HIGHER CRITICISM: SLAYER (PART 8) — “DIVINE INTERVENTION”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
Sep 262019
 

 

(This is the eighth 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 1994 album Divine Intervention. 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.)

I’ve always perceived Divine Intervention as Slayer’s black sheep sort of release.  It’s an odd album to be sure, seeing Slayer write more tempo-complex songs, explore more death metal sorts of sounds, and adopt some of the other sounds they themselves had inspired in others.

But I like Divine Intervention quite a bit.  It’s weird, and Slayer have always been pretty good about being weird the few times they’ve done it.  There’s something unhinged about this album, and that lines up with a lot of the really bleak and depraved lyrical content.  There’s a lot of shit about serial killers on this album, and the album SOUNDS like the subject matter it addresses.  It’s sick.  It also helps that Tom Araya just sounds PISSED on this record, a tonality he’s never had before. He also sounds unhinged. Continue reading »

CRANIAL: “ALTERNATE ENDINGS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 252019
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by Germany’s Cranial, which will be released on September 27th by Moment of Collapse.)

It’s either an incredibly ballsy, or completely coincidental, move for German sludgemongers Cranial to put out Alternate Endings just one week after Post-Metal titans Cult of Luna released their new, long-awaited album, A Dawn to Fear.

After all, there’s only so much time, money, and mental energy available to potential listeners, and big releases like ADtF do tend to monopolise people’s attention for a long time both before and after they come out (heck, this is exactly why you often see movies getting pushed back or bumped up… no-one wants to go up against Star Wars at the box office unless they really have to after all!).

I’m inclined to think that it was a purposeful move by the Bavarian quartet though, as not only did they explicitly select CoL’s Magnus Lindberg to master their new record, but each of the four songs presented here is written and performed with such brash, bullish confidence that I can’t imagine any of the members of Cranial were at all worried about being compared to their Swedish brethren! Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): LAMBS‡ — “MALICE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 252019
 

 

As we rapidly approach the last quarter of the year, 2019 has already proven itself to be the bearer of some tremendously good post-metal and sludge releases, but it’s far too soon to close those chapters of the year’s book. In particular, the debut album by the Italian band LAMBS‡ hasn’t been released yet — though it will be on Friday (September 27th), via Argonauta Records — and it more than holds its own with releases by more established and widely-heralded names.

Aptly entitled Malice, it combines elements of post-metal and sludge (along with black metal and hardcore) in ways that deliver catastrophic heaviness, unearthly atmosphere, unnerving tension, harrowing gloom, and absolutely obliterating violence. It’s relentlessly gripping, and unsparingly intense, and we have a full stream of it for you now. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ROUND-UP (PART 2): THE RITUAL AURA, HOPE DRONE, ORPHEUS OMEGA

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 252019
 

 

(NCS scribe DGR is catching up on reviews after a long hiatus with a multi-part collection, of which this is the second of three parts.)

This was not intended to be the Australia segment of this roundup when I started. In fact, as I found myself bouncing around this whole archive of intended reviews, the ones I cut out to send off to the teeth machine that is this website kept lowering these down while I was adding to them, until I had the three resting on top of each other, much in the same way a puzzle game will collapse pieces on top of each other in unplanned fashion.

While I mentioned earlier that this archive has found itself both swelling and shrinking in size as the year has gone by, and even as some other writers were kind enough to pick up some of the releases I had been hoping the site would cover, these three managed to stay pretty firm in their places while we waited for their release dates to hit.

For the most part, they were always on the radar screen. It just so happened that two of them would release in close proximity to one another toward the later part of the year and the third is one of those that is strictly in this writer’s wheelhouse and basically found itself spoken for before anyone else could even get the chance to call it. Continue reading »

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

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
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

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
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 »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries