Album Reviews Archives - Page 395 of 557

CLARET ASH: “THE CLEANSING”

Aug 142015

(Andy Synn reviews the new second album by Australia’s Claret Ash.)

Oh, Australia, how/why you’re currently experiencing this upsurge in attention and exposure for your contribution to the world of the Metallic arts I don’t know… but I do know that it’s thoroughly deserved.

I mean, seriously, I don’t even have to think all that hard to come up with a frankly staggering array of all the great things that have come from Down Under in recent years… Be’Lakor, Ne Obliviscaris, Drowning the Light, Orpheus Omega, Whoretopsy, the highly underappreciated Okera, Dawn of Azazel, Stargazer, Innsmouth, my current personal favourites Sanzu, Rise of Avernus, Advent Sorrow, Watchtower, Hope Drone, Spire, Wardaemonic, The Schoenberg Automaton, Caligula’s Horse, Mad Max… the list goes on!

Well, not to be forgotten or outdone, the boys in Claret Ash have just unleashed their sophomore effort, and what a nasty little piece of high-quality sonic darkness it is! Continue reading »

HOPE DRONE: “CLOAK OF ASH”

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

Aug 132015

(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Australia’s Hope Drone.)

It’s not often that I am able to pontificate on the future here at NCS and actually be correct — I’m more likely in the running to be one of the kings of talking out of my ass about what may be coming to us soon (I hear tell that the batting average amongst our other writers is just as good, though, with the exception of our lovely esteemed editor whom I have been informed is correct 100% of the time and never, ever wrong), but overall I’ve found that this is work best left to the TV pundits and people who can actually make a play at knowing what they’re talking about.

I’m admittedly enthusiastic about the style of music that I love and review, but truthfully, and in my case especially, I’m a bit on the dumb side. However, that isn’t to say that I don’t have the occasional blink of brilliance. Sometimes, there will be a band and a moment for that band where you hear them and you immediately get the sense that,”Yeah, that is going to get them signed”. These times seem so obvious that it is like being hit by a fish thrown at you in an open field; you saw it coming, but you still got gills in the face.

In the case of Brisbane’s Hope Drone, it wasn’t just one moment, it was actually a series of moments. Eleven of them, to be exact. Continue reading »

FEAR FACTORY: “GENEXUS”

Album Reviews 14 Responses »

Aug 122015

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Fear Factory.)

I’m a pretty standard Fear Factory fan. Soul of a New Machine, Demanufacture, and Obsolete are the best albums; Digimortal was a nu-metal sellout with some keeper tracks; and everything Dino-less is awful.

Mechanize was a monster comeback record, seeing Burton Bell and Dino Cazares return with fucking Gene Hoglan, and it rivaled their early material while bringing in the more thrash and melodic edge of Dino’s other band Divine Heresy.

The band’s last record, The Industrialist (which ONLY involved Bell and Cazares, according to the only album credits I can find) was good, but I didn’t find it living up to the momentum Mechanize had. Continue reading »

MATRON THORN: “THE RITUAL NARCOTIC”

Album Reviews 9 Responses »

Aug 112015

Most albums, including many that each of us would count among our personal favorites, are simply collections of individual songs. Each song may be a blast to hear, and they may stay in your head for years, but hearing all of them together doesn’t amount to much more than multiplying the time spent enjoying something you like.

Other albums, however, are greater than the sum of their parts. The individual songs may stand up well in isolation; you may get something important out of listening to specific tracks even when you’ve just stuck them on a playlist. But when you listen to all of them together, from the beginning of the album to the end, they have an emotional impact that exceeds the effect of any of them standing alone, and the reasons go deeper than simply the extended amount of time you’ve spent listening to a band you enjoy. Matron Thorn’s The Ritual Narcotic is definitely one of those albums.

The Ritual Narcotic is the first album to appear under the name Matron Thorn, but it isn’t Thorn’s first solo (or near-solo) work. He has produced more than two dozen releases under a variety of other project names, including Benighted In Sodom, (and FYI, Thorn has just begun uploading all of the Benighted In Sodom releases to Bandcamp). But perhaps his best-known work has been as the composer and sole instrumentalist of the remarkable Ævangelist. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GAROTTING DEEP / FŌR — “VOID ASCETICISM”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 2 Responses »

Aug 112015

(Andy Synn wrote this review of the new split by Garotting Deep (Canada) and FŌR (Sweden).)

So I recently stumbled upon Garotting Deep, a band whose name is a reference to the poisonous, polluted swamp-lands that play a pivotal role in Stephen Donaldson’s Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

Colour me intrigued.

Even more interestingly, the band’s newest release is a split with Swedish grim lords FŌR, a band that Islander has actually drawn the site’s attention to several times before (HERE).

So colour me doubly intrigued… as long as that colour is a suitably fuliginous shade of Black. Continue reading »

A LOATHING REQUIEM: “ACOLYTES ETERNAL”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 102015

(DGR reviews the new album by Nashville’s A Loathing Requiem.)

You may recognize the name A Loathing Requiem, as we have written about this project before. In early July we actually featured a small write-up about it in one of our “Seen and Heard”, posts alongside Orkhan and some others, and now we’re going to check back in with it because July 31st actually saw the release of the band’s second album, Acolytes Eternal.

Acolytes Eternal, the new album from A Loathing Requiem — the one-man solo tech-death project headed by perpetually angry-looking musician Malcolm Pugh — comes at an interesting time. 2015, like the years before it, seems to be adding to the ever-expanding blast-front that is the tech-death explosion, and a lot of bands are clearly giving it their all — these releases are coming hard and fast. It makes them somewhat difficult to distinguish, and you have to dig that much harder to get past the massive walls that each band erects in terms of sound and song structure.

It’s an increasingly hard field to break into, but A Loathing Requiem has some interesting advantages up its sleeve. One is that this project has been around for a while; Acolytes Eternal marks the second full-length release from this project — serving as a follow-up to 2010’s Psalms Of Misanthropy, and another advantage lies in the musician behind the project himself. Continue reading »

SOILWORK: “THE RIDE MAJESTIC”

Album Reviews 15 Responses »

Aug 102015

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Sweden’s Soilwork.)

At one point if you’d asserted that, fifteen years into their career, Swedish shred-masters Soilwork would be undergoing a creative and commercial renaissance I’m pretty sure you’d have been laughed out of whatever building you were in. Or thrown out.

Though the twin-peaks of A Predator’s Portrait and Natural Born Chaos initially positioned the band as a force to be reckoned with, the relative disappointment (creatively, if not necessarily commercially) of Figure Number Five (an album I, personally, absolutely love), Stabbing The Drama, and Sworn to a Great Divide definitely had a lot of people wondering if the band had started on the long, slow slide into mass-marketable mediocrity.

Somehow, surprisingly, 2010’s The Panic Broadcast bucked this trend with gusto, with the returning Peter Wichers clearly bringing a renewed sense of vigour and vitality to the songwriting process, and the decision (consciously or otherwise) to allow uber-drummer extraordinaire Dirk Verbeuren to finally cut-loose paying massive dividends.

This all led to the unexpected and unpredictable success of 2013’s The Living Infinite – a massive double-album undertaking which somehow sustained an impressive 85-90% hit rate across its twenty-song track-listing, re-establishing the band as contenders while simultaneously raising the bar.

And there’s the rub. Because, try as I might, I can’t help but feel like The Ride Majestic falls a little short of the mark the band have set themselves. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LUX FERRE, GOAT TORMENT, MEFISTO, BORGNE, JOTNARR

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET 5 Responses »

Aug 092015

Off and on over the last couple of days I browsed the web and links we received via e-mail, hunting for new music that I thought would be worth recommending. I’ve collected some of those here. The songs display different styles, though they are all connected to the traditions of black metal — and I think they are all very good.

LUX FERRE

Lux Ferre are a Portuguese band who somehow eluded my attention until this weekend, despite the fact that they’ve released two full-lengths and have a third one coming out this fall. The new album is entitled Excaecatio Lux Veritatis.

Lux Ferre obviously don’t crank out their albums in a hurry — this new one comes six years after the band’s last record, Atrae Materiae Monumentum, and that one followed their debut album (Antichristian War Propaganda) by five years. Though I can’t comment on the band’s previous releases, the first advance track that has appeared from the new album is tremendous. Continue reading »

NERVOSA ARE FUCKING AWESOME

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 13 Responses »

Aug 092015

photo by Pri Secco

(Our friend Derek Neibarger (Godless Angel) introduces us to a Brazilian band that he’s very excited about.)

My introduction to the Brazilian thrash trio, Nervosa, came in January of 2014 in the form of a promotional video which showed the band performing the track “Masked Betrayer” from their debut EP, Time of Death. The first four minutes of the video were dedicated to interviews with vocalist/bassist Fernanda Lira, drummer Pitchu Ferraz, and guitarist Prika Amaral. I couldn’t understand a single word of their native tongue and my attention nearly wavered up until the short film switched to the band ripping their way through “Masked Betrayer” in what appeared to be their rehearsal space.

The music was raw, fast, and aggressive, and I was immediately transported back my teenage years when I was swept away by the thrash movement of the mid ’80s. This was the same savage energy and intensity that corrupted my youth and branded me a metal junkie for life. I couldn’t wait to hear more Nervosa! Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SVARTELDER — “ASKEBUNDET”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Aug 072015

In early May I discovered and wrote about (here) a new song by a multinational band named Svartelder. I was originally drawn to the song because of an e-mail which explained that the current line-up of the band includes members of Carpathian Forest, In the Woods, Den Saakaldte, Pantheon I, and Old Forest, in addition to founder and frontman Doedsadmiral. The e-mail didn’t disclose which particular individuals from those bands are now part of Svartelder — they’ve taken new names for this purpose: Maletoth (bass, guitars), AK-47 (drums), Kobold (keyboards) — but if you snoop around on Metal-Archives, you can now figure it out.

That first song I heard was so good that I downloaded the EP that included it — Askebundet — as soon as it was released on July 10. All three songs on the EP turned out to be excellent, and I vowed to myself that I would review it promptly. Alas, like so many of my impulsive promises to myself, I failed to follow through. Now I’m finally making good — a month late. The only silver lining to the cloud of my ineptitude is that the EP is still available as a “name your own price” download on Bandcamp, so if you like it as much as I do, you can grab it without delay. Continue reading »

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