TRAITOR: “SHADOWHEART”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 022013
 

(In this post guest writer Kim Rosario reviews the latest EP by Traitor.)

Black metal, hardcore, and grindcore…  Who on earth would combine those 3 genres and how would it even work?  Black metal, for instance, is very dark and brooding at times and at others is played at blistering breakneck speeds.  Hardcore is upfront and honest brutality with thundering rhythms and powerful grooves.  I could see those two combining, but when you throw grindcore into the mix, that’s when it starts to get tricky.

Here you have two regimented genres that have a focused, articulated sound and you want to add grindcore to the mix?  A high-energy, no-rules, just go genre?  Yes, this does sound brave and challenging, but one band decided to do this.  Metro-Detroit’s own Traitor just released their EP Shadowheart, which combines black metal, hardcore, and grindcore.

The album starts with the song called “Heart Of Gnarled Roots”. An abrasive shriek and the fury of pummeling hardcore riffs bombard the listener, with punk-fueled blast beats.  The elements of each genre constantly fight each other in one giant sonic assault.  While Traitor’s main focus is hardcore, this band’s emphasis on black metal makes appearances at all the right times. Continue reading »

ANTIGAMA: “METEOR”

 Album Reviews  9 Responses »
May 312013
 

(NCS contributor Austin Weber returns with this review of the sixth studio album by Poland’s Antigama.)

If the metal-as-noise paradigm has any truth to it, grindcore has always pushed that maxim relentlessly, essentially willing you to find something enjoyable within such abrasive sounds. Of course the best grindcore bands have always had a knack for rising above mere raw aggression to take grind to a refined, more delicately controlled state of chaos. As a group, Poland’s Antigama have wisely merged the two schools of thought, which means they do spend time assaulting your ears in noisy fashion, but  do it with a more developed manner of songwriting with more structure, which I will dub “grown up grind”. They’ve been on this path since 2002 and over the course of numerous full-lengths and splits they’ve gotten consistently better and more disturbing with each release.

Meteor feels like the work of a band who are smartly aware of the current grind landscape and subtly bringing to their music certain sonic comparisons to the best elements of several top-tier grind bands. They’ve managed to channel the essence of Kevin Sharpe’s (Brutal Truth) deep, barked enunciations as well as having an influence from their death-metal-meets-punk riffs. They also have more than a few toes dipped in the Pig Destroyer school of deathly diverse riffing and complex suffocating drumming, and they tie all this together with a production reminiscent of Mumakil.

The end result is murderous and catchy but with an oddball side to it that is uniquely Antigama. From the very beginning they always had an experimental nature that’s set them apart from the pack. However, they’ve been greatly refining this aspect of their sound for some time, culminating in out-there extremes like “Paganini Meets Barbaplex” and the ambient film score feel of “Black Planet”. the closer off their last record, 2009’s Warning.  Continue reading »

VOMITOUS: “EMPIRES OF GREAT ENSLAVEMENT”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
May 312013
 

Deep down at the filthy core of all good brutal slamming death metal are riffs — atonal, palm-muted monstrosities that produce a visceral, physical effect, the kind that get your guts churning. Effective vomit vocals are important, too. You want them cavern-deep and gruesome; you may or may not want them to sound like a mess of puffed-up bullfrogs competing for sex on a wet night. A healthy serving of percussive obliteration, you want plenty of that, too.

You get all of that in Empires of Great Enslavement, the new EP by Sweden’s Vomitous. But you get more, too. To begin, you have the brilliant cover art by one of our favorite metal artists, New Zealand’s Nick Keller. We featured the cover in one of our daily artwork posts at the NCS Facebook page back in March and have been looking forward to the music it would house ever since.

Empires encompasses six tracks, one of which is a short, atmospheric introduction and two of which appeared on a 2012 demo. The band tend to launch the songs with a barrage of sonic obliteration, all rapid-fire riffing and thundering drums. But the music is rhythmically dynamic, sometimes slowing into massive, skull-caving slam segments, the most convulsive of which occurs in “On the Column of Insignificance”, and sometimes exploding in a flurry of jabbing, pneumatic riffage (as in “Infectious Urethral Re-Leakage”).

The songs are also occasionally spiced with squealing pinch harmonics (“Atrocities of Unspeakable Magnitude”), grisly tremolo leads (“Scorched Earth Apocalypse”), or even the kind of groaning, fret-sliding chords that remind me of what Gojira has popularized (“Scorched Earth”, again). And kudos for the distorted vocal sample at the end of the title track, an excerpt from Lovecraft’s eloquently frightening poem “Nemesis”. Continue reading »

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER: “EVERBLACK”

 Album Reviews  18 Responses »
May 302013
 

(Here’s TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new album by The Black Dahlia Murder, which will be released on June 11 by Metal Blade. At the end of the review you’ll find all three of the songs that have premiered to date.)

Some bands only get better with age. I honestly feared that The Black Dahlia Murder would have sold out by now, compromised their sound, watered it down (especially due to the unusual amount of acclaim they’ve received as an American melodic death metal band), but instead they’ve only become more vicious.

I’ve been a fan of this band since before Unhallowed with the A Cold-Blooded Epitath EP and have remained a die-hard fan since. The savage way in which they attack their melodic assault, the vein-bursting stylings of Trevor Strnad’s now patented and oft-copied high and low vocal attack, and a commitment to producing music that’s melodic without pussing out in the slightest have really cemented BDM as an unstoppable force in American metal.

And the thing is, Everblack is The Black Dahlia Murder’s best album yet. Deflorate and Ritual both had cool things to offer and were great albums, but this is definitely BDM at their most brutal and dark. Continue reading »

HYBRID: “ANGST”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
May 302013
 

 (NCS contributor Austin Weber reviews the new album by Spain’s Hybrid.)

The sickening debut by Wormed on Planisphaerium was a stunning experience, one that stuck with me and was replayed often. A couple years after its release in 2003 I felt a curious need to check Metal-Archives.com and see if any members of Wormed had side-projects. Which led me straight to Hybrid, a band that at the time included one of the founding (and still current) Wormed guitarists, J. Oliver, alongside guitarist Miguel Angel aka Migueloud (Human Mincer), who coincidentally joined Wormed after quitting Hybrid.

Upon finding out about Hybrid, I had to grab their debut The 8th Plague. On their debut they sounded like industrial-influenced technical death metal, with a penchant for punishing, thick grooves, mathcore moments, and a fetish for grindcore flourishes. As if that wasn’t enough diversity to create some off-kilter unique metal, they also had intriguing use of both sax and synth while also possessing a skill for skronky discordant guitar-sounds.

On The 8th Plague they conjured sounds both alien and cold, owing more than a nod to the legacy of Gorguts. The hard-hitting and ever-switching drumming by Chus Maestro was the driving force of the album and not just an anchor for the guitars. He graced the album with constantly shifting patterns and abrupt changes in tempos, often switching between grind patterns and Latin jazzy playing to keep things interesting. Continue reading »

TRAIL OF TEARS: “OSCILLATION”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  5 Responses »
May 282013
 

(In this post, DGR reviews the latest — and last — album by Norway’s Trail of Tears, which is due for release in North America on June 11 by Massacre Records.)

Listening to Oscillation, Norwegian group Trail of Tears’ seventh and ostensibly final album, is something of a bittersweet experience. The group’s acrimonious breakup played out in a pretty public fashion (reported here, for example), and once you read stories about how the working environment within the band had been difficult for a year prior, you can’t help but let it color your perceptions of the disc — especially if you’re the type to pontificate on each choice as it exists on an album, its overall effect on the sound, how you think things went down. Instead of seeing this as a remarkably risky album for a group who have been relatively conservative with their formula, you instead find yourself thinking,”Wow, they must have been fighting this whole time,” and it really does put a damper on what should be thought of as – and empirically is – a pretty good batch of Trail of Tears songs.

So that’s why this is something of a difficult review, because there are things on Oscillation that you could reason away or just simply describe that are now somewhat tainted by the group’s somewhat dramatic breakup. As a result, this review will be considering the disc in a vacuum, written by someone who liked Existenia and Bloodstained Endurance. Those two discs albums are probably the closest comparison to Oscillation, because this new one feels like the continuation of the two previous releases, with enough experimentation and shifts in sound that it still stands on its own. But it could just as easily be polarizing, simply based on which of the two warring vocalists is in the front of the band for most of the songs. Continue reading »

BEFORE THE PROPHECY: “[COLLAPSE]”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 272013
 

(We welcome guest writer Kim Rosario, who reviews the debut EP by Before the Prophecy from Warren, Michigan.)

The local scene for any genre can be home to a plethora of the next big (insert popular band name here) vying for a chance at stardom.  On any given weekend you can go to a venue in your neighborhood to catch this month’s group of musicians playing cookie-cutter riffs of all your favorite bands and adding their own personal touch to the mix.  Next month, however, a whole new group, a whole new sound.  Every now and then a young group of musicians will tap into a raw, true form of expression and reality.  These individuals understand what it means to truly write, live, and breathe music.  Warren, Michigan is home to such a group, and they are known as Before the Prophecy.

The band’s debut E.P. [collapse] houses many flavors that are prevalent in the progressive metal scene, yet they don’t focus too much on a single area or use typical breakdowns combined with ambient leads as a crutch.  Before the Prophecy early on create a dedicated sense of destruction with fast-paced drumming combined with a bevy of polished riffs and textures.  Quite frequently the leads will be played with a distinguishable effect over them to differentiate from the reverb-laden solos of their peers.  Drummer Will Constantine is also a standout performer on this E.P. While this genre may be stereotyped into blast beats and breakdowns, he flourishes, offering many different flavors to blend with the brutality and emotion and keep each song original and fresh. Continue reading »

IMMOLATION: “KINGDOM OF CONSPIRACY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 272013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album from Immolation, which is out now on Nuclear Blast and can be ordered here.)

Kingdom Of Conspiracy is fucking excellent and you should buy it and shit.

See ya.

Nah, although I do kinda wish I could leave the review at that, just to have the shortest review in NCS history. I love Immolation, and as I stated in my review of Suffocation’s latest album, they’re another band who have those three key things going for them: Consistency, legacy, and relevancy. No one sounds like Immolation to this day, and yet Immolation continue to be ahead of their time no matter what era they are in.

Kingdom Of Conspiracy is a welcome jolt to the spine as well, because this is definitively the band’s most aggressive and fastest album since Dawn Of Possession, as well as one that includes the signature doom, sludge, and slam moments Immolation know how to throw into the mix. The band have never sounded more intense, Ross Dolan’s trademark roar has never sounded more grotesque and filth-covered, the drums are at an all-time high of double-bass and blast-beat saturation, and the riffs this time around opt more for bleeding you out via your jugular as opposed to the Immolation S.O.P of dragging you into an abyss by your feet. Continue reading »

SOLOTHUS: “SUMMONED FROM THE VOID”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
May 272013
 

In late 2011 a Finnish band named Solothus released their debut demo, Ritual of the Horned Skull. It drew praise from many reputable sources, but I, being irreparably half-assed, failed to track it down. However, because half of my ass does work reasonably well, I didn’t miss out on a second chance — the chance to hear the band’s forthcoming debut album, Summoned From the Void.

And what do Solothus summon from the void? They summon the gloom of a black storm front, the massive power of a swelling tide, and the chill of a crypt, and they transport all that straight into the listener’s mind — along with melodies both morbid and soulful, and compelling riffs that run the gamut from glacial to galloping.

Some hint of the music’s power comes in the instrumental introductory track, “Frostbane Overture”, as the magisterial sounds of a cathedral organ rise up within the vault, but the peaceful, meditative piano melody that joins the organ music may be a misdirection, for the air soon becomes thick with the atmosphere of doom.

Ancient doom is much of what weights the music — ponderous, booming guitar chords bathed in distortion; anvil-thick bass notes that sound like girders collapsing in slow motion; funereal drumbeats that pound like the steps of giants; bereft melodies moaning the grief of lost souls; and gravelly vocals as deep as ocean trenches, sometimes rising in ghastly howls. It sinks you at the same time as the powerful riffs get your head moving. Continue reading »

THE VESTIGES / PANOPTICON SPLIT: A REVIEW

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 262013
 

Two of the most interesting and musically original U.S. extreme metal bands now going, Vestiges and Panopticon, have teamed up for a split release that became available as a digital download two days ago, with vinyl to come. If you know anything about these bands, then chances are your expectations will be high — and you won’t be disappointed.

VESTIGES

This Washington, DC, band have dedicated themselves to a long-term musical narrative about man’s degradation of nature and the consequences that has brought, and will bring. The story began in their excellent 2010 album The Descent of Man, with songs named after chapter headings — “I” through “V”. The story continued with chapter VI in a 2011 split release with Ghaust, and then around the beginning of this year they began streaming the next two chapters, “VII” and “VIII”, on their web page and Bandcamp. Those most recent two songs are the Vestiges contributions to this current split with Panopticon.

The two songs flow seamlessly from one to the next, making them essentially one piece of music exceeding 18 minutes in length. It casts a dark, powerful spell. “VII” could be thought of as an extended overture. It’s almost entirely instrumental, beginning with droning ambient sounds and emphatic piano chords and then adding huge, prolonged bass notes and eventually the clash and march of cymbals and snare drum. It builds in volume and intensity until the music explodes at the beginning of “VIII”. Continue reading »

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