SHORT BUT SWEET: TORTURE DIVISION — “THE REAPING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jun 272014
 

Well, this is a damned fine way to end the damned work week — with the release of yet another free demo by Sweden’s Torture Division. This new one is named The Reaping.

As followers of the band know, they periodically release demos for free, and each time they complete a trilogy of demos they package them up for release on a compilation CD. In 2013, Torture Division released two demos, both of them (as usual) mixed and mastered by the masterful Dan Swanö at Unisound. The first one was named The Worship, and I reviewed it here. The second one was The Sacrifice, and I reviewed that one, too. And then I also picked one of the 2013 songs — “All Rise” — for my list of 2013’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.

The Reaping completes the latest trilogy of Torture Division releases. This one was also mixed and mastered by Dan Swanö, and in addition to providing a free download of the songs in mp3 format, this time Swanö has prepared a download file of the songs in full dynamic range FLAC format for the audiophiles out there. So go thank Mr. Swanö by liking his Unisound Facebook page, dammit!

And while you’re in a thankful mood, go throw some money at Torture Division via this link so they’ll continue showering us with the best goddamned death metal masterpieces the world has ever known (I know these are masterpieces because Torture Division says so, dammit!).

And now, for a few words about The Reaping. Continue reading »

INANIMATE EXISTENCE: “A NEVER-ENDING CYCLE OF ATONEMENT”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 262014
 

(Austin Weber reviews the new second album by Inanimate Existence.)

With their first record, 2012’s Liberation Through Hearing, Santa Cruz-based Inanimate Existence showed themselves to be much more than a technically competent brutal death metal act. A full half of the album was an experimental instrumental affair of great diversity. As a result, the evolution of their sound present on their sophomore follow-up, A Never-Ending Cycle Of Atonement, is not completely surprising. Yet it’s still stunning that they’ve managed to merge their progressive and experimental side with a series of ferociously cutthroat, frenetic death metal songs.

It’s an eloquent feat that works far better than it sounds on paper. Even more, the whole experience is bound to a philosophically rich lyrical focus of cyclical failure, potential redemption, and the eventual return to start the process again.

A Never-Ending Cycle Of Atonement is a worthy sequel to their first album, similar but bolder, more extravagant, and still intent on further branching out from the confines of mere brutal death metal. There is a larger melodic focus this time as well — verging on the sound of both Decrepit Birth and Necrophagist at times. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EXXXEKUTIONER — “MANIAC ASYLUM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 252014
 

I hadn’t even made it to the last song on my advance copy of Fear the Priest before I was blasting an e-mail to the publicist for Exxxekutioner, begging for the chance to premiere a track from this debut EP. I got my wish, and now you’ll get a taste of what got me so pumped up about this six-song main-line of pure mosh fuel.

This group of four twenty-somethings from the vicinity of Manchester in the UK have only been together since the spring of last year, but you’d never guess that from the music they make. They have mature skills and old souls — and by that I mean a direct channel to the early spirit of bands like Venom, Sodom, and Destruction, delivering a brash and authentic blast of thrash, black, and speed metal like they’ve been doing it for decades.

The hell-ripping songs on Fear the Priest fly like a horde of bat-winged demons, the kind of speed you’d reach if you were on fire and the nearest water source was three blocks away. The riffs are to die for — super-charged with adrenaline and loaded with irresistible hooks — and the tumbling, rumbling drumwork and booming bass will get their hooks in you, too. Continue reading »

VINTERSORG: “NATURBÅL”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Jun 252014
 

(Andy Synn wrote this review of the new album by Sweden’s Vintersorg.)

So it’s probably worth starting out this review by clearing something up. When Vintersorg (Andreas Hedlund and Mattias Marklund) announced that they were going to release an interlinked quartet of albums, each based on one of the four classical elements, I’m sure that a lot of you, like myself, initially expected each one to be quite different from the others, as befitting the divide between the elements themselves. Something akin to the way Thrice explored very different tonal and musical textures with The Alchemy Index I-IV, perhaps.

Well, we were wrong about that it seems. With the release of the first two albums, Jordpuls (“Pulse of the Earth”) and Orkan (“Hurricane”), which dealt with the elements of earth and air respectively, it became clear that the band’s core sound – a melding of archaic, folkish melody and blackened, progressive metal – remained enviably focussed and largely unchanged.

That’s not to say there weren’t differences between the two albums, of course. Jordpuls certainly possessed a certain earthy flavour and an ageless tone, while Orkan captured the flighty, intangible nature of the wind remarkably well with its ethereal song structures and skittering flutes. But, ultimately, neither was a major shift in style or sound for the band. And that’s ok. They weren’t meant to be.

Really, this whole experiment is more about filtering and refining the established Vintersorg sound in interesting, incremental ways, than it is about altering it wholesale. It’s about changing the little things, the small shifts in focus or delivery, adding a few deft touches and artful rearrangements here and there, all designed to re-envision the band through a different, elemental lens. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: A WOLVHAMMER-KRIEG SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 242014
 

Two of my most highly anticipated 2014 albums are Crawling Into Black Sun by Wolvhammer (due for release by Profound Lore on July 8) and Transient by Krieg (coming from Candlelight Records in September). And today Broken Limbs Recordings has released a split by both of those bands that just provides more reasons to get stoked for the coming albums.

WOLVHAMMER

Wolvhammer’s contribution to the split is “Slaves To the Grime”, an alternate version of a track that will appear on Crawling Into Black Sun.

I’ve heard the album version, which is a standout song — a body-moving bulldozer of concrete-heavy riffs and vocals that are acid enough to etch glass, with other alternating segments that lumber into a sludgy, soul-sucking abyss and gallop like a hell-horse. The version on the split is, if anything, even more thoroughly pulverizing. The production gives it a thoroughly radioactive quality, and it’s shot through with bolts of squealing, squalling lead guitar, like that crazy part of your brain trying to get out of its prison. And man, when it hits those doomed, dragging segments, it falls like granite blocks dropped from a great height.

Truth be told, I like this version even more than the album track (and I’ve been a big fan of that one since the first listen) — completely crushing, but also infectious enough to warrant a call to the Center for Disease Control. Continue reading »

OLD MAN WINDBREAKER REMEMBERS THE NORTHERN SOLSTICE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jun 212014
 

(Guest contributor Old Man Windbreaker returns to NCS after an extended absence with the following quirky commemoration of this seasonally significant day.)

Mellow greetings, fellow sapients. Old Man Windbreaker greets you, indeed. Old Man Windbreaker is also sleep-deprived and febrile. Old Man Windbreaker decided to write something for this year’s day of the Northern Solstice. And no, it is not an installment of the promised “A Tredecennium of Metal” series.

Anyway, let us get on with it — a review of Wagner, Wagner Reloaded, and Wagner Revolutions. In addition to finding out whether that is a real thing, you will find here enclosed in this non-existent envelope the non-existent answers to the big questions: “Where do we come from?” “What are we?” “Where are we going?” “Will it blend?” {Cue Immortal and their invisible oranges}

Firstly, there is no trilogy of feature films or musical works titled “Wagner”, “Wagner Reloaded”, and “Wagner Revolutions”. We shall be considering only the music recording titled Wagner Reloaded by Apocalyptica with the MDR Symphonic Orchestra, with the corresponding dance performance choreographed by Gregor Seyffert.

Secondly, One shall wish you to have a great time on this year’s day of the Northern Solstice, which also happens to be World Music Day. One shall not apologise for the irrelevance of the music review to the event of the Northern Solstice.

Finally, One shall make no further mention of the answers to the big questions, other than to say this: “Yes, it will blend.” Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SPAWN FROM DECEIT – “NEW THRONES”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Jun 192014
 

(DGR catches up with the latest offering of grind from Finland’s Spawn From Deceit.)

Sometimes, you want some music that you can not only scream along with but also scream at in a white-knuckle rage. I went through this a huge amount last year, and the feeling has been sticking around since then. It sent me on a massive grind kick (of the loud, banging, DIY Punk style, about as close to Nasum and Rotten Sound as I could get with every band) and wound up covering a variety of bands.

Finland’s Spawn From Deceit were probably the most punk of the grind bands that I covered when I launched that vast swath of reviews in the genre late last year. Since then though, I haven’t done my due diligence to see what the guys have been up to. Should’ve known better, because grind is a genre that lends itself to fairly prolific releases, and lo and behold, Spawn From Deceit have another six-song face-to-the-grinding-wheel release out called New Thrones — though I don’t think there is any way to get your hands on it at the moment. Continue reading »

MUSIC FROM THE BLISTERING EDGE: FALLUJAH, EATEN, OMNIHILITY

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jun 192014
 

I’ve collected here new music from three bands. As suggested by the title of this post, the songs have something in common, though they are different in other respects: They all include certain instrumental elements that are very, very fast. Your hair may be singed. The skin on your face may bubble like a broiled fetus. You may void your bowels. I myself only experienced the last of these effects, but I thought it best to provide a complete set of warnings.

FALLUJAH

Damn, but I surely do love that album cover, don’t you? It’s a collaborative effort between Polish artist Tomasz Alen Kopera, whose work I’ve featured about a dozen times in the daily art posts on our Facebook page, and the band’s vocalist, Alex Hofmann. The album’s name is The Flesh Prevails and it’s due for release by Unique Leader on July 22.

What I heard yesterday was a new song named “Carved From Stone”. It’s an interesting song. Certain instrumental tracks are moving at about 1,000 mph. The kick drums eject shells at the rate of am M134 minigun, and the riffs whip like hurricane winds and pummel like a jackhammer. On the other hand, Mr. Hofmann growls his lyrics as if patiently telling a bedtime story, presumably to a brood of orcs. And the lead guitar carefully unspools an eerie atmospheric melody like a coil of razor wire. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DECEPTIONIST — “THE BEGINNING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jun 182014
 

(DGR reviews the new release by Deceptionist from Rome, Italy.)

Deceptionist are a band I discovered via the Hideous Divinity Facebook page a few weeks back. Hideous Divinity are one of the bands that grew off of the Hour Of Penance tree, and their vocalist Enrico H Di Lorenzo was posting about how he had provided guest vocals on Deceptionist’s song “Through The Veil” on their new EP.

Deceptionist are a new band hailing from Rome and consisting of Andrea Di Traglia on vocals (usually in a middle- to low-range growl), Antonio Poletti on guitars, and drummer Claudio Testini, who is frightening behind the kit and whose name must now be added to the ever-growing ranks of Italian blast masters. Di Lorenzo described them as being a tech-death band with a light electronic element, using them in an industrial form to add to their overall sound. He also mentioned that this new EP, their first, bears the name of The Beginning (Promo CD 2014) and that it was available at “name your own price” on Bandcamp.

To ballpark a comparison band, Deceptionist veer into the spectrum of tech-death that Spawn Of Possession seem to inhabit by themselves. Instead of going for the intensely low-end, humongous sound with all of the whirs and whistles on top of it, Deceptionist go with the knife-sharp, machine-typed-out and mathematically precise playing that Spawn dish out in spades. This means that their promo EP should be very familiar to fans of the latter group, because Deceptionist’s promo sounds like a swarm of angry insects being delivered into your eardrums via a tech-death funnel. Continue reading »

BLACK PUNK: A SPLIT BY KRIEG AND RAMLORD

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 172014
 

If you google the phrase “black punk” you’ll discover a music genre known as Afro-punk, as well as a band named Death — not Chuck Schuldiner’s ground-breaking group, but a “proto-punk” band from Detroit formed in the early 70’s by three brothers, who happen to be the subject of a recent critically acclaimed movie. What you won’t find is any reference to the forthcoming split release by Krieg and Ramlord — at least not yet.

I’ve been listening to this four-song split once a day for the past week (while gazing fondly at its killer cover art), and my first impressions haven’t changed: At its core, this a fusion of black metal and punk. It would be tempting to file it away under the heading of “blackened crust” along with bands such as Young and In the Way and Martyrdöd, but to these ears the music on this split is an even more primal union of black metal and punk, and its primal appeal is strong.

KRIEG

Krieg has been kicking out releases since the mid-90s, with a steady flow of splits and EP’s to go along with six albums. This split with Ramlord is one of two scheduled for release this summer, the other being a split with Wolvhammer that I’ll also be reviewing very soon. For this release Krieg contributes one original song and a cover. Continue reading »

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