LIMBONIC ART: “SPECTRE ABYSM”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 122017
 

 

(Norway-based NCS contributor Karina Noctum usually brings us interviews, but this time it’s a review — of the eighth Limbonic Art album, the first one in seven years.)

Limbonic Art is a Norwegian Black Metal band formed in 1993 that blends melody with the melancholic pace and ambient elements of Funeral Doom. It is now the solo project of Daemon (Zyklon) project, and one of my favorite one-man bands.

I discovered Limbonic Art 15 years ago. I was drawn to the cover of Moon in the Scorpio, a beautiful artwork, at the music store and ever since then I’ve been following every new release. I like the fact that it is melodic but not the kind of annoying melodic that wears you off.

Every release has a distinct nature that keeps it interesting, from the devastating, relentless, tight, and fast-paced music of Ad Noctum – Dynasty of Death to the more experimental and varied sound and ambience of In Abhorrent Dementia. Every album is different and yet each one carries the Limbonic Art mark.

Their latest album Spectre Abysm is perhaps one of the albums that remind me the most of the band’s first album, Moon in the Scorpio. The grandiose dark and ritualistic ambience of the early days is combined with excellent guitar and bass work and awesome layered vocals, all firmly framed in the Norwegian BM style. Continue reading »

SELBST: “SELBST”

 Album Reviews  17 Responses »
Jul 112017
 

 

Yesterday the two-man black metal band Selbst, originally from Venezuela and now based in Chile, released their self-titled debut album through Sun & Moon Records. This follows the band’s striking 2015 EP, An Ominous Landscape, which I briefly reviewed here. The new album is a substantial work, nearly 48 minutes long, and it confirms the considerable promise of the band’s previous shorter releases. More than that, it’s a gleaming ice-blue nova in the midnight vault of 2017 black metal.

Augmented by a spectacularly powerful production, the music is titanically heavy, potent enough to rumble your core, with many of the elaborately textured sounds reverberating as if recorded in a quartzite cavern (because the music shines as well as thunders) — from the spine-rattling drumwork to the penetrating, otherworldly guitar melodies that shimmer, swirl, and soar through blanketing storms of abrasion.

But it’s the kind of album that immaculately marries atmosphere to explosive physicality, and it also achieves a rare, knife-edge balance between the ensnaring repetition of gripping patterns and the head-spinning intricacy of progressive flourishes. The songs are in near-constant motion, in the sense of movement between differing shades of darkness, different tempos, moments of unsettling calm and terrible conflict. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GREY AURA — “1: GELIGE, TRAUMATISCHE ZIELSVERRUKKING”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 112017
 

 

We all have our metal comfort food, the genres we go to even when the performers aren’t doing anything too different from what’s been done for decades. And to be sure, a band doesn’t have to break any molds, or even chip them, to be worth hearing. Yet to varying degrees, we all have our antenna up for something that does break molds, but doesn’t simply leave you with a pile of shards, as if to proclaim nothing more than, “You see? We can break things!”

The demo you’re about to hear is indeed something that sounds very different from anything you’re probably accustomed to, and its ambitions go beyond the music itself. The explanation will take a few paragraphs, but I encourage you not to skip past them, because it’s a story that will explain and deepen the appreciation for what you’re about to hear.

And what you’re about to hear is 1: Gelige, traumatische zielsverrukking by the Dutch “post-black metal” band Grey Aura, along with the spoken recital of the first chapters of a book, in advance of its Bandcamp release tomorrow (July 12). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOD ROOT — “SALT AND ROT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 102017
 

 

While each of the four tracks on the new album by Philadelphia’s God Root could have a nerve-wracking and even devastating effect on your emotional well-being if heard alone, Salt and Rot was quite clearly planned as a unified piece of music, a single well-orchestrated descent into madness. Part crushing death ritual and part hallucinatory fall into a lightless abyss where there’s very little to hold onto, where fear and emotional breakdown are the fracturing orders of the day, the album is staggeringly powerful, stunningly bleak and disorienting, and also unforgettable. Before you know it, it has you in its clutches and pulls you into its calamitous and narcotically vaporous vortex, extinguishing the will to resist.

Salt and Rot will be released by Horror Pain Gore Death Productions on July 11th — tomorrow. To help pave this now-very-short path to its advent, we have a full stream today. My best advice is to set aside 33 minutes for uninterrupted listening, and then the rest of the day for recovery. Continue reading »

TEHOM: “THE MERCILESS LIGHT”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 102017
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the debut album by the Swedish band Tehom, released in April by Blood Harvest.)

Despite my best efforts I haven’t managed to write as much as I’d hoped to over the last few weeks. My job has been keeping me pretty busy during the day, and my evenings have largely been taken up by booking/prepping/practicing with Beyond Grace, and it’s likely that this state of affairs is only going to get worse over the next week or two, as we kick off the first leg of our album release tour this Thursday.

Thankfully I’ve already got a series of interviews lined up to cover my upcoming absence next week, and should have just enough time over the next couple of days to review a handful of albums which I feel have been woefully overlooked here at NCS.

So, without further ado, let me introduce you to the unbearable grimness of Tehom, and their debut album The Merciless Light. Continue reading »

THE BEST OF BRITISH, 2017 (PART 6): KING LEVIATHAN / PTEROGLYPH / SORROW PLAGUES

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 072017
 

 

(Andy Synn brings us a new installment in a series that focuses on recommended new releases from the U.K.)

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again – the UK Metal scene is in rude health right now.

Across the board, across a multitude of styles and sub-genres, my British brethren are kicking ass arse and taking names and working hard to remind the world that we have more to offer than just trend-chasing Pop-Metal groups and second (or third) hand copycats of American bands.

That’s not to say that things are perfect of course. There’s still a tendency in some areas to celebrate comforting mediocrity over anything with a more distinctive/challenging/interesting sound, and the occasional dominance of certain cliques still, in my opinion at least, has a slightly deleterious effect on our ability to make a serious impact outside of our own borders.

But, for whatever reason, sifting through the more generic and middle-of-the-road acts to find the ones worth my time seems to come more easily to me these days.

Maybe I’ve just become more discerning/cynical. Or maybe it’s just a sign of the cream rising to the top. Continue reading »

COLD INSIGHT: “FURTHER NOWHERE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 072017
 

 

(This is DGR’s review of the complete version of Cold Insight’s debut album, released on June 28 of this year.)

The subject matter territory that heavy metal covers is vast. When you view heavy metal as a filter through which all musical aggression seems to come through, you have a recipe for just about anything and everything being screamed, growled, shrieked, yelped, barked, and even sung about.

Heavy metal still has its staples; longtime readers will of course recognize the holy trinity of body horror in mutilation, gore, and murder — the various possibilities inflicted upon corpses has long since been the foundation upon which death metal is built. You also have Satan so ingrained throughout heavy metal that almost everything has a thin veneer of Lucifer spread on top of it, and then… then you also have the void.

We in heavy metal specialize in the void, the empty, and the abyss — we’re void worshipers and watchers, we claim to see things in the emptiness, and the abyss is where we seem to record half of our early musical releases until we can afford some proper production work.

The most analogous thing to all three, of course, is space. It doesn’t take a short logic leap to see that we exist quite literally in a Big Empty — where on a map, two planets can look close together, until you are informed that it takes years to travel between them. “Cold” and “empty” are often descriptors we apply to music, especially doom, so of course we have now wound up in space.

From that, we draw upon science fiction with its space-opera overtures and something that has found its way into heavy metal more and more, especially as a visual component. In part, this helps explain the sci-fi aesthetics of Cold Insight’s newly released debut Further Nowhere. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: ETHER — “THERE IS NOTHING LEFT FOR ME HERE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 062017
 

 

Some people are tough, some are fragile… or so we think, though it’s closer to the truth to say that everyone is tough and fragile, alloyed in different degrees, and varying with our changing circumstances. And no one would deny that the human condition is perilous, given to challenging our toughness and sometimes breaking us apart when we least expect it.

Sludge isn’t the only metal genre that grapples with these low points, but as a vehicle for expressing the crushing blows that life can deal out and providing a catharsis for their emotional impacts, it can be among the most powerful. Ether’s second album, There Is Nothing Left For Me Here, is in that category. It is also full of unexpected musical textures, and also glimpses of beauty within the desolation and sense of abandonment that hang heavy over the very heavy songs.

The album will be released tomorrow — July 7th — and we have a full stream of the music for you today. Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: “FEAR THOSE WHO FEAR HIM”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 062017
 

 

(DGR prepared this review of the third, and reportedly final, album of a consistent favorite of our site — Vallenfyre.)

In what will likely be the understatement of the year, you could easily say that Vallenfyre’s career has been one intertwined with death.

At face value, they’re a death metal band. Two out of their three album covers have prominently featured skulls, Vallenfyre’s genesis story is rooted in a tribute to founder Gregor Mackintosh’s father after he had passed, and the musicians who have taken part in the project have been death and doom metal luminaries — including longtime guitarist Hamish Glencross, formerly of My Dying Bride.

If you wanted to be reductive you could say that Vallenfyre have started to sound a lot like the groove-heavy side of Napalm Death, and now we’re faced with the prospect of the “death” of the band itself with Gregor giving interviews saying that he views the Vallenfyre releases as a trilogy and would be happy to leave it there. Continue reading »

SEMINAL EMBALMMENT: “SEMINAL EMBALMMENT”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 062017
 

 

(We welcome back Vonlughlio, with another recommendation of brutal death metal for our readers.)

So this time around I have the opportunity to write about one of my favorite BDM bands from Australia. No, it’s not Disentomb (which I do love), it’s a band from Adelaide, South Australia, named Seminal Embalmment.

Formed back in 2006 under the moniker Five Finger Disintegrator, they changed their name in 2011 (glad they did).  Two years later they signed to New Standard Elite and released their EP Stacked and Sodomized, material that displayed amazing riffs with well-executed drums and great song structures. If I had made a top EP list that year, it would have been included. The only aspect of the music that I did not enjoy as much was the vocals; they were not bad, but they did not seem to go hand-in-hand with the music. Continue reading »

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