(We present another edition of Andy Synn’s three-line reviews.)
Well, it appears that “Reviews in Haikus” has become a regular monthly affair somehow, so I thought to myself… why not use it to quickly touch base with a triptych of albums I probably won’t get chance to review properly any time soon? Continue reading »
During this past weekend two very good German bands released a split in which each of them covers a song by the almighty Bathory. The bands are Ultha and Morast. The split is available on Bandcmp now and will be released on 7″ vinyl by Vendetta Records (Halo of Flies will have copies for U.S. distro). The songs will also be included in a Bathory Tribute Compilation to be released later this year by CVLT Nation. Here are a few thoughts about the split, plus streams of the songs:
ULTHA
In March of this year I posted (here) an interview of this new German black metal band along with a stream of a song from their debut album Pain Cleanses Every Doubt, which was originally released by a group of European labels last year and then re-released in April 2016 by Translation Loss Records.
And then in August I also reviewed the band’s new EP, Dismal Ruins. Both releases were so very good that I was eager to hear Ultha’s cover song for this new split. Continue reading »
(This is the third part of a multi-part post prepared by Austin Weber putting the spotlight on recent releases, and today he focuses on music from these three bands: Ehnahre, Absvrdist, and Körbl. To check out Part 1, go here, and Part 2 is at this location.)
EHNAHRE – NOTHING AND NOTHINGNESS
Back in January of 2016, I helped the Boston-based avant-garde doom group Ehnahre stream their fascinating new full-length called Douve here at NCS. It seems 2016 is a particularly productive year for Ehnahre, as the band is already back with a freshly released EP called Nothing and Nothingness. Continue reading »
(This is the second part of a multi-part post prepared by Austin Weber putting the spotlight on recent releases, and today he focuses on music from these three bands: VIII, Shioya, and Cyprus. To check out Part 1, go here.)
VIII – DECATHEXIS
For all the things in modern society we blame on social media, the flip side is how much good comes from using it as a tool to spread and share new music and other art forms. Without it, I would never have heard of VIII, a strangely named Italian black metal group whose new album Decathexis continues to blow my fucking mind. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Sweden’s Dark Tranquillity.)
Broadly speaking, Dark Tranquillity’s career has been one characterised by successive sequences of sudden reinvention and steady refinement, with every major breakthrough followed in turn by a corresponding period of careful, if somewhat less impressive, polishing and fine-tuning.
It’s a pretty obvious pattern in hindsight. The early success of The Gallery was followed by The Mind’s I… the melodic, proggy proclivities of Projector were the jumping-off point for Haven… and then Damage Done, probably the biggest metamorphosis in the band’s career, in turn gave us both the oft-underrated Character and the (arguably) somewhat overrated Fiction.
Unfortunately it’s around this time that things get a little tricky, and we enter what has become a bit of a sensitive area for some fans, as there’s an argument – and not an unreasonable one – that the band have been stuck in something of a rut ever since, repeating the same old formula, to ever-diminishing creative (if not commercial) returns.
For although Character was, in my opinion at least, a worthy enough follow-up to Damage Done, Fiction was effectively just a brace of crowd-pleasing singles surrounded by a wealth of generally solid, but not necessarily stunning, material. And while We Are The Void hinted in places (such as the icy, blackened “Arkhangelsk” and the darkly atmospheric “Iridium”) at burgeoning changes to come, neither it, nor the disappointingly average Construct, managed to capitalise on this potential in order to fully reignite the band’s creative fires.
So the question now is, does Atoma signal another long-awaited, and long-overdue, renaissance from the Gothenburg alchemists? Continue reading »
Black metal has morphed into many different shapes since the term was first coined on the cover of Venom’s second album. Even the now-classic albums released by Norwegian bands in the early ’90s are referred to as the “second wave” because the changes had already begun, though those albums could justifiably be considered the ones that created the genre as most people now know it, far more than the prototypes of the ’80s. Of course, the morphing has continued with increasing speed from then straight up to through present.
The Dutch band Tarnkappe have little apparent interest in all the spinoffs and mutations that have transformed “black metal” into a genre term of such breadth that it no longer provides much specific guidance about the sound of bands who use it. Their new album Winterwaker (“Guardian of Winter” in English) is firmly rooted in the early ’90s — and it thrives in that cold black soil. Yet Winterwaker still has its own vivid and dynamic personality. Continue reading »
(DGR reviews the new album by Spain’s Noctem, which was released on September 30 by Art Gates Records and Prosthetic Records.)
Spain’s Noctem have kept themselves to a pretty tight every-two-years-put-out-a-new-album schedule, something made more impressive by the fact that the group have had some pretty consistent — though small — lineup shifts in between each album. In the case of Noctem’s new disc, that isn’t the case anymore, as the band’s current lineup features three new members, with the change made official in 2015.
Noctem are one of those groups who have drastically refined their sound with each release, as they trim whatever fat they find, or make a shift in sound. In the case of the group’s 2014 release Exilium, Noctem wound up a fairly sleek, blackened death metal band with a penchant for going at hyper-speed for most of the album; they sounded like a hyperbasting death metal band with just a slight bit of recent-era Kataklysm guitar shred tossed into it. The songs were of the shock-and-awe-assault type: no time to build, just starting at a million miles an hour and accelerating from there. Whatever wasn’t destroyed by the initial blast still had to weather three-plus minutes of the band roaring at you.
Haeresis is Noctem’s fourth full-length disc and it stays pretty close to its siblings Divinity, Oblivion, and Exilium in terms of run time at about ten songs and forty-five minutes in length. Barring Oblivion, which is an outlier with a last track running thirteen minutes long, Noctem have at this point found a pretty concrete formula in terms of just how many songs they want and how long an album needs to be. They’ve found that a sleek forty-some-odd minutes tends to work for them, and with Haeresis, the band do that without any instrumentals in the mix, meaning that all ten songs on Haeresis are Noctem at their most vicious. Continue reading »
On their debut demo, Sorguinazia demonstrate impressive skill in conjuring visions of chaos, horror, and inescapable doom. In the space of only three songs, they immerse the listener in maelstroms of dense, violent, suffocating sound while casting dark and mesmerizing spells at the same time. You can easily imagine that the membrane between our own reality and a dimension inhabited by monstrous wraiths is being torn asunder, and we are being inexorably pulled into the vortex where they dwell.
Sorguinazia consists of two members — Axczor (vocals, bass, drums) and Xolaryxis (guitars, vocals). Their location hasn’t been revealed. Their self-titled demo will be released on tape by Toronto’s Vault of Dried Bones on October 31, and today is a good day to spread the word about it, because all three songs have just been made available for listening on YouTube, and we’re bringing all of them to you at the end of this review. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn brings us the last of his daily reviews this week, extoling the virtues of the new album by the French band Lessen.)
Last, but by no means least, on my week-long parade through the underground and the undergrowth of the worldwide Metal scene, we’re setting up shop in France to listen to the self-proclaimed “Progressive Post-core” of Lessen and their second album A Nebulous Being, a highly melodic, intensely emotive mélange of metallicised Post-Hardcore and atmospheric Post-Rock influences, which references (at various times) bands such as The Ocean, Thrice, Shai Hulud, and even the dearly-departed Burst. Continue reading »
The debut EP of the Indian black metal band Démonos is fascinating. It doesn’t fit neatly into any of the usual pigeonholes of black metal. There are common threads that link the songs together, but each of the songs is also quite distinct from the others. Making your way through all four tracks from start to finish proves to be an enthralling and immersive experience — and it’s a trip we hope you’ll take with us as we premiere a full stream of From Sacred To Profane.
It’s tempting to attach adjectives like “avant-garde” and “progressive” to the music, in part because the EP is so varied, unpredictable, and instrumentally imaginative. It plumbs dark depths, with an often solemn and even depressive air, but the songs are also infectious when you first hear them and memorable in their aftermath. Continue reading »