I reviewed and we premiered the band’s debut album Umbra back in 2016‘s final days, and it was one of my favorite records that came out that year. Their uncanny mastery of technical black metal mixed with touches of ritualistic death metal and a bit of deathgrind really hit a note in my soul that screamed with feral ecstasy. I’ve listened to Umbra regularly since I discovered it and have eagerly awaited what I would hear next from these blasphemous Norwegian carnage mongers. Continue reading »
(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Norwegian band Solstorm, released on October 4th.)
There is a pronounced tendency, in art, in literature, in cinema, to treat the apocalypse (and its aftermath) as something dramatic and thrilling. Something equally capable of generating excitement as it is terror.
But the terrible truth is that the end of all things… is just that. An ending. A time for, if nothing else, looking back on what has come before, because there is no tomorrow.
This is something that Solstorm first captured on their debut, self-titled album, way back in 2013, and which they return to here, on the succinctly-titled II. Continue reading »
(This is the third and final subpart of a fourth installment in DGR’s effort to catch up on reviews of 2019 releases he wants to recommend, with this 3-part fourth post devoted to melodic death metal. Today the subject is the third full-length by the Swedish band To Dust, which was released in March of this year.)
The presence here of To Dust comes courtesy of the random-band button at Metal-Archives, which has provided me with quite a few gems and discoveries over the years. I’ve gained a habit of just slamming on that button while on lunch break at work, with the endless flood of metal bands providing multiple cocked eyebrows in the form of ‘that looks interesting’ to ‘holy shit, are you kidding me? that qualifies here?’. To Dust were very much the former — even though their profile photo on that site is hilariously out of date.
For some reason the title of their latest album, False God Of Death, caught my eye, and the simply stated cover art somewhat sealed the deal, though I’d be bullshitting you if I denied that their being a melodeath band didn’t help give the group a boost. As stated before, although tech-death has become a comfort food, melodeath has become my bread-and-butter genre to enjoy.
False God Of Death was released all the way back at the tail end of March and bears a lot of the hallmarks of the melodeath genre: grand keyboard swells, hefty two-step-driven guitar work, and a snarling vocalist hovering in the mid-high range whose vocal delivery is as percussive as their drummer is. Continue reading »
(This is the second subpart of a fourth installment in DGR’s effort to catch up on reviews of 2019 releases he wants to recommend, with this 3-part fourth post devoted to melodic death metal. Today the subject is the debut full-length by the German band Fading Aeon, which was released on July 5th.)
At five songs and over forty minutes of material — with the Bandcamp download including an instrumental version of the title song if you really want to stretch — it was initially hard to place what exactly Fading Aeon’s A Warriors Tale was going to sound like. A Warrior’s Tale was released on the group’s Bandcamp in July, but became a victim of circumstance on my end and thus became a late-in-the-year discovery — one of the longer waits of any of these groups to become part of this review round up.
The three-piece could have been any number of things, with song lengths that stretched well into the nine-minute range, although their album art and logo suggested they probably weren’t a doom band. With a name like A Warrior’s Tale, my best guess would’ve been the sort of keyboard-and-guitar-interplay-heavy, folk-melodeath of a group like Wintersun. I seem to find one band every year that is really good that also really loves that particular slice of the melodeath scene and has absorbed heavy influence from it.
After a lot of listens to A Warrior’s Tale I can say that I was partly right, as Fading Aeon are an epic melodeath band, heavy on the keys and long song lengths — but not so reliant on speed as one might expect, instead favoring an approach that makes this trio sound massive, and with a pleasant surprise on the vocal front to boot. Continue reading »
(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Arizona death metal band Gatecreeper, which has just been released by Relapse Records.)
I’ve been making my way through the Will Forte-led comedy/drama (dramedy?) series The Last Man On Earth recently, having missed out on it when it first aired.
This has very little to do with Gatecreeper, to be entirely honest, except to allow me to say that Deserted continues to prove that Death Metal is still “alive in Tucson”. Continue reading »
Archons
(DGR turned in a surprise 4th installment in his effort to catch up with reviews of 2019 releases after a personal hiatus. The first 3 installments are here, here, and here. However, our beleaguered editor (me) decided to cut this 4th installment into 3 parts, focusing on one album per day, beginning with this review of the comeback album by Archons.)
Hey, did you guys catch when the previous collection of these reviews was referred to as part three of three?
Ha. Oops.
In all seriousness this last piece is it. After this, I’m caught up, and for that some thanks are in order. Even though life derailed me hard for a moment and this review archive for the longest time held a title of ‘Review Archive Jan-Feb’, ever-expanding and at one point holding twenty-two releases that I had hoped to look at, I was finally able to get this done thanks in large part to the other writers on this site being understanding enough to pick up some of my slack, including reviewing releases that are pretty firmly in the ‘DGR wheelhouse’.
This collection absorbed releases throughout the year, and thanks to the rest of the crew for picking up on bigger releases that I would’ve wanted to talk about like Wormed or Hate, I was able to knuckle up and tackle these lesser-known bands and finally be done.
Just in time for stuff like In Mourning and Insomnium to hit…whoops. Continue reading »
We’re calling this a premiere, but that’s not strictly true. It’s more like a wake-up call to people who might have missed the album we’re streaming below, and an alert to both old and new fans that the record is being released today on CD for the first time by ATMF.
The album in question is Entropic Increase From The Omega Aeon, the second full-length by the formidable Chilean black metal band Xul ov Kvlten, which was first released as a digital download this past January. As one of the late-comers to the album, but now having become immersed in it, I am not a bit surprised that ATMF picked it up for a physical release. Continue reading »