SHADES OF BLACK: MISÞYRMING, YELLOW EYES, LABYRINTHINE, BHLEG, CEMETERIUM

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Aug 242014
 

Black metal today comes in so many shapes and textures that’s it’s almost as diverse as “death metal”, its original thorned orthodoxy having blossomed into a garden of unearthly delights. In this post I’ve collected the diverse music of five black metal bands who I discovered last week. If there’s one thing they do have in common, it’s a skill in crafting melody (of all things).

MISÞYRMING

Misþyrming (“Mis-thyr-ming”) are an Icelandic band whose name came my way in rapid succession from an e-mail by NCS supporter eiterorm and an Eistnaflug-themed article by Kim Kelly. According to Kim’s article, “The Reykjavik-based project started out as a one-man endeavor and expanded when founder D.G. added drummer H.R.H. (also of Carpe Noctem) on drums.” I’ve written admiringly about Carpe Noctem before, so that kind of made three reasons to go exploring.

Misþyrming’s debut album Söngvar elds og óreiðu will be released in a collaborative effort by Fallen Empire and Terratur Possessions, and two of the songs are on Bandcamp now. The music is incendiary — perhaps the most destructive music of the five bands in this post — but when they back down from the flame-spewing they cast mesmerizing riff spells. And they do a damned fine job of flame throwing (with eerie ambience), too.

Don’t forget this band’s name — I’m confident it’s going to spread. Brilliant stuff. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SOULLESS CARNAGE, BLOODSTRIKE, SUMERLANDS

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Aug 232014
 

 

Here are three short reviews of three short releases that I think are really good. I’ve been meaning to say something about two of them for the last week or two, and the third I only heard for the first time yesterday — and that’s the one I’ll start with.

SOULLESS CARNAGE

I wish I had time to carefully read every e-mail and Facebook message we get from bands and listen attentively to all their music, but I can’t. Instead, what I’m able to check out is a matter of happenstance — it often comes down to whether I happen to have a few minutes to kill at the moment when I read a message that pricks my curiosity.

For example, yesterday I was skimming through the NCS e-mails with a few minutes to kill and saw a message from a Polish band named Soulless Carnage who described themselves as “a blackened death metal crew, inspired by classics like Morbid Angel, Deicide, Grave“. In fact, they’re partially named after a Grave tune (“Soulless”). Continue reading »

MAAT: “AS WE CREATE THE HOPE FROM ABOVE”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Aug 222014
 

(In this post Ty Lowery reviews the debut album by Germany’s Maat.)

Serendipity can be a powerful thing. A few months ago, I was deep in the bowels of YouTube, having started by listening to some random band’s EP (I think). Either way, I wound up listening to a song called “Atum / Conqueror of Chaos”. It was a pretty good song. I listened to it, marked the cool album cover in my head and vowed to look up the band later.

Naturally, I forgot all about them. Even in my search for my favorite album covers (see here), I couldn’t find the pharoah’s stony stare to save my life. Oh well, life goes on.

Fast forward to earlier this week, while I was on a quest to find some black metal that I didn’t hate… Imagine my surprise when I saw the song sitting in a recommendations list on a random forum. I found the album (As We Create Hope From Above), realized it had been released, and opened wide. Continue reading »

NAME YOUR OWN PRICE BANDCAMP THROWDOWN; AN ALBUM, AN EP, AND A SONG: FRACTALLINE, ASYLUM, AND REMAINS OF THE TYRANT

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Aug 222014
 

(In this post DGR reviews music from three bands, with complete music streams for each one.)

Fractalline – Polymath Theory

Fractalline are a Los Angeles-based death metal band who have been around for a while now, with two prior releases to their name. However, those came out in 2010, and a lot can happen in four years, as evidenced by this group’s June 2014 release Polymath Theory.

The band currently have the album listed as “name your own price” on Bandcamp. As a whole, it’s a concept disc with a heavy science fiction bent. Part of what makes Polymath Theory interesting is that it pursues the theme without the album art just being a picture of a planet and the words ‘SPAAAAAAAAAAAACE’ underneath it, as so many other bands who’ve tried their hands at this subject matter seem to have done.

In the words of the band themselves:

Polymath Theory is a concept album that is a “commentary on humankind’s evolution from basic beings subject to the whims of their universe, to intergalactic explorers and energistic entities in search of purpose – while touching upon our present state in the final trek – DeEvolution.”

The album is full of infinitely complex mid-tempo grinders that see the band in a markedly different market than the current string of light-speed hyperblasting bands out there. Since the group don’t have the benefits of pyrotechnic speed on their side to help in their appeal, they have instead chosen to build Polymath Theory out of odd shapes and weird, angular structures. Continue reading »

DECAPITATED: “BLOOD MANTRA”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Aug 222014
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new Decapitated album.)

To my mind each and every Decapitated album has a different flavour to it. Oh, the band definitely have a unique and specific sound, no doubt, but even within that, there’s still more than enough room for nuances of expression and style.

For example, Winds of Creation has a certain bloodstained thrashiness to it, Nihility an unearthly post-human precision, The Negation an otherworldly, angular feel… while Organic Hallucinosis positively reeks of unkempt madness and cerebrospinal corruption, and Carnival Is Forever offered us a warped, reflective mirror made of sharpened edges and shattered perceptions… Ultimately I think you’d be hard pressed to mistake a song from one album as belonging to any of the others, and yet each one remains recognisably, even intimately, Decapitated.

With Blood Mantra the Polish psychonauts offer up yet another facet of their ever-evolving sound, an album permeated with an eerie, almost nightmarish, sensation of discomfort and dissociation, carrying through familiar threads of each of its predecessors, whilst simultaneously twisting and reweaving them into fresh new forms. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: BLOOD OF KINGU — “DARK STAR ON THE RIGHT HORN OF THE CRESCENT MOON”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Aug 212014
 

 

The Ukrainian black metal horde Blood of Kingu are on the verge of releasing Dark Star On the Right Horn of the Crescent Moon — their third album and their first in more than five years. As you will soon hear, it is a grim devotional to disease, doom, and decay — an intense, immersive listening experience that over its length builds a wholly enveloping atmosphere of ominous peril.

With Drudkh’s main man Roman Sayenko once again piloting this dangerous vessel, Blood of Kingu drive the music with relentless blasting percussion and huge moving waves of almost ceaseless tremolo-picked chords, accented by eerie and ominous keyboards that effectively deepen the aura of doom. Through these dense moving walls of sound, bleak minor-key melodies ripple like disease vectors, and Sayenko’s monstrous, hollow roars sound like a ritualistic chant in an occult ceremony of death. When the band isn’t storming like a hurricane, they’re pounding like titans hammering nails into granite, or using massive groaning chords in a way that sounds like chains being dragged across a crypt floor.

The album’s savage assault is segmented by two brief ambient interludes, but even those breaks do nothing but further intensify the sense that you have been transported to an arid, decomposing wasteland of perpetual night. Continue reading »

SECTU: “NEFARIOUS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Aug 212014
 

(DGR reviews the third album by Sweden’s Sectu, which was launched in June of this year.)

The discovery of Sectu could not have come at a better time for your lovely reviewer here. While I’ve buried myself in a smattering of different genres recently, there hasn’t really been a traditional death metal disc that has caught mine eye in a bit. You can actually thank Volturyon for this discovery, because while bouncing around to their Bandcamp page to look for a stream we could attach to the review of Human Demolition, I found the Swedish record label ViciSolum Records and their Bandcamp page — and just below Volturyon were Sectu.

Now, I absolutely love record company Bandcamp pages. It’s such an amazing way to discover bands and, if you’re coming across an album that has come out already, an excellent way to get a big sample of what you’ll be in for. It’s the modern-day “stuck in a CD store listening to an album to find out what’s on it” — minus the headphones and the trying your damndest not to rock out in public.

Sectu, who are based in Stockholm, Sweden, are hard to pin down within the death metal genre. They have elements of tech-death, but also a huge treasure trove of Swedish death metal from which to pull, and are even prone to delving into some of Morbid Angel’s more apocalyptic moments. Continue reading »

TRIOSCAPES: “DIGITAL DREAM SEQUENCE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 202014
 

 

(Austin Weber reviews the new sophomore album by Trioscapes, which is being released today by Metal Blade Records.)

Music that lies at the intersection of jazz and metal has always interested me. The first Trioscapes album that came out not long ago in 2012, called Separate Realities, certainly scratched that itch. What excited me the most about the record was that it certainly seemed like only the beginning of where they could go with their sound, if they followed their heads.

While many are familiar with them as the side-project of Between The Buried And Me bassist Dan Briggs, saxophonist/flute player Walter Fancourt (ex-Mars Volta) and drummer/electronics artist Matt Lynch deserve just as much credit.

When Separate Realities was released, I immensely enjoyed it — but the band have experienced an exponential growth in their sound on Digital Dream Sequence. The leap into larger uncharted waters on the new record is simultaneously jaw-dropping and smile-inducing. They may be the same band toying with the same ideas, but the expanded and more unconventional depths of these new compositions gives the band a fuller, more adventurous sound than they previously exhibited. Continue reading »

NOVEMBERS DOOM: “BLED WHITE”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Aug 202014
 

 

(In this post DGR reviews the new album by Novembers Doom.)

Chicago-based Novembers Doom are a band of many, many albums over the span of a twenty-year career, and many musicians if you want to be funny,. They’re also a band of many descriptors, hailed as a variety of things over the years — a death metal group, a doom metal band, a gothic-doom metal band — and often incredibly hard to pin down. Some even go so far as to call them America’s answer to Opeth… which I’ve seen in more than one review.

With such a long and storied career the band have pretty much earned the right to be whatever the fuck they want at any given moment, but they’ve always stuck to a pretty strong foundation comprised of doom with a heavy gothic influence a la My Dying Bride, a death metal band, and a mournful, clean-sung group that absolutely thrives on despair.

It’s a bastard offspring of differing genres, but ones so closely related that Novembers Doom figured out not only how to combine them but also how to jam them together so well that nobody really veers close to their style. Bled White, with its spare cover art, is only the group’s latest chapter in a very large book at this point. It sees the band sounding as strong as they’ve ever been, and fully confident.

Some of the best and most miserable work they’ve have ever kicked out lies within the album’s hour-and-eight-minute run time — establishing it as a worthy successor to the band’s previous records and also providing an excellent starting point for people who’ve long heard the name but have never jumped in before. Continue reading »

AMORPHIS DEATHMATCH Round 5: “AM UNIVERSUM”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 192014
 

 

Editor’s Note:  Have you heard the news? Have you heard that Amorphis will be playing Tales From the Thousand Lakes (1994) in its entirety at Maryland Deathfest XIII next year? Our old pal Trollfiend heard the news and seemed pretty excited about it, especially since, if memory serves, it was the last Amorphis album he liked (or at least part of it).

I couldn’t leave him in a state of unmitigated excitement, what with his high blood pressure and all, so I reminded him that he had never finished his no-holds-barred cage match with the discography of Amorphis, the one he started (here) way back in December 2011. Apparently, Trollfiend is vulnerable to guilt-tripping, and so here — more than two years after he engaged in “no rules” combat with Tuonela — we bring you Round 5. This promises to be gory…

********

It has been more than two years since I set foot in the arena.

I have forgotten many things, but the brutal reality of my last battle against the hordes of Amorphis still cuts deep into my soul. I wander the sands, once watered with fresh blood. I am Alone.

I stand at the spot where the assassin Tuonela fell, her neck broken by my own hands. I remember then, as I do now, the horror that I felt; that I could be so callous, cold, unfeeling. That I could discard my oath so readily. I had sworn to serve, and had felt betrayed, but her words haunted me still.

“It is you who are the betrayer.”

Nothing makes sense to me anymore. The harsh cries of circling vultures sound like wails through a bent metal tube, perhaps an alto sax. They grate on my nerves like her accusal. I was the victor then, but now? She has become the Goddess at whose feet I weep, and I am but a Sad Man.

Continue reading »

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