Album Reviews Archives - Page 44 of 563

POINT MORT – LE POINT DE NON-RETOUR

Apr 302025

(Andy Synn decides to shake things up a little with the genre-blending new album from Point Mort)

Whenever you’re writing about a band like Parisian “post-genre” provocateurs Point Mort – whose sound combines elements and influences from (Post) Metal, (Post) Hardcore, Alt-Pop, Rap, Electronica, and more – it’s often hard to know quite where to begin.

After all, while comparisons and references to the likes of The Ocean and Oathbreaker, Leprous and Latitudes, Rolo Tomassi and Refused are certainly valid (though by no means exhaustive) they’re never going to really capture just how defiantly – and potentially divisively – the French quartet resist easy categorisation.

But, much as an expert chef is capable of taking a concoction of ingredients that wouldn’t normally work together and turning them into a Michelin-starred meal, so too have Point Mort taken an array of sounds and styles and combined them into a delicious seven song smorgasbord named Le point de non-retour.

DESERTED FEAR: “VEINS OF FIRE”

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Apr 292025

(Below you will find DGR‘s review of the newest album by Deserted Fear, released late last week by Testimony Records.)

Germany’s Deserted Fear have been the engine that could over the course of six albums now. A compact project that has been a three-piece for a large course of their career, the band have been a consistent mark within the world of heavy metal.

Since 2012’s My Empire, Deserted Fear have proven themselves reliable, with releases hitting like clockwork on about the two-to-three-year mark. Their artistic evolution has seen the group change over the years from a very groove-inspired and influence-worshiping branch of death metal – the classic one-two thump of swede-death and Bolt Thrower‘s primal hammering filtered through the modern era’s taste for ruthless efficiency – to something akin to a current-day melodic death metal band since the days of 2019’s Drowned By Humanity.

While the logo or their taste for artwork has remained suitably corpse-obsessed, Deserted Fear have embraced a surgical attack that has made the three-piece sound so much larger than they actually are and one that has also made them fairly easy to understand and get into a groove of your own with.

While the melodeath genre has seen its fair share of revivalism across multiple eras and numerous “influenced by the influenced by the influenced by” crews, Deserted Fear have grown more naturally into a role that could just as easily have been built for late 90’s/early 00’s era In Flames and Soilwork. Deserted Fear‘s newest album Veins Of Fire puts a big spotlight on that fact and also shows that the band have comfortably settled in as being vanguards for doing so. Continue reading »

HEXEKRATION RITES: “MISANTHROPIC PATH OF CARNAL DELIVERANCE”

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Apr 282025

(Our Norway-based contributor Chile prepared the following vivid review of Hexekration Rites‘ debut album Misanthropic Path of Carnal Deliverance, released last week by Godz Ov War Productions.)

First things first. The listening process is never a straightforward one. There comes an album occasionally that you’d listen to once or twice, shrug and move on. Maybe you’d give it one more chance. Or not. And then sometimes comes along an album that commands your attention on the very first listen. Like putting a spell on you, stopping the thing that you’re doing. This is that album.

The French marauders in Hexekration Rites have been around for some seven years now and it says a lot about a band when it gets high praise years before them even thinking of releasing a full-length debut. Exactly this happened with their demo release and the first EP Desekration Manifesto, both getting some downright carnal love here on No Clean Singing. A recommended read and a listen, surely. Continue reading »

VOIDFALLEN: “THE RITUALS OF RESILIENCE”

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Apr 282025

(In February Noble Demon released a new album by the Finnish melodic death metal hellions Voidfallen. DGR held fire and allowed the album to boil through his sensorium for a while, as he often does, and he’s now ready to give us his thoughts about it.)

Like many a melodeath band in this day and age, Finland’s Voidfallen are an interesting proposition. This is a genre well-known and well-trodden with an immense body of work to its name and just as many contortions and permutations as someone could even imagine – and then some. There’s been an insane number of groups looking to put their own spin on the catchier and more glamorous side of death metal, taking its penchant for hook-heavy riff work and shred-tastic guitar soloing and continually stacking new blocks atop it or bending it to their will.

When you have regional flavorings adding to the massive subgenrification of a style, you know you’re dealing with an unruly beast, one which at this point is beyond just the territory of a devil we know and well within the realms of a devil we may have been intimate with once or twice, assuming that quiet nod and knowing wink isn’t just suggesting future adventures post-expected drunken blackout.

Noble Demon then have an intriguing idea put forth with Voidfallen‘s second album The Rituals Of Resilience. Beyond the masks and spectacle, Voidfallen are a combination of classic keyboard and guitar warrior melodeath, slamming face-first into an insane tango with the darker side of Omnium Gatherum‘s slightly more progressive flavorings. The Rituals Of Resilience has Voidfallen smashing up against the plexiglass of their chosen genre in a classic act of attempting to do what could best be defined as ‘a hell of a lot’ while still hewing hard into their foundational drawings. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DISPYT — “FRÅN MELANKOLI TILL MENINGSLÖSHET”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Apr 252025

(Andy Synn steps in as a last minute substitute to host our premiere of the new album by Dispyt)

Up until about… let’s call it 24 hours ago… I thought I was done writing here for the week.

Unfortunately our great and glorious leader – who was originally intending to share his thoughts about Från melankoli till meningslöshet, the upcoming third album by filthy Finnish riff-mongers Dispyt (out 29 April) – ran into a few difficulties and was struggling to find time to put his thoughts into words here for us all to gorge upon.

And so, heroically and without hesitation, I volunteered my services… after all, I’ve been a fan of the band ever since I stumbled across their debut album, Den ständigt närvarande ångesten, more years ago than I care to think about, so who better to give them their due?

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CHANGELING — “CHANGELING”

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Apr 242025

(written by Islander)

We don’t need to be mind-readers to fathom why Tom “Fountainhead” Geldschläger named his new project and its debut album Changeling. Like the legend from European folklore, it has the musical presence of a supernatural shape-shifter whose diabolical essence diverged from the shapes that disguised it in place of the humans spirited away — except there’s no real disguise here, because the music strikingly and abundantly seems well beyond the capabilities of base-level humans.

Changeling is an entirely fitting name, but Fountainhead might also have chosen the name Phileas Fogg, the adventurous creation of Jules Verne who accepted a wager to go Around the World in Eighty Days. That idea comes to mind because the album, in its many changing escapades, in some ways does seem like a globe-spanning, head-spinning tour by ground, air, water, and subterranean passages, spanning different cultures, different sights, and different dangers.

Except this grand tour will only take you an hour, an hour very well spent, as you’ll discover today through our complete premiere of Changeling in advance of its April 25th release by Season of Mist. Continue reading »

FLESHBORE: “PAINTED PARADISE”

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Apr 242025

(January releases sometimes get overlooked. DGR doesn’t want that to happen in the case of the new album from Indiana’s Fleshbore, which Transcending Obscurity Records brought us in the first month of this year, and he explains why at length below.)

February brought us a new release in the tech-death world from Indiana’s Fleshbore. Painted Paradise is only the group’s second album but already has them on a strong trajectory. The issue for the band right now is that they’re competing in an incredibly crowded and flush sphere of the musical world and at such a time in which even a genre like tech-death, long known as being the swirling mass of instrumental craziness, has long since codified into something fairly recognizable.

We have labels that even specialize in this sort of thing and, depending on which one a band is on, you could even guess with about eighty percent accuracy as to what they sound like based on that idea alone. Painted Paradise, then, is an interesting release because it is an album where you can understand almost immediately why someone would want to throw their weight behind it.

One of the biggest challenges for a modern day tech-death group is differentiating themselves within the wider genre-sphere and escaping the wall-of-notes stereotype or the rapidly shifting guitar dynamic that often has parts quickly devolving into auditory mud. Yet somehow – even with a healthy dose of influence worship – Fleshbore do so on Painted Paradise, but the bigger question of how may take a little more explanation than what an opening segment may allow. Continue reading »

ZMARŁYM – WIELKIE ZANIKANIE

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Apr 242025

(Find out why the new album from Zmarłym is one of Andy Synn‘s favourites of the year so far)

I may catch a little bit of flack for this… but… from my perspective the first third (since we’re almost a third of the way through the year now) of 2025 has been kind of slow, musically speaking.

I’m not saying it’s been a bad year, by any means, and if it’s been working for you then that’s not a bad thing either, but for me 2025 so far feels like a bit of a step down from 2024 (and 2023, and so on), with a lot of the “big” names or highly hyped new releases just coming across as “ok”.

That being said, there have definitely been a few notable stand-outs (some of which I’ve been able to write about and review here), and a lot more potential highlights to look forward to, so I wouldn’t exactly say we should be ready to write off the whole year just yet.

Especially when we’ve got bands like Zmarłym putting out such a distinct, dynamic, and deviously unorthodox take on Black Metal with their recently-released second album, Wielkie Zanikanie.

AORTES – CARRION

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Apr 232025

(Andy Synn encourages you to really immerse yourselves in the crushing depths of Carrion)

It’s a familiar enough refrain by now that, due to the vast amount of new music released each week/month/year, we seem to spend a lot of our time just playing catch-up here at NCS.

That being said, we do still try and sneak in a few advance reviews whenever possible… although in this particular case our best laid plans were scuppered by the fact that the band’s new album ended up being released early this last weekend.

It doesn’t really matter all that much, however – after all, it’s sometimes better to be fashionably late to the party, right?

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STRUCTURE — “HERITAGE”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Apr 222025

(written by Islander)

In the moments of silence, when we have slipped from rooms and the gaze and demands of others, we can wander through all that has been, hold the precious, present moment in our hands and weigh both our delights and despair with reasoned measure.

Those are the words that serve as a preamble to a forthcoming debut album named Heritage that we found in press materials for the album. The album, which we’re now premiering in full, is the work of a project named Structure, one established in 2021 by Dutch musician Bram Bijhout, who is perhaps best known for his guitar work with Officium Triste, whom he served for seven years.

That preamble and the album’s name (and its cover image) point toward what inspired it, as Bram has explained: Continue reading »

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