SHORT BUT SWEET: MORDBRAND — “IN NIGHTED WATERS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Aug 262016
 

Mordbrand-In Nighted Waters

 

I’ve developed a habit through years of experience, much like Pavlov’s dog was trained to salivate at the sound of the bell: When I learn that Sweden’s Mordbrand have released new music, I drop what I’m doing and hungrily scamper over to the music player to listen. This happened yesterday when, without advance warning, a new Mordbrand EP popped up on Bandcamp. The name of it is In Nighted Waters.

This new EP is actually the Mordbrand half of a split LP with California’s Gravehill, which will be released in the U.S. by Doomentia and is now available in Sweden via Carnal Records. It includes four original songs and a cover of “Compost Christ” by Bluuurgh… (rearranged by Mordbrand and including guest vocals by Mike Abominator (Necronizer, ex-Gravehill). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): EYE OF SOLITUDE — “CENOTAPH”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Aug 262016
 

Eye of Solitude-Cenotaph

 

(Grant Skelton reviews the new album by the UK band Eye of Solitude and brings us the premiere of a full album stream.)

 

I’ve truly grown to love sad metal. A prevalent stereotype among the folks who do not understand our beloved genre is that all metal fans are depressed. Yeah, even suicidal. But sorrow, despair, depression, and even suicidal ideation are not unique to metal fans.

In a study published in Frontiers In Psychology, Ai Kawakami intended to find out just why people like sad music. While Kawakami and his fellow researchers used classical pieces for their study, the result is what counts. The participants in the study enjoyed listening to sad music. “Musical emotion,” Kawakami said, “encompasses both the felt emotion that the music induces in the listener and the perceived emotion that the listener judges the music to express.” (Find out more here.)

Certain kinds of metal are for partying and abusing your liver. Other kinds probably give many of us a healthy outlet for aggression so that we don’t wind up in a padded cell. But some metal — and I definitely place London’s Eye Of Solitude in this category — give us something else. I was recently given the pleasure of listening to their latest album Cenotaph. And what exactly does this album give the listener? In a single word, I’d say humanity. Continue reading »

ODDITIES: A LIST ASSEMBLED BY NEILL JAMESON (KRIEG)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 252016
 

Neill Jameson

 

(Neill Jameson (Krieg) joins us again with another compilation of recommended music, this time focusing on some metal releases that don’t easily fit into established genre definitions. To check out the other playlists Neill has brought us, they’re collected here.) 

Listening to the new Urfaust that’s coming out shortly really got me to thinking a bit, which doesn’t happen too often. The subject of the hamster wheel turning in my head was bands that fall outside of a specific subgenre but are still in the metal realm. Outsider metal I suppose. Bands that are still just as dark and carry the same emotional weight but can’t be stuck inside “black” or “death” metal strictly, probably in academic “nerd” terms or whatever you’re calling them in the comments section of popular metal sites you claim not to read. Anyway, a few of them came to mind which I wanted to share, so I’m sitting in my office writing this as a proper way to avoid reality for a bit, much like these bands are also a proper way to accomplish the same thing. Continue reading »

HEAVEN SHALL BURN: “WANDERER”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 242016
 

Heaven Shall Burn-Wanderer

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Germany’s Heaven Shall Burn.)

Recipe for success: one part Bolt Thrower, one part Earth Crisis, one part Swedish Death Metal (of the more melodic variety), and a heavy helping of Germanic thrash. Garnish with relevant philosophical and socio-political themes and roast for 15-20 years in a blaze of righteous fury.

It’s a recipe which has served Heaven Shall Burn extremely well over the years, and, though there have certainly been some valid criticisms of the band for sticking too closely to their own formula at times, it’s one that’s been responsible for keeping the German firebrands right at the forefront of the European Metalcore scene (which, with its slightly more raw and Death Metal influenced sound, I’ve often considered to be subtly distinct from its eventually more commercialised American cousin).

So I don’t think it would have surprised anyone if, on their eighth full-length album, the band had simply elected to continue with the same sound which made Iconoclast, Invictus, and Veto so successful. Why fix what isn’t broken, after all?

But… unexpectedly… that’s not exactly what happened… Continue reading »

OVARYROT — “SUICIDE IDEATION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Aug 242016
 

Ovaryrot-Suicide Ideation

 

(DGR prepared this review of the new album by the Swedish/U.S. band Ovaryrot.)

This disc sounds like a goddamned nightmare.

Every once in a while we’ll come across a release that makes the hair fly back from minute one and then leaves us glued to the wall for the entirety of its run. Not that it is usually a mark of quality, but sometimes from the first moment an album will start out sounding like someone taking a saw to sheet metal and somebody else hammering on a trash can behind it. Sometimes the music is so abrasive that you kind of can’t help but be entranced by it; judgments of quality usually come after the second or third listen, which is just about the time when  you parse out exactly whatever the fuck that previous forty-some-odd minutes of whirlwind was.

Ovaryrot’s Suicide Ideation — which came out on August 14th — is one of those albums. Not that we would ever expect a band who go by the moniker of Ovaryrot to play nice; we’ve learned our lessons there before. Continue reading »

VOLTURYON: “CLEANSED BY CARNAGE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 232016
 

Volturyon-Cleansed By Carnage

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Sweden’s Volturyon.)

Sweden’s Volturyon are a band for whom I’ve been waving the banner pretty frequently — most of that faith inspired by the EP they put out in 2014 entitled Human Demolition. It’s one that I bring up often because I feel like it flew under the radar of a lot of metal listeners; to me that seems insane, because I am hardly ever on the cutting edge of anything, and if I have something that I feel flew under the radar — something that seems to consistently surprise listeners every time I show it to them — then something isn’t right, and I need to do more to shout it from the mountaintops.

Human Demolition was a concise EP, with four songs and an intro, and three of those songs were blisteringly quick death metal grinders, with one sort of mid-tempo chuggathon to break up the pacing a tiny bit. “Concrete Devotion” is a constant highlight for me. That’s why I was pretty much locked in from the start with the group’s upcoming early-September release, Cleansed By Carnage. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: FRIGORIS — “NUR EIN MOMENT…”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 222016
 

Frigoris - Nur ein moment-AlbumCover

 

On August 25, Hypnotic Dirge will release the new album by the German band Frigoris, whose name you may recall from the praise we heaped on an advance track from the album named “Trúwen”. Entitled Nur ein Moment… (Just one Moment…), it follows the band’s 2013 debut full-length Wind and is the first part of a two-album concept that follows “the tracks of a protagonist who faces the consequences of suicide in an interior journey.” Today we present a full stream of the album in advance of its release later this week.

Through the course of the album’s six long tracks Frigoris move from passages of soft, ethereal beauty to storms of surging blackened power, interweaving elements of black metal, post-metal and doom to create a journey through a changing emotional landscape of peaks and valleys. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DAWN RAY’D — “A THORN, A BLIGHT”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Aug 222016
 

Dawn Rayd-A Thorn A Blight

 

(Andy Synn reviews the debut EP of the UK band Dawn Ray’d, which is out now on Bandcamp.)

As our contributor Wil Cifer wrote recently, “Crust seems to be a hot buzzword when it comes to underground metal these days”, to the extent I’m even starting to see it edge out the near-ubiquitous over-use of the terms “blackened” and “Black Metal” in certain places (but don’t you worry, I have a whole other column percolating in my head about THAT particular topic).

It seems to be one of those terms designed to bestow instant underground-cred on a band, whether or not it’s actually reflected in any aspects of their music, and, as such, I’ve seen it crudely co-opted multiple times by bands and writers who don’t seem to know (or care) what it means, they just want the artificial credibility and cultural capital it bestows.

I’m saying all this as a preamble because I want to make it clear right away that – even though their unwavering anti-NSBM, anti-fascist stance and sharp, punk-edged sound certainly gives them more claim to the term than some others I’ve seen – gritty Black Metal three-piece Dawn Ray’d don’t seem to care one way or the other whether you call them “Crust” or not.

They’re just happy to let the music speak for itself. Continue reading »

INQUISITION: “BLOODSHED ACROSS THE EMPYREAN ALTAR BEYOND THE CELESTIAL ZENITH”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Aug 222016
 

Inquisition-Bloodshed Across

 

It is time to put to rest any of the grumbling you might have heard in regard to the new Inquisition. Some people were more than likely already in a bad mood after hearing the new Metallica or only had a marginal intrest in Inquisition to begin with. The truth is, their new album sounds just like them, right when Dagon lets the chords ring out with such eerie dissonance.

They are not out to win over any new fans. This is not to say they are just dialing it in, as drummer Incubus brings some sinister grooves and really lays into his high hat. In the car my wife complained the crash was a little tinny, but I didn’t hear that, and overall the mix has the dense sound that I want from them. Continue reading »

LIFE, STRUGGLE, AND INTENSITY — THE WORLD OF VRASUBATLAT

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Aug 182016
 

V1

 

(We are happy to have Kaptain Carbon back with us. On this visit, he helps to commemorate the 10th release of a label called Vrasubatlat. Kaptain Carbon operates Tape Wyrm, a blog dedicated to current and lesser-known heavy metal. He also writes Dungeon Synth reviews over at Hollywood Metal as well as moderating Reddit’s r/metal community.)

It is no secret Vrasubatlat has recently become one of my recent favorite labels and collectives of bands. If you read my previous column on some of my favorite demos of 2016, you will see a glowing endorsement at the top of the page. It is only because this label keeps putting out music that I keep wanting to write about. Once they stop, I will stop as well. I do not know what to tell you. There is just something appealing about music when it feels like an open wound.

This article is to celebrate Vrasubatlat’s tenth release in two years, as well as introduce others to the wild and hellish world of black / death with social issues. Continue reading »

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