SCAR SYMMETRY: THE SINGULARITY (PHASE ONE: NEOHUMANITY)”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  9 Responses »
Oct 072014
 

 

(DGR reviews the new Scar Symmetry album.)

Heavy metal’s fascination with space is a long and storied one, especially in recent years as the mass media has become engrossed in science, with a half-million shows that all seem to boil down to, “Check out how awesome this shit is!”, as voiced by Morgan Freeman or breathlessly delivered by popular physicists.

Few bands, however, have tackled these subjects with the consistency and exploratory excitement of Scar Symmetry, having now released six albums covering a variety of subjects dealing not only with space in its physical form but also the philosophies of the universe, the science fiction aspects, and even a healthy dose of futurism — as recently provided by the group’s newly released sixth disc The Singularity (Phase One: Neohumanity), which will henceforth be referred to as Singularity. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 4

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 072014
 

 

(In this latest installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory  forays through the underground. The first installment is here, the second here, and the third here.)

SHAVASANA

The other day I was talking to a friend about Astomatous, the long-since defunct Chicago death metal band whose ranks included Nicholas McMasters, the bass player for Krallice/Geryon/others, as well as drummer Lev Weinstein, who is also in Krallice and Geryon among his many other groups.

Out of curiosity, I as usual returned to Metal-Archives to see if any of the other players were involved in continuing projects, and saw that former Astomatous guitarist, Aaron Avellone, was part of a new-ish group called Shavasana. He performs the vocals for Shavasana in addition playing guitar for them. According to the almighty Metal-Archives, their name means “corpse throne” or “throne of corpses” in Sanskrit, a fitting name for sure. Continue reading »

REVOCATION: “DEATHLESS”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Oct 062014
 

 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the forthcoming new album by Boston’s Revocation.)

Sometimes I think the best thing a band in Revocation’s position can do, with as many releases into their career as they are now, is to take a musical step back, in the interest of maintaining the essence of what the band are about.  Their previous self-titled album was good, but I and others felt that the music was stagnating a bit.  Oddly, this wasn’t because the band were getting too comfortable. Instead, I think the S/T suffered from attempts to include more progressive elements, sections, and song structures in the music, which detracted from the adrenaline and the intensity, while the core death/thrash sections felt a bit phoned in at times.  I can see where Revocation may have wanted to integrate more “out there” moments into their music, but I think maybe even Revocation themselves realized that they needed to get back in touch with what made them stand out in the first place.

In a lot of ways, Deathless feels like a back-to-basics record, at least within Revocation’s own sonic domain.  It finds the band more in the straight-up riff-driven death/thrash quality of their debut, Empire of the Obscene, and the album that catapulted them to notoriety, Existence Is Futile.  The result is Revocation’s best record since Chaos of Forms. The idea of moving in a more pure, riff-driven direction with more maturity was a really smart move, and it proves that Revocation are in fact still 100% in touch with the intensity and the knack for inducing adrenaline rush that they were founded on.

“Deathless” is 100%, back-to-front, Revocation-patented thrash-driven death metal at its best. David Davidson, as per usual, makes this record, and this band as a whole. His signature thrash/death/fusion riffing style is definitely in top form here, but those fusion-y elements of his style also feel dialed back in order to bring the thrash and death metal elements to the forefront.  It’s an interesting choice, considering it’s one of the things that “makes” him as a guitarist, but it also gives those moments when they come around an even greater impact. Continue reading »

SLUGDGE: “GASTRONOMICON”

 Album Reviews  17 Responses »
Oct 052014
 

 

The story of my blogging life: As I neared completion of this review, which I’ve been meaning to write since early summer, a friend of mine tossed off the following words on Facebook that put all my tediously crafted prose to shame: “Intergalactic riffing slugs! For the curious, imagine Akercocke, Carcass, and Morbid Angel having a love baby. And it’s a slug. From outer space. And it wants you dead.”

Sigh.

Slugdge is a two-man outfit from Preston, England, consisting of Matt Moss and Kev Pearson. What might first appear to be a typo in the band’s name is simply one of many manifestations of the band’s fixation with slugs: Their 2013 debut album was named Born of Slime, and their 2014 follow-up, Gastronomicon, includes song titles such as “Lettuce Prey”, “The Sound of Mucus”, “Invertehate”, and “Salters of Madness”. The band’s name is pronounced “Slug-j”. They seem to worship an entity named Mollusca.

Wait!  Don’t leave!  I can’t stand slugs either (they grow to the size of bananas around Puget Sound), and I tend to have a predisposed skepticism about the music of bands who prefer pun-filled song titles and generate a surface aura of goofiness. But trust me, you need this album in your life. It’s one of the year’s biggest and best surprises. Continue reading »

MOLOCH: “VERWÜSTUNG”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 052014
 

 

Moloch is an incredibly prolific one-man Ukrainian band, the alter-ego of multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sergiy Fjordsson. Since 2004 (according to Metal-Archives) Moloch has released more than 90 demos, splits, EPs, compilations, and full-length albums, and the grand total is undoubtedly higher if we include recordings that were circulated only among small groups of friends and colleagues. In 2014 alone, Moloch has participated in splits with Sabbat, Krieg, and Nunslaughter, released two EPs (Horizont and Die Isolation), and produced an album named Verwüstung. Yet despite this breathtakingly large output, the only work with which I’m familiar — and only recently so — is Verwüstung. But it made an impact on me, hence this review.

As a Moloch neophyte, I’m unable to compare and contrast Verwüstung with any of Moloch’s other releases. For me, it stands alone, but it stands tall.

The album includes two types of music, reflecting what I gather are Fjordsson’s two divergent musical passions. The first track (“Todesstille”) and the last one (“Verwüstung”) are wordless dark ambient pieces. They are markedly different from the six songs that come between them, but they don’t feel tacked on. They feel more like steps in a ritual, with “Todesstille” clearing the mind in preparation for what is to come and “Verwüstung” providing a cooling-off period and a time of reflection after the emotionally harrowing storm of black metal that precedes it. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 3

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Oct 042014
 


(In this latest installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory  forays through the underground. The first installment is here and the second is here.)

ANTHROPOMORPHIC SOUL

This release came to my attention by way of my good friend Corey Jason, also known as the sole force behind The Conjuration, whom I’ve covered here at No Clean Singing several times. So it’s fitting that what he sent me was also a one-man death metal band.

Anthropomorphic Soul is a Portugal-based projected led by sole member Nuno Lourenço, with a few guest solos and guest sax playing added for good measure. Seed Of Hate is certainly experimental death metal, yet always interesting, wrapped in a mechanical sheath of industrialized buzzing, giving it a very different, demented, horrifying feel. The skronky saxophone embellishments on “Anthropomorphic Soul” and “A New Beginning” add another flavor of mania into the mix, especially since they are not quick sax solos but extended soundscape additions — much like the quirky orchestral/choral overlays that also rise to the surface from time to time.

Seed Of Hate is hard to categorize, as it doesn’t really fit within one kind of death metal, nor is it clearly inspired by a single source. The problem I usually have with one-man death metal is that, minus Necrophagist and a handful of others, the songwriting often falls flat in favor of technical performances that are highly derivative. Fortunately, Anthropomorphic Soul does not succumb to that pitfall. For that reason alone, Seed Of Hate is worthy of your time. Continue reading »

TORCH RUNNER: “ENDLESS NOTHING”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Oct 032014
 

 

Endless Nothing is good for one thing and one thing only: Caving in your damned skull, crushing all of your vertebrae, spilling your guts, and setting them on fire. Or maybe that’s four things.

Thirteen songs, most of them short, all of them tremendously heavy and brutally destructive — that’s what the new second album by North Carolina’s Torch Runner delivers. The riffs alternately hammer like giant mallet blows or roar like smoking concrete saws, and at all times they vibrate with radioactive levels of distortion. The percussion follows the same kind of tag-team format — pounding with enough force to split asphalt or blasting away like heavy artillery.

And my god, the bass — the bass is absolutely staggering. You don’t believe me, just check out the opening minute of the album’s longest song, the catastrophically bleak “Circle of Shit”. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 2

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 032014
 

 

(In this latest installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory  forays through the underground. The first installment is here.)

VEILBURNER

Veilburner are a two-man death/black band from Pennsylvania whose strength lies in oddball mania, conjuring an unearthly interstellar feeling. Veilburner burnish an esoteric atmosphere throughout The Three Lightbearers as they dig in dissonant ditches, arising frequently with technical guitar-led passages, some of which bring Gorguts and Obscura to mind. Veilburner often back up their aggressive core with experimental soundscapes of an industrial and occult feel that is oddly psychedelic in nature.

Simply hellish stuff, and damn fun to listen to death metal infused by a cold clinical black metal embrace. This album is killer from start to finish, and to me, frequently sounds like a black metal companion to the immersive insanity Gigan conjure — rife with psychedelic inclinations and robotic/reverb heavy vocal effects amid a massive mix of horrific undulating riffs and spine-shattering drum work. I recommend listening to the whole album at once, but if you need a starting point, go with “Nil Absolute”. The Three Lightbearers rips wormholes open in your mind, leading to self-collapse from within. Get your mind explosion on! Continue reading »

METAL NOT PREVIOUSLY FEATURED ON NCS — PART 2

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Oct 032014
 

 

(We welcome back our Norwegian guest contributor Gorger, with Part 2 of an entertaining post that we began earlier this week.)

Welcome to Part Two of my little presentation of stuff I don’t think NCS has covered. If I’m mistaken about that, sue me. There’s a few dozens other releases I would like to shout about, but this seems like the best criterion to help me select by means of elimination. Part One can be read here. On we go, then.

NO RAZA – WHEN CHAOS REIGNS

Let’s start of with a trip to Colombia to meet four guys who have managed to put together an unusually solid death metal album. My impression is that this South American country is better known for cranking out brutal extreme metal with limited sophistication. Maybe I’m wrong. It has to happen sometime.

The band was apparently originated as early as 1997, but the first sign of life was the debut album from 2004. This was followed by a live album, video, and an EP before the sequel was released in 2012. I’m new to this band, and my enthusiasm for their death metal is due to several factors. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MORDBRAND — “VASTATION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Oct 032014
 

I think I’ve written about every release by Sweden’s Mordbrand after their 2010 debut in a split with Evoke, including their excellent 2014 album Imago. Since I only write about what I like and want to recommend, you can figure out that they haven’t disappointed me yet — and they still haven’t: Their forthcoming two-song 7″, Vastation, is another winner for fans of Swedish death metal.

The first song, “Failure of the Paraclete”, is loaded with a variety of big riffs — riffs that grind, gallop, lurch, and stagger — and a rhythm section that expertly matches the music’s shifting patterns, with rippling bass and tremolo chords surfacing at the end to close the song memorably. Continue reading »

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