RANNOCH: “BETWEEN TWO WORLDS”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Nov 182013
 

(Andy Synn reviews the forthcoming debut album by the UK’s Rannoch.)

Every so often an album comes along, pretty much out of nowhere, and absolutely blows you away – sometimes with its technicality, sometimes with its songwriting, and sometimes with its sheer audacity.

Rannoch’s Between Two Worlds blew my mind in every one of these ways, and more.

Do you like Darkane? Opeth? In-Quest? Ihsahn? Bands who take the traditional weapons of heavy metal warfare and stretch them to their breaking point, and beyond? Are you looking for a band capable of melding devastating groove, mesmerising 8-string acrobatics, fluid, rumbling bass lines, and progressive nuance into one cohesive whole?

Then this is the album for you. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: “WHERE FLIES THE RAVEN” BY SOL NEGRO (And A Review of “DAWN OF A NEW SUN”)

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Nov 182013
 

Sol Negro’s Dawn of A New Sun is an absolute gem. Originally released in a limited edition of cassette tapes last year, it’s about to get the full-fledged distribution it deserves via the excellent Mexico-based label Chaos Records. Today we’re giving you a taste of the album by premiering the record’s final track, “Where Flies the Raven”. But first, here are some impressions about Dawn of A New Sun as a whole.

Attempting to categorize the album in genre terms is a challenge. The music is remarkably dynamic, with different songs emphasizing different aspects of what turns out to be Sol Negro’s own very distinctive sound. At different moments I thought of bands such as Obscura and Death (at their most progressively inclined), though shrouded in a mantle of black metal and doom. But as it happens, the reference that may come closest to capturing the band’s core motif lies in the one cover song on the album: “Dead Emotion” by Paradise Lost, a brilliant song from the band’s second album Gothic (1991), which Sol Negro perform brilliantly.

And if all these diverse band references confuse you, trust me when I say that the music is masterfully cohesive. Sol Negro unite elements of doom, progressive death, and black metal to create a genuine feast for the ears. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: “YOUR GOD” BY FEARED (And A Review of “VINTER”)

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Nov 182013
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the forthcoming album by Sweden’s Feared, and we’re also stoked to bring you the premiere of a new Feared song: “Your God”.)

A lot of us music fans, especially metal fans, and even more especially music fans who are musicians, have a good idea (or know very well) what goes into writing an album. It’s something that takes time, commitment, and if you care about your music, a great deal of deliberation over what you’re crafting in order to make it the best and most compelling it can be. But creating music has never really been a process that you can just schedule, put in the time, and expect it to come out fine. Some bands have managed to prove that idea wrong, like The Black Dahlia Murder, who’ve released albums on a reliable schedule and haven’t taken a quality dip. Other bands haven’t fared so well.

Usually, we tend to think of the creation process for an album-length work as a long-term endeavor. As fans, we may bitch about how much time it takes for a band to write and record their next album, but we also tend to become leery when a band releases a new album soon after the one that preceded it. So it’s a surprise that Feared, after releasing a monster of an album earlier this year in Furor Incarnatus, announced they’d be releasing another album this year. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: VALDUR, BEAST AS GOD, EMBALMED

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 152013
 

Here’s a random round-up of destructive new music I found today, including a review of a stunning new EP I stumbled upon quite by accident.

VALDUR

I first came across this three-man collective from Mammoth Lakes, California (and wrote about) them more than three years ago following release of their excellent second album, Raven God Amongst Us. In September 2012 I found out that Valdur had finished writing their new album and were set to begin recording it the following November, and I also found out about an excellent two-song EP entitled The Hammer Pit that they had previously self-released, consisting of “rough version” of two new songs. We featured those songs here and here, and both tracks are now streaming at Bandcamp. And then last December I saw that Valdur had released a stupendous new single entitled “Blast Beast”, which I wrote about here and which is also available (pay-what-you-want) on Bandcamp.

And now, finally, we have news about the band’s third album and a “rough version” of one of the new album tracks to hear. The album is entitled At War With, it includes 10 songs plus the killer album art you see above, and it will be released on December 17, 2013, by Bloody Mountain Records. The pre-mastered song that went up for streaming two days ago appears to be the title track — and it’s a blackened death metal masterstroke. Continue reading »

KATAKLYSM: “WAITING FOR THE END TO COME”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Nov 142013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Canada’s Kataklysm.)

So here we are finally, Waiting For the End To Come.  When I reviewed the entire Kataklysm discography, it was an interesting exercise, not only for myself but I hope for our readers as well, to rediscover what the band had produced over the course of their long career  Now here we are, with what the band claims is their most technical, most punishing album yet.  Does it deliver?  This is the question that nagged at me after having listened to Kataklysm’s admittedly up and down catalogue.

Quite simply, this may be the band’s best effort of their current, mostly melodic death, direction.  With less groove, more blast beats and blackened scathe, and of course their blistering death metal brawn at work, Kataklysm appear to have crafted an album solely to start pits, invoke murderous thoughts, provoke raised fists in defiance of life itself.  Some of the best songs the band have ever written are on this disc, not to mention that this is the first Kataklysm album I’ve actually had the compulsion to buy in physical form. Continue reading »

CLOUDKICKER: “SUBSUME”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 142013
 

(Here’s DGR’s review of the latest album by one-man phenom Cloudkicker.)

For those of you not in the know, Cloudkicker is a solo guitar project of one Ben Sharp. At this point the project has quite a few releases under its belt and all of them have been available for “name your own price” for some time now. Subsume, which hit this year, is the latest in a long line of excellent releases.

When Cloudkicker released Beacons back in 2010, it was a heavy contender for album of the year. In an explosion of solo basement/bedroom/wherever-they-could-hook-up-their-recording-gear guitarist experiments, Beacon seemed like something different and fresh – even if it bore the same signatures of the scene from which it was born. The whole outbreak of guitarists suddenly showing their skill and technicality seemed amazing, but over time they had all started to blur together, and eventually would feel as if they were coalescing into one big, blob of stuff that took years of practice but had started to matter only to those who also played that style.

Cloudkicker was able to weave into that style a sense for ambiance and mood, using a guitar to paint pictures to go along with long, descriptive song titles (which have now proven to become a signature). Beacons told a story without words, and with every release since then Cloudkicker has sought to accomplish something similar, even when completely shying away from all the technicality, time signatures, and endless scales, and instead sticking with melodic, acoustic pieces that fell way more into the post- and prog circles than they did the metal ones. However, we have proven as a community that we can recognize and appreciate good music regardless of style, and so seeing this project embraced, as one of the fans who got to do so with the zeitgeist around Beacons, has been great.  Continue reading »

BISMUTH / UNDERSMILE SPLIT

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Nov 132013
 

From out of the blackest pits of Groningen in The Netherlands, Tartarus Records will be co-releasing, along with Graanrepubliek Records and At War With False Noise, a split by two UK bands who deserve more exposure: Bismuth (from Nottingham) and Undersmile (from Witney). Each band contributes a single song to the split, but they are gigantic, collectively demanding more than 40 minutes of your time. It’s life and death in the low and slow lanes.

BISMUTH

Bismuth consists of vocalist/bassist Tanya Byrne and drummer Joe Rawlings. Bismuth released a debut EP last year by the name of The Eternal Marshes, and their contribution to this split marks their second release. It’s a 17-minute work entitled “Collapse”, and there could hardly be a better title for it — except this is not so much the sound of existence falling apart as it is the sound of existence being slowly dismantled in a titanic demolition project. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: VANHELGA — “SOMMAR”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 102013
 

Vanhelga are a Swedish band, the brainchild of Jacob Ottosson (aka “145188”), who until recently has been the band’s vocalist and sole instrumentalist. With Vanhelga’s most recent EP, Sommar, he is joined for the first time by Johan Gabrielson (“1853”), a former member of the late, lamented Lifelover, as a vocalist and lyricist. To be honest, that Lifelover connection was what finally drew me into Vanhelga’s music, although the band have previously released two full-length albums and five shorter works.

Although Vanhelga themselves characterize Sommar as an EP (which explains the “Short But Sweet” title of this review), it’s almost 32 minutes long and includes seven songs. Other bands have used the “full-length album” label for shorter collections of music. But whatever the right characterization, there’s no denying that Sommar is a significant achievement.

Trying to describe, much less summarize, the music is difficult. It’s an unusual combination of styles, including (but not limited to) black metal, post-rock, post-punk, and gothic. Its overall atmosphere is melancholy and at times even depressive, with textures of urban angst and desolation — and occasional eruptions of fierce anger. The mainly mid-paced song structures are relatively simple and relatively conventional, with the component parts looping back on themselves in a way that cements the infectious but tormented melodies in the listener’s mind. But that’s not to suggest that the music itself is utterly stripped down or simple, and it’s certainly not to suggest that it ever ventures into any kind of comfortable territory. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: UNRU / SUN WORSHIP SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  12 Responses »
Nov 092013
 

This is a review of a split release by two German black metal bands — Unru and Sun Worship — that will be issued on 12″ vinyl on December 10, 2013, by An Out Recordings and Sick Man Getting Sick Records. Each band contributes a single song, one per side. Both songs are now streaming on Bandcamp and both are available as immediate downloads with pre-orders of the record. And both are really good.

UNRU

Unru’s first release, Demo MMXIII, came out this past January. It was an 11-track affair in which none of the songs reached four minutes and more than half were less than two. By contrast, Unru’s contribution to this split, “Von der Flüchtigkeit des Todes”, is nearly 10 minutes in length. For most of that time, it’s a storming cascade of distorted tremolo-picked guitars and blasting drumbeats through which a grim melody rises and falls like heaving waves. The seething intensity of the music is enhanced by acidic, reverberating shrieks. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: PSYCHOTIC PULSE — “AVOLITION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Nov 092013
 

(DGR reviews the latest EP by Psychotic Pulse from Toronto.)

Psychotic Pulse were initially brought to my attention by their drummer, who was (and is) the proprietor of a project known as Tyrant Of Death. The group had just released their self-titled debut earlier this year, and to no surprise it turned out really, really well. They manifested themselves as a hybrid of industrial, groove, and death metal that strode atop shrieking vocals with many a heavy section that triggered near instantaneous headbanging. I thought the Psychotic Pulse self-titled disc was great.

Psychotic Pulse have the industrialized, machine-like sound hardwired into their system. They’re precise as can be and nail every beat almost perfectly, with enough machine noise and electronics filtered into their sound to bring to mind the apocalypse via The Terminator; metal by way of Skynet, with the machines making as much cacophonous noise as they can unleash as a form of psychological warfare. Continue reading »

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