KARTIKEYA: “SAMUDRA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 302017
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album, released earlier this month, by the Russian band Kartikeya.)

I’ve been out for awhile and I apologize for that. I had a personal tragedy occur and it caused me to have to pull back for awhile. I had originally asked Islander to review this album since I didn’t think I could, but I decided to pick myself up and do it since I’ve got a lot of history with this band.

Kartikeya’s brand of ethnic-influenced melodic death metal with modern groove and progressive influences has been a beloved sound here at NCS, among both the staff and the site’s readers. Samudra is an album that’s been waylaid by a lot of delays and suffered a lot of difficulties in coming to fruition. It’s now been SIX YEARS since Mahayuga, and for people who love this band I think there was a lot of speculation as to whether all the delays would spell doom and whether Samudra would be up to par.

We got a taste of Samudra with the 2011 Durga Puja EP (which I reviewed here) — the EP’s title track is included on the album — as well as what were originally three stand-alone singles, “The Horrors Of Home” (2012), “Tunnels of Naraka” (2013), and “The Golden Blades” (2016), which are also on this record (and each of which we’ve reviewed). “Durga Puja” was an exercise in Kartikeya pushing their Vedic elements to the absolute forefront, a borderline danceable snake dance that really served to emphasize Arsafes’s love of the culture he was raised in, while the first of those singles was more of a traditional Kartikeya-style death metal song, gnarly mangled riffs, fast as fuck, with a juxtaposed melodic chorus to keep a bit of hookiness in there.

I was surprised to find out when I finally got the promo of Samudra that those four songs were only the tip of an expansive soundscape that is like being hit by a sandstorm filled with flesh-gnawing insects and majestic wonder. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): JESSICA93 — “GUILTY SPECIES”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 302017
 

 

You’re about to have the chance to hear a full stream of Guilty Pleasures, the fourth album by the French underground band Jessica93 in advance of its November 3 release by MusicFearSatan and Teenage Menopause.

I nearly didn’t agree to host this premiere, despite how hard the album hooked me. It’s pretty far away from the varieties of extreme metal that are our bread and butter, and the vocals are entirely clean, which always generates confusion among those who take us at our word when they see the site’s name.

But then I thought, if someone as musically tunnel-visioned as I am can get enthusiastic about this music, maybe the same will be true of others who usually come here to get their skulls fractured and their brains purified by flamethrowers. And in fact I do think there are aspects of the music that are likely to appeal to segments of metal fandom. Besides, you’d have to be the victim of a C4 cervical fracture not to reflexively move to these songs. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): HOODED MENACE, WAR POSSESSION, RADON TRENCH, BLASPHEMOUS PUTREFACTION, SCARECROW

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  9 Responses »
Oct 272017
 

 

Happy Friday. And if you actually happen to be happy because it’s Friday, instead of boiling with rage because you’ve just endured four-plus days of bullshit, you may not relish the music you’re about to hear. On the other hand, maybe your preferred means of matching your happiness (or your rage) to music involves abrading your ear drums, losing your mind, and mercilessly kicking open the spigot on your adrenaline glands. In which case, brothers and sisters, you’re right where you need to be — right here.

This is Part 2 of a round-up I began yesterday (here). And even though I didn’t finish this in time to post it yesterday, it’s exactly what I intended to post then. In other words, I decided to close my ears to the flood of other new songs that surfaced between then and now. There’s always time to catch up with that on Saturday, though I have a bad tendency to wound myself with intoxicants on Friday nights, so I ain’t promising nothing.

HOODED MENACE

The fifth Hooded Menace album will arrive on January 26 via Season of Mist, with the title Ossuarium Silhouettes Unhallowed and cover art by Adam Burke, who continues to kill everything this year. The first advance track, “Carnal Reflections“, debuted at DECIBEL two days ago. Or was it three? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): PORTAL, VALDUR, WALTER FORNICATION, DÖDSRIT, TERRA MATER

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  8 Responses »
Oct 262017
 

 

I started writing this round-up of new music two days ago, but was unable to finish it. It is now somewhat dated. But I’ve resisted the impulse to make it dramatically longer by adding everything I’ve discovered in the intervening days — I only added two new things. But since the collection has now ballooned up to music from 10 bands, I divided it into two parts

I really don’t believe that there is a higher or lower power organizing the events of my life, but I can understand why other people do believe that. Sometimes the shit rains down so hard and chokes the throat so completely that I think to myself, “This can’t possibly be a matter of chance!” And sometimes everything flows so shiny and chrome that I think I have done something right and some force recognizes that and bestows a blessed reward. Take last night, for example.

In making my usual rounds, in which I surf the effluent of the internet and our own in-box looking for musical revelations, I came across the following gems gleaming among the sewage. And it’s all pretty damned filthy, yet still gleaming, in the way that the best filth shines with a preternatural vibrancy.

And while I don’t believe in higher or lower powers, I do appreciate synchronicity, and so it proved to be that almost everything here was a form of death metal (though my later additions diluted the death a bit), and the excursion began and ended with scarecrows, which seemed so fitting less than one week before Halloween. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TALV — “ENTERING A TIMELESS WINTER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 252017
 

 

The Italian one-man black metal project Talv makes no secret about the atmosphere created by the new third album that’s set for release on November 3 by A Sad Sadness Song (a sub-label of ATMF). It is clearly displayed in the cover art, in the album’s title — Entering A Timeless Winter — and in the names of the songs (“Dreaming A Funeral In Another Life”, “A Sad Moon Concealed By Pines”, and Sidereal Hypothermia”), as well as in Tarv’s decision to end the album with an ethereal ambient-music cover of a song (“Winterreise”) by Coldworld.

In short, this is a bleak and wintry form of musical sorcery, and to hear it is to slowly drown in a vast and rising lake of tears, one that’s frigid enough to slow the blood, cloud the emotions, and carry the mind away to places we might not often visit. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEVLSY — “PRIVATE SUITE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 242017
 

 

“Post-Black Metal” is a particularly amorphous genre term, one that has been applied to everything from Alcest to Enslaved, from Sólstafir to Wolves In the Throne Room, from Oranssi Pazuzu to Harakiri For the Sky, from Altar of Plagues to Deafheaven. With such an expansive palette of sounds arguably encompassed by the term, it can leave a lot to the imagination, though a re-imagining of the boundaries of black metal may itself be the very core of the concept. Which brings us to the Lithuanian band DEVLSY and their forthcoming second album Private Suite.

It is a provocative and adventurous six-track affair, a compact 35 minutes of music that will be released by ATMF on November 3, but which we have the pleasure of presenting in a full stream today. Continue reading »

ANTARKTIS: “ILDLAANTE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 242017
 

 

(DGR reviews the debut album by the Swedish group Antarktis, released earlier this month by Agonia Records.)

Sweden’s Antarktis, comprised of In Mourning, Ikhon, and Necrosavant musicians, are a project that we’ve been writing about at our humble abode for some time, albeit when they were first operating under the name Majalis. In the three years since that group’s debut EP, Cathodic Black, they have changed their name to Antarktis and settled down to write what has become their recently released debut full-length Ildlaante.

The album sees the effective tracklist from Cathodic Black doubled from three to six and the runtime similarly extended to a sweet, sweet forty-some-odd minutes of drifting, grooving, and lightly keyboard-seasoned post-metal with a light sludge element that reveals them running alongside fellow countrymen Gloson in the smoke-machine-enveloped bleakness that seems almost required of the genre. Continue reading »

SCATOLOGY SECRETION: “THE RAMIFICATIONS OF A GLOBAL CALAMITY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 232017
 

 

(Vonlughlio brings us another review of brutal death metal, this time focusing on the new release by the multinational band Scatology Secretion.)

This time around I decided to do a small write-up about a new BDM band that formed in the beginning of this year. The project is called Scatology Secretion, with none other that Justin Downs (from Human Excoriation, Vituperate, Purulent Necrosis) on vocals, Oscar Fixation (of Fixation on Suffering, ex-Cerebral Effusion) on guitars, and Squeezer on drums.

In their short time as a band they were signed by rising new BDM label Reality Fade Records and this past July released their first demo entitled Inauspicious Apocalyptic Inception. That struck me as one of the best BDM demos released this year, a display of old-school BDM that reminded me of Brodequin and to some extent Disgorge.

But that wasn’t all the band accomplished this year. Not long after the release of the demo the label announced they were going to release their first full-length in 2017 as well. At that moment I must admit I was a bit worried. I mean, they just released a demo, and usually it takes time for a band to work up to the next musical endeavor. Also, I wondered whether they would they keep the same direction or change to a different sound. Would they pull an Illud upon us fans? Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ANIMA DAMNATA — “NEFARIOUS SEED GROWS TO BRING FORTH SUPREMACY OF THE BEAST”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  5 Responses »
Oct 232017
 

 

Offerings of praise to Satanus and efforts to channel blasphemous rage against the constricting noose of religious piety are commonplace in extreme forms of metal, with widely varying degrees of sincerity and success. But you will find few if any albums this year that channel such inspirations with the degree of inhuman ferocity and stunning violence displayed on the new album by Poland’s Anima Damnata. Their dedication is relentless, their execution merciless, and the impact of what they’ve done is nothing short of breathtaking.

The name of the new album, set for joint release by Godz Ov War and Malignant Voices on November 1, is Nefarious Seed Grows To Bring Forth Supremacy of the Beast. It’s their third full-length in a career that began in the mid-’90s.

About halfway through the album during the first time I heard it I realized that my mouth was hanging open, and had been hanging open since a few minutes into the first track. Even then, despite looking like a carp out of water, I couldn’t close the gaping hole in my face. The sheer speed and unrestrained fury manifested in the music is simply stupefying.

And simply surviving the assault may be as much of a challenge for many listeners as the high standards of destructiveness that the band obviously set for themselves. But for those steely enough to run this gauntlet, you’re in for an exhilarating (and perhaps terrifying) experience as we deliver the premiere of a full album stream today. Continue reading »

SARKE: “VIIGE URH”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 232017
 

 

(Norway-based metal writer Karina Noctum prepared this review of the new fifth album by the Norwegian band Sarke.)

Sarke released their fifth full-length Viige Urh on October 13. This time they are infusing the Viking theme into the music. This is not being done in the same metal fashion as other epic, folk bands have done. They borrow from genres which you wouldn’t normally see mixed into anything Viking. They are attempting to sound unique without straying too far from their original sound, and they succeed.

This album is excellent and it is not going to bore you at all because it is complex and comes with many musical surprises along the way. In addition, it is super-infused with feeling! So it is also unique in that sense. With Viige Urh, Sarke get a bit less thrashy and voyage much more into the dark waters of Viking, Stoner, and Doom.

In fact, Sarke kinda mess with your head by blending so many different soundscapes into a whole, and it is amazing how they manage to do this while maintaining a hold on the album’s integrity. It is absolutely not a mess, yet it is ever-changing and even gets a bit experimental. I guess it takes lots of years to get to this point. It can’t be done easily. Continue reading »

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