DRIPBACK: “FAILED FUTURES”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
May 072014
 

(Andy Synn reviews the debut album by UK-based DripBack.)

Some bands, heavy as they might be, are all about subtlety and nuance. Grand ideas and deep layers disguised by heaving guitars and booming drums.

Others are more direct, and want nothing more than to vent their frustration and deliver a serious metallic beating to whomever is (un)lucky enough to stumble upon their music.

Dripback are definitely the latter type of band.

Failed Futures – a vile concoction of brutal Death Metal, violent Hardcore, and pissed-off Punk (edged with touches of manic Grind) – is a high-percentage brew of gut-wrenching riffage and poisonous nihilism which shows no mercy and takes no prisoners over its 13-song/39-minute length. Continue reading »

AGALLOCH: “THE SERPENT & THE SPHERE”

 Album Reviews  23 Responses »
May 052014
 

(Close on the heels of the album’s streaming premiere, Andy Synn reviews the new work by Oregon’s AGALLOCH.)

The new Agalloch album is currently streaming in full over at NPR. In a sense this makes the idea of reviewing it somewhat redundant. After all, if you want to know what it’s like you can just head on over there and click ‘Play’.

But there’s something to be said for the idea that a review isn’t just about merely describing the songs – “That’s a good riff”, “this bit’s really good”, “wow, aren’t they really fast/technical/brutal” – but can also be a place to talk about the band and their music in wider terms, using the offering of a new album as a starting point for further discussion.

That, and the fact that several of you might not have time or space in your lives to access the NPR site, or might simply prefer to wait for the physical release, prompted me to put metaphorical pen to paper and actually review The Serpent and the Sphere… for myself as well as for you, our readers. Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: “SPLINTERS”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 052014
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli delivers a review of the new, second album by the UK’s Vallenfyre.)

I’ll admit to it.  I haven’t been writing ’cause of a video game.  Dark Souls 2 in particular.  Now that I’ve had my complete fucking burnout on the game, I felt motivated to get back to metal and metal things.  The new Vallenfyre album was a surprise waiting for me in our Dropbox and it pretty much called me like a siren to listen.  I loved their debut (I bought it after reviewing it) and looked forward to another helping from these death-doom denizens of pestilence.  As things turned out, having played Dark Souls 2 worked completely in my favor because it allowed me to encapsulate Splinters perfectly.

There is a monster in the game called The Rotten, a golem composed entirely of corpses held together only by a consciousness that seeks to give shelter to the thrown-away and unwanted, whether they like it or not.  The helpless victims are butchered and added to The Rotten’s mass, forever prisoners to his sadistic sense of being the shepherd to a flock of sheep.  One of the key aspects of the Dark Souls universe is that humans cannot die; they are merely resurrected in a zombified state while retaining all of their mental faculties, making The Rotten essentially a prison built from living yet decaying, rotting corpses.

Vallenfyre on Splinters pretty much embody that.  They forcefully absorb you into the mass of corrupted defilement they have created, and use your very life force to feed their ability to function.  This results in a sound that is overwhelmingly putrid, filled with Swedish buzz-saw guitar tones, dragging doom, carpet bombs of blast beats, titan-sized riffing, and utter despair. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SERPENTS LAIR — “DEMO MMXIV”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  9 Responses »
May 042014
 

 

Serpents Lair are from Sjælland, Denmark.  The members have not disclosed their identities or musical pedigrees. Two shrouded figures appear in a photo on their Facebook page, so I assume there are only two people in the band, but that’s merely an educated guess. Beyond that, all I know is that on May 2 they released a two-song demo on Bandcamp, and I’m tremendously impressed by it.

I’m perfectly happy with black metal that just tears, rips, and froths the waters like a school of piranha on a fresh carcass, and Serpents Lair certainly do that — and do it with a ravenous appetite. But the music is so much more than that.

Ominous, dissonant melodies heave and swell through the music like storm tides, even when the band are racing, and that creates a potent, sinister atmosphere. But they don’t always race. The music also falls into slow, menacing processionals, with big ominous chords that reverberate like bells of doom and rhythms that methodically strike like hammer blows. There is almost as much an air of bitterness and anguish in this music as there is righteous fury. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: THE ARCANE ORDER — “PROMO 2014”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
May 042014
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the brand new two-song promo from The Arcane Order.)

You guys may remember that a ways back I did a week-long series on quality, under-the-radar melodic death metal bands via reviews of select albums.  One of the bands I wrote about was Denmark’s The Arcane Order, a group for whom I really haven’t adequately expressed my enthusiasm on this site.  These guys are melodic death metal of the most imperial strain — bombastic, titanic, with blackened ice and symphonic typhoon wind.

The Arcane Order have been MIA for some time now.  Their last album, In the Wake of Collisions, came out way back in 2008.  I’ve followed them eagerly nonetheless, especially when they started talk of writing a new album last year and have since actually begun working on a new record.  To whet peoples appetites, I suppose, the band decided to debut two new songs just to let people know how things are coming along. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ORNAMENTAL HEADPIECE — “MASKS OF ASH”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
May 012014
 

I chuckled when I first saw the name of this band, and then chuckled more volubly when I saw the cover of their debut EP, Masks of Ash. That is indeed one hell of an ornamental headpiece. Someday maybe I’ll find out how they picked their name, but of course what really counts now is the music, and Masks of Ash is awfully good.

The band’s membership is somewhat obscure, though it includes Damian Master (aka Deathless Maranatha of A Pregnant Light and Dukula Menelek of Aksumite), as well as one or more people from a band named Citizen and another from Detroit named Freedom. For me, Master’s presence made the EP immediately worth checking out — and I was hurried along in doing so by NCS supporter Utmu.

The four-song offering only lasts about 11 minutes total, but it’s a compelling 11-minute ride. The dominant style is black metal — on the raw, blasting, lo-fi end of the spectrum — but there are other ingredients in the mix as well. Continue reading »

ABORTED: “NECROTIC MANIFESTO” (A SECOND NCS REVIEW)

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Apr 302014
 

(Earlier this week we were thrilled to premiere a full-album stream of the new Aborted album along with BadWolf’s review. Today the album was officially released, and to celebrate the occasion we now bring a second review by TheMadIsraeli.)

I spent a lot of time earlier this month listening to a fuck load of Aborted, particularly Global Flatline and the band’s new serving of carnivorous delight The Necrotic Manifesto, back-to-back on repeat.  Global Flatline was a big deal for Aborted, earning them new fans and some return fans after a slew of albums that seemed mostly to have been met with indifference.  I never really understood the dislike or luke-warm reaction to the band’s 2005-2008 output; I quite enjoyed it, but it didn’t exactly click with a lot of people.  Global Flatline honestly may have been the band’s crowning opus since Goremageddon: The Saw and the Carnage Done.  As a result, The Necrotic Manifesto is an album that puts the burden on these Belgian butchers of doing some extreme heavy lifting to maintain a consistency of quality.

Other bloggers I’ve talked with who’ve had advance access to this album all seem to have different takes on this record.  Some feel it’s a continuation, a logical one, of Global Flatline while others think (as I do) that this has a much less refined, grittier, and more unrelenting flavor.  I also feel that there is quite a bit more grind present, whereas I thought Global Flatline was a straight death metal album.  The fact the band switched out guitar players has to be a huge factor, too; those who were replaced appeared on those last several records, including Global Flatline.  I mean, you can’t really argue with who they now have in the ranks — Danny Tunker, who has quite a resume, and Mendel Bij De Leij, whose latest solo release I reviewed recently and who is Sven De Caluwe’s bandmate in System Divide.  Yet I have to admit that I was curious about how these changes would affect the music. Continue reading »

NONEUCLID: “METATHEOSIS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Apr 302014
 

(Austin Weber reviews the forthcoming second album by Noneuclid, a band featuring members of Triptykon, Dark Fortress, and Obscura.)

After seeing Obscura live a number of years ago with new (at the time) bassist Linus Klausenitzer in tow, I curiously checked after the show (where “Ocean Gateways” blasted my butthole apart and I was the lone idiot screaming and growling along to each song) to see what else he had done, and in doing so stumbled upon Noneuclid and their outstanding debut, The Crawling Chaos. After a long 8 year wait, they’ve finally followed up that album with the release of Metatheosis, an effort that further builds upon, bends, and blends the foundations and experimental defiances of tradition they previously established. Metatheosis, at a towering 67 minutes, is not a record for everyone. Which is to say it hits the right mixture of weird, wonderful, and wounded, in a graceful interconnected trifecta that will intrigue just as many people as it will repulse.

This is a testament to the fact that they’ve had the balls and vision to really go for it, to craft a specialized sound that is a hybrid you will either become hypnotized by or unable to connect with. Ambitious music like this exists not for the purist who will be confused by it, but for metalheads craving that new sound that hits all the sweet spots in a way they haven’t heard before.

To classify Metatheosis overall, one could say that it falls into the realm of thrash, while avoiding the trappings and limitations of the retro-thrash movement. The progressive thrash base of Noneuclid comes across like Watchtower and Voivod meet Metallica and Slayer. Aided by the incorporation of ravenous death metal shrouded with black touches, the music also embraces a despairing sense of doom with orchestral and acoustic threads woven into the tapestry. Noneuclid’s merger of styles comes across as quite unorthodox and avante-garde, and in the end they never quite fit anywhere, they are simply Noneuclid, and their approach is all their own. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LISTEN TO A FULL STREAM OF ABORTED’S “NECROTIC MANIFESTO”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 282014
 

(In this post BadWolf reviews the new album by Aborted — The Necrotic Manifesto — and we bring you for the first time anywhere a full stream of the album in its entirety.)

When you have a staff as wild as the NCS crew, it’s pretty difficult to arrive at anything approaching consensus. Between Islander, myself, Izzy and Andy, not to mention our various contributing writers, we like pretty much every style of metal (Note: that sentence, to anyone just casually reading this site, probably sounds completely absurd. You’re right. It’s totally absurd, but follow me). Concordantly, whenever there’s a record that every single one of us feels strongly about, it’s worth getting up and taking notice. One such record was Aborted’s 2012 rager, Global Flatline, which somehow wound up on every single one of our year-end lists. Maybe that’s why we have the privilege of streaming its successor, The Necrotic Manifesto, in its entirety for you below!

Aborted haven’t messed with their formula much in the last two years, which is good; why mess with perfection? The Belgian five-piece combines gory death metal with hardcore and grindcore influences as well as anybody else. If you wanted, you could call them a deathcore band, but why would you want to? Their approach doesn’t rely on big, meaty breakdowns to carry otherwise limp songs. Sure, there’s a massive bruiser at the end of “The Davidian Deceit,” but the three minutes leading up are chock full of squealing guitar runs and lock-step grooves as well. Continue reading »

HOUR OF PENANCE: “REGICIDE”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 282014
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Italy’s Hour of Penance.)

Allow me get this out of the way right now: Regicide is about as definitively an Hour Of Penance album as you could ask for. Everything’s present and correct  and firing on all cylinders – the uber-intense death riffs, the overwhelming, over-produced drum work, the raging vocal dissent – it’s all there and all utterly destructive. Whether that appeals to you will depend entirely on how much you’ve loved the band’s previous works, particularly Paradogma and Sedition.

Because let’s face it, the Italian extremists definitely subscribe to the philosophy of “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. Their sixth album packs in the same wealth of punishing riffage, bloody hooks, and concentrated venom that’s been their stock in trade for years now, rejecting any pressure to change or develop beyond their obsession with sheer sonic evisceration. Continue reading »

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