PORTAL: “VEXOVOID”

 Album Reviews  19 Responses »
Feb 062013
 

Portal’s new album Vexovoid comes more than three years after their last album Swarth, which was my introduction to the band. At that time, I had heard nothing like Swarth. My reactions, of course, were a product of my tastes at the time and what, in retrospect, was the limited range of metal to which I’d been exposed up to that point in my education as a metal lover. I found the album deeply disturbing and yet transfixing. I can’t say I immediately liked it, but I couldn’t stay away from it either.

Since then, my tastes have expanded, as has the range of extreme music I’ve heard. Among other things, I’ve listened to a lot more blackened death metal (a micro-genre I also think of as apocalyptic death metal or atmospheric death metal, some of which also gets labeled “war metal”). Which is to say, I’m no longer the innocent virgin who was violated by Swarth. Having been violated by many other rough beasts in the intervening years, I wondered how the new me would react to Vexovoid.

The new me likes Vexovoid very much. It doesn’t have the shock value that Swarth delivered to my unprepared ears more than three years ago, but even to these now mangled and punctured ear drums Portal haven’t lost their ability to create vivid, catastrophic atmospheres of horror and doom. Vexovoid is both disturbing and mesmerizing. It will detonate a highly radioactive bomb in your head, grind up the remains like hamburger, and send your soul into the void. Continue reading »

VREID: “WELCOME FAREWELL”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Feb 062013
 

(Below, Andy Synn reviews the forthcoming sixth album by Norway’s Vreid.)

To me a new Vreid album is a very… sexual experience…

First we have the announcement that a new album is in the works, the enticing promise of something special to come, a reward for being good boys and girls…

Then comes the build of anticipation, the flirting glimpses of the artwork, the teasing interviews where the band stoke our ardour with their verbal prowess and come-hither eyes…

Then there’s the foreplay, the premiere of a song, the release date announcement, the booking of tours, all designed to get you all primed up and ready to go…

Then, finally, you get to the main event. The album is released and all that pent up frustration and energy finally reaches… climax.

Sorry everyone, I got a bit worked up there.

Anyway, Welcome Farewell is an awesome record, it really is. Continue reading »

OBSERVATIONS OF THE DAY: GORGUTS, SHINING, MALIGNANT MONSTER, AND TALANAS

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

Allow me to share with you a collection of findings that I happened upon over the last 24 hours, most of it breaking news, some of it new music I think is worth spreading around like life-giving manure, and some of it videographic in nature. News first:

GORGUTS

Thanks to a tip from Vonlughlio, I discovered that Gorguts have signed with Season of Mist and will be releasing their extremely long-awaited fifth studio album later this year. Guitarist/vocalist Luc Lemay is quoted in a press release we received as follows:

“Everything from writing these new songs, traveling to NYC for rehearsals, developing a new friendship with John, Kevin and Colin, three of the most talented people I ever jammed with…everything from this project was beyond stimulating artistically.

From this experience was born a new GORGUTS record, a concept record which is going to last over an hour. An hour of epic, ambient, dark music which doesn’t compromise its Death Metal roots. As a composer, by exploring different kind of music, it was always my goal to integrate the same writing tools in Death Metal as if I would be writing a piece of chamber music for instance.

Well, I’m really eager to share this new record with you!” Continue reading »

VOIGHT KAMPFF: “MORE HUMAN THAN HUMAN”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

(Named for the polygraph-like test that Blade Runners use to determine whether a subject is a replicant, Voight Kampff are a French metal band who released their debut album late last year. In this post TheMadIsraeli gives it a brief review.)

I figured it was time to start digging into the depths of the internet and find really obscure shit.  Voight Kampff certainly caught me with the stupid, almost borderline shitty cover art you see above, labeling their music as “Progressive death/thrash metal” and boasting Blade Runner references out the ass.  To say the least, I was intrigued.

Contrary to the feeble but futuristic cover art, this album is a surprising old school kick in the teeth.  Voight Kampff are an odd band, playing a style that never hit it off with many people at its time, with a production that sounds straight out of the early 90’s or late 80’s.

You see, Voight Kampff appear to be huge fans of that really awkward phase around the 80’s going into the 90’s when thrash metal and death metal were coming to be almost the same thing.  You had the technicality of death metal, and that genre’s vocal stylings as well, but the speed and composition sense of thrash metal.  We saw this with bands like Pestilence on Testimony of the Ancients, Coroner on Mind Vortex, or Death on Human. Continue reading »

HOWLING: “A BEAST CONCEIVED”

 Album Reviews  11 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

I hear someone’s voice, sometimes I get a vivid mental picture of what they look like. I hear Vanessa Nocera’s vocals on the debut album by Howling, I see her clearly:  two stories tall, covered in dense black fur matted with blood, teeth made for tearing and chewing, claws made for gutting, blood-red eyes like windows into Hell.

I could be wrong. She might only be one story tall. But I’m pretty confident about the rest of it, at least when there’s a full moon.

Of course, there’s more to A Beast Conceived than Ms. Nocera’s inhuman vocals. She’s joined in Howling by Tony Proffer (Beyond Hell) on guitar and bass, and by drummer Elektrokutioner (Scaremaker, Wooden Stake, Beyond Hell, Encoffination, Father Befouled, etc.). Together, this trio are about as locked in to a shared vision of their music as you could possibly ask for. Together, they kick up a mad, thrashing, garage-band racket that pulls from more diverse genres than you might guess from what I’ve written so far — and what they’ve cooked up is fuckin’ brilliant.

Vanessa Nocera’s vocals require that the prefix “death” be added to any attempt at a genre description for A Beast Conceived. The word “horror” could be added because of the lyrical themes (not to mention the album art). But despite these markers, the music isn’t down-tuned, distortion-pedaled old-school death metal, or corpse-ridden death/doom, or goregrind, or even crusty d-beat. What it is, is something quite refreshing and insanely addictive. Continue reading »

REMNANTS OF 2012 THAT I HEARD IN 2013: HIVESMASHER, PERHAPS, DISKORD, II II II

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Free Shit  7 Responses »
Feb 052013
 

(Welcome back Louisville-based music writer Austin Weber with some thoughts about a diverse array of artists and albums from 2012 that he missed in his year-end list for NCS. Might be some new discoveries in here for you, too.)

Last year there were a few bands who released absolutely stunning albums that even I forgot about….until now.

Hivesmasher– Gutter Choir

Pig Destroyer’s Book Burner was rightly hyped as grind album of the year, and while I loved the hell out of it, Hivesmasher does something very different for me. Theirs is a grimey, nastier kind of grind, similar to the utterly hopeless filth Crowpath used to conjure up.

This is on a whole other level, better written and better played than most who reside within the hyper-focus on speed and punk atittude to cover up weak songwriting and poor instrumental capability. The tropes that now consume the genre have led me to try and find those groups who are trying to elevate grindcore instead of just being a barrage of (albeit awesome) sound.

Hivesmasher knocked me on my ass from the first track, which made abundantly clear how good these guys are. Continue reading »

MESHUGGAH: “PITCH BLACK” IS NOW OUT!

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

Last week when I caught wind that Scion AV would be releasing something new from Meshuggah tomorrow, I ventured a guess that it would be a new Meshuggah song, perhaps as part of a two-track EP, maybe with a live track included along with the new song. Well, it turns out I was right.

Yes, Pitch Black is a two-song release with a previously unreleased studio recording from 2003 — “Pitch Black” — and a live track. The second track is a previously unreleased, live version of “Dancers To A Discordant System” from obZen. Both songs are very much worth hearing and having.

What do these songs bring? Here’s a partial list: brute, bruising, chugs with that reliable Meshuggah tone; spacey cosmic ambience; near-spoken-word vocals, some of it positively robotic; a fidgety, squirming guitar solo in the title track; and funky bass lines as the foundation for what sure as fuck sound like sax solos (or a guitar tuned to sound identical to one) on both songs. Continue reading »

ABRIOSIS: “VESSEL”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

(Below, TheMadIsraeli provides a review of the 2012 EP Vessel by Vancouver’s Abriosis.)

If I told you we had a band on our hands here who brought to the table the genre-bending, fusing duality of Revocation, the noisy, unorthodox, massive dissonance of Gojira, and a take on composition that is very Martyr-esque, I bet you’d shit yourself. In case no one paid attention to them when Islander mentioned them back in his “girl growlers” series (here), Abriosis is that band.

This EP, Vessel, chews up and spits out anything lesser in its path in its short 20-minute run time. Abriosis bring chaos with a contradictory sense of pin-point accuracy and focus that, quite frankly, blows a lot of their current peers out of the water. This is envelope-pushing stuff, even if the territory explored here is nothing terribly new, just an exciting combination of more modern approaches to brutality.

I highly recommend checking this out, and picking it up, whatever you need to do — and it’s easy since the band have just made the EP available for free download via this link. Continue reading »

EYE OF SOLITUDE: “THE DECEIT”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHORT BUT SWEET  7 Responses »
Feb 042013
 

It’s not often that you get the chance to spend your money on solid metal and know that you’re making a charitable donation at the same time, but that’s the chance Eye of Solitude and Kaotoxin Records are giving you with the band’s brand new EP, The Deceit, which is now available for download at Bandcamp.

First, a word about the charity. All money raised by this EP before June 1s, 2013, will go directly to Asociaţia Nevăzătorilor din România — the Romanian Association for the Blind and Sight Impaired. The amount raised by June 1 and donated to the charity will be posted on the label’s Facebook page: www.facebook.com/kaotoxinrecords.

Since Eye of Solitude is a UK-based band, you may wonder about the choice of charity, but the connection probably can be traced to the band’s vocalist Daniel Neagoe, who is Romanian born.

And now let’s get to the music. If the band’s name seems familiar, it may be because I’ve written about them before in connection with an official video for a song from their most recent album, Sui Caedere, which is available for streaming and purchase on Bandcamp here. The new EP includes three songs, totaling about 18 minutes of music. Continue reading »

HATE: “SOLARFLESH”

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Jan 312013
 

(In this post, NCS writer Andy Synn reviews the new album by Poland’s Hate, which is scheduled for release in North America on February 5.)

Ok, let’s start by acknowledging the elephant in the room, shall we? For years now (more than I’d care to count, in fact) it’s been de rigeur to punctuate any review or feature on Hate with references to… that other band. You know the one. The ‘other’ blackened death metal band from Poland. Begins with a ‘B’…

Anyway, I think that’s been done to death. We all know the similarities by now, just as we should all realise there’s more than enough room in the world for both acts to be taken and judged on their own merits. So I’m going to conduct this whole review without even once mentioning the ‘B’ word, or making reference to ‘they who shall not be named’. In fact, I’m going to pretend they don’t even exist.

Now Solarflesh is Hate’s eighth full-length album, and offers up a more refined – and perhaps even more crushing – take on a sound that the band have been developing since (at least) 2003’s Awakening Of The Liar, a hybrid of black atmospherics and brutal death metal aggression, which has slowly taken on more and more of a spiritual, metaphysical aspect as the years have gone by. Added to this is that, as opposed to… some other band… there’s always been something more intimate about Hate’s approach, something that works to set them apart, even as they give rapturous voice to their own inner demons. Continue reading »

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