DARKCORPSE

 Album Reviews, Phro's Posts, SHORT BUT SWEET  16 Responses »
Oct 232012
 

(In this post, Phro provides an introduction to the music of Japan-based Darkcorpse.  It has something to do with a wolverine’s urethra.)

Hey. I’m Phro. It’s been a while, but your asses are still surely elastic. So stretch ’em out and get ready for some really gritty black metal.

Darkcorpse is a band. They make music that sounds like someone injecting gravel into a wolverine’s urethra via a sandblaster. They have two demos, and you will love them (demo 2, in particular). That’s not a prophesy or a request or even a demand. It is a fact of life in the same way it is a fact that life isn’t worth living if you can’t go out to clubs, meet nice strangers, bring them home, cut large holes in their stomachs, shove in some rabid rodents, and then sew them up and watch the fun on an ultrasound.

Their Bandcamp page informs me “Darkcorpse play a no-frills crust inflected brand of Black Thrash with a touch of doom.” I, literally, have no fucking clue what that means. I mean, I recognize the words, but when it’s all together in sentence form, it kind of makes my brain feel like a cum-sandwich smoothy bubbling up from beneath my eyeballs and rolling down my cheeks. (“My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.”)

However, if we look at the individual pieces of the sentence, it all makes sense. The vocals, in their crusty/black/trashiness, sound more than anything like the aforementioned wolverine howling in furious anger (not in pain though, that little fuck is more annoyed than anything) just before it rips free from it’s steel bindings and bites clean through your genitals. Continue reading »

HIDEOUS DIVINITY, “OBEISANCE RISING”: A GUEST REVIEW BY TED O’NEILL (OBLIVION)

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Oct 232012
 

(We’re stoked to present the following guest review by veteran guitarist Ted O’Neill of that most excellent California band Oblivion, whose new album we reviewed here.)

I was very pleased when the powers that be at NCS asked me to write a “guest” review for the site. I’m not a professional writer, which will become evident shortly, so let’s not get too excited about grammatical errors and the like.  Not being a writer by trade also frees me from the self-imposed burden of some of the pseudo-intellectual bloggers who try their best to pick apart and find flaws when they do get their hands on a stellar new release. Fortunately, I’m reviewing Hideous Divinity’s debut album Obeisance Rising, an album which leaves little room for criticism. Before I tell you why this is an album that is more than worthy of your money, let’s introduce the band.

Hideous Divinity is a band hailing from Italy, originally started in 2007 by Enrico Schettino, Mauro Mercurio (both ex-Hour of Penance), and Synder Mastantuono (Eyeconoclast). After composing and recording some material the band was silent until a new line-up took form in 2009 with Enrico H. DiLorenzo (vocals), Enrico Schettino and Fabio Bartoletti (guitars), Flavio Cardozo (bass), and Mizio Montagna (drums). At the time of this writing the band has parted ways with Flavio and Mizio, replacing them with Stefano Franceschini (bass) and Giulio Galati (drums).

For everyone who is not Italian, please re-read that paragraph as we are going to have a quiz here in a minute. OK, ready…go!

So why am I reviewing an album that came out 6 months ago? Well, simply put, this band needs more support. Somehow it seems that Obeisance Rising flew under almost everyone’s radar. This needs to be fixed and fixed NOW because in a sea of crappy generi-core modern metal, Hideous Divinity is an absolute juggernaut top-flight death metal band. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say these guys are a “real” death metal band, as this is death metal done the way it is supposed to be done. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: BEYOND MORTAL DREAMS – “DREAMING DEATH”

 Album Reviews, Eye-Catchers, SHORT BUT SWEET  9 Responses »
Oct 232012
 

It’s not often that in the space of a four-song EP a band establish themselves as a paramount force in their chosen genre of music, but that’s what Beyond Mortal Dreams have done on Dreaming Death. This Australian band recorded a debut album in 2008 (From Hell), but this April 2012 self-released EP is a new beginning, reflecting both a revised line-up and an especially powerful take on dark, supremely brutal death metal.

Three of the songs are original and the fourth is a cover of Beherit’s “Beast of Damnation” — and the choice of a Beherit song should tell you something about this band.

The music on Dreaming Death is both galvanizing and transfixing. It made me imagine standing in the presence of an infernal creature that’s monstrous and yet magnificent, a sight that would freeze you in place with fear yet accelerate the rush of blood through your veins in a supercharged burst of adrenaline.

The hyper-speed riffs swarm like a horde of red-eyed bats bolting straight out of Hell. It’s a dense, raw, distorted sound that’s almost overpowering.The listening sensation is horrific, like being caught in the cataclysmic destruction of a battlefield or being processed through a giant meat-grinder capable of turning entire populations into sausage stuffing, bones and all.

The guitar solo’s erupt like sheets of white lightening. They’re scalding and blazingly fast, yet they’re also melodic — if you can wrap your mind around that conundrum. Continue reading »

SUNDAY SAVAGERY, WITH ENSLAVED, XEHANORT, FISTULA, AND CATS MATING

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  15 Responses »
Oct 212012
 

The loris compound at NCS HQ has been in turmoil. They apparently expected me to leave grubs for them before I left town last week, and they resorted to cannibalism while I was gone. Must have been a ritualistic aspect to it, because I found them chanting over those big eyeballs of the dead, which had been collected like marbles in a shallow pit.

I thought they would just fast, and some of them had gotten pretty hefty so I figured that wouldn’t be a bad thing. Actually, to be brutally honest, I just fuckin’ forgot to leave food.

Anyway, they’re in a feisty mood, because I guess uncooked loris doesn’t taste as good as grubs. I don’t understand their language, but I’m pretty sure they were chanting something about impaling me on greased spikes. I’m glad I reinforced the fencing and electrified it last month. All my efforts to reason with them seem to have fallen on deaf ears, so I’ve had to resort to stern disciplinary measures.

I’ve been playing them some savage new music I discovered recently, using the compound’s megajoule PA system. It’s causing blood to come out of their ears, but instead of getting docile, it’s causing them to headbang. Very slowly. Because they’re lorises, aren’t they?

I thought I’d share the music with you, too. Not that you need disciplining, of course. Unless you do.

ENSLAVED

Thanks to a tip from MaxR (Metal Bandcamp), I started the lorises off with Enslaved providing a live cover of Led Zeppelin’s classic “Immigrant Song” on the Norwegian TV show Trygdekontoret on October 17 2012. It’s a goddamn glorious cover, with the band blackening the song and then ending it by dropping down into a doomy breakdown with Ice Dale spinning off a psychedelic guitar solo. I thought it was generous of me to give those slow creatures something to watch as well as hear. Continue reading »

DEAFHEAVEN / BOSSE-DE-NAGE SPLIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Oct 212012
 

deafheaven are one of my favorite genre-bending black metal bands. Their debut album Roads To Judah made many of the Best of 2011 lists we published at this site, and I also included the song “Violet” in our list of 2011’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. Though I was sold on the band based on that album and their previous EP, Libertine Dissolves, I became an even more devoted fan after seeing them perform live at Neumo’s in Seattle about a year ago and talking with their charismatic frontman George Clarke both before and after that set.

When I saw the news that they had recorded a song for a forthcoming split release with another Bay Area black metal band, Bosse-de-Nage, I begged for the chance to hear the split, and my wish was granted.

deafheaven’s song is a cover of “Punk Rock” and “Cody”, the opening songs from the 1999 album Come On Die Young, by Scotland’s Mogwai. By coincidence, Andy Synn included this deafheaven track in a list of his favorite “unexpected” covers that we published only a few days ago.

Before diving into deafheaven’s take on the songs, I first listened to the Mogwai originals, with which I wasn’t familiar. “Punk Rock” is a drifting, dreamy, isolated guitar arpeggio that plays out over a sample from a speech that Iggy Pop made during a 1977 CBC interview. “Cody” is similarly slow and restrained, a beautiful, hypnotic, near-pop song with layered guitars, almost-hidden vocals, and a decidedly melancholy ambience. Continue reading »

DRAGGED INTO SUNLIGHT: “WIDOWMAKER”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 182012
 

Even after my first listen to Widowmaker all the way through — and it must be heard in that way — I began giving it my own subtitle: “The Descent of Man”. Charles Darwin may have claimed the title as his own 131 years ago, but the new concept album by Dragged Into Sunlight isn’t about the evolution of human mental faculties to a higher state. It’s more the reverse — an inexorable degradation into misery, and ultimately savagery.

For those of you who are familiar with the band’s debut album Hatred for Mankind (reviewed here), listening to Widowmaker is in most ways a very different experience. Though its release follows Hatred, it was recorded in three separate sessions between 2010 and 2012, with the band consciously creating a different kind of soundscape than the cataclysmic, corrosive, chaotic cacophony that suffused the debut release.

Though there are three long tracks on Widowmaker, they are numbered and nameless. Think of them as three sections of a single song, or perhaps as three movements in a symphony of doom. No one will jail you for listening to these tracks separately, but it’s clear that this gradual descent into the abyss was meant to be experienced as a unified whole, lasting more than 40 minutes. Continue reading »

CATTLE DECAPITATION’S NEW VIDEO FOR “FORCED GENDER REASSIGNMENT” SETS A NEW STANDARD FOR FOULNESS

 Album Reviews  44 Responses »
Oct 152012
 

“WARNING: The video you are about to watch is incredibly gory, violent, and features strong sexual violence including rape and sexual assault. Bloody-Disgusting does not endorse or condone any of the actions seen in this video. It is to be viewed as entertainment only.”

That’s the warning that appeared in advance of Bloody Disgusting’s premiere not long ago for the new official video by Cattle Decapitation for “Forced Gender Reassignment”, a track off their decimating 2012 album Monolith of Inhumanity. And that warning appeared after the site explained that the video had been rejected by both YouTube and Vimeo.

I took all this with a grain of salt. I mean, let’s face it, we live in a culture totally stuffed with hype, because hyperbole sells. Having now watched the video, I’m here to tell you: The warning is not hype. Mitch Massie has made something utterly foul and disturbing, with explicit scenes of torture and rape and the brutalization of human flesh. It’s so NSFW that you’re probably not even safe watching it in the same city where you work. Continue reading »

CREEPMIME: “CHIAROSCURO”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit  6 Responses »
Oct 142012
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews a classic of Dutch death metal from a long-defunct band and provides a free download of this out-of-print beauty.)

Ok, this is me finally getting around to a favor that was asked of me all the way back in the summer of 2011.  You might remember my coverage of a now defunct Dutch band I was a huge fan of called Cypher (who were kind enough to provide us with free downloads of their music, including that unreleased EP we helped bring to the light of day).  While I wait for Tobias Borra and gang to resurface with what is essentially Cypher 2.0 (name not yet revealed), Tobias had asked me to check out a band considered to be Dutch death metal legends alongside the likes of Pestilence who were rather overshadowed in their day.  The band has Cypher/I, Chaos/Dew Scented bassist Joost Van Der Graff on bass and vocal duties, so Tobias felt I’d find it extremely relevant to my interests.

The band in question is Creepmime. Information about them is rather obscured and hard to come across (even the Metal Archives page appears to be inaccurate and very incomplete).  Actually, information on them is VERY obscure and nearly fucking impossible to come across.  Wanna know how obscure?  It’s nearly impossible to find line-up-per-album info, including for the album (Chiaroscuro) that’s the subject of this post. This band is so obscure that there aren’t release dates, simply fucking estimates of time.  All I can tell you is that Chiaroscuro came out sometime between late ’93 and ’95. Continue reading »

SOMETHING VERY NASTY: DE MAGIA VETERUM – “THE DEIFICATION”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Oct 132012
 

They left me late in the day after what seemed like hours of feasting with lip-smacking glee on selected internal organs.  My internal organs.  They secreted an enzyme in their salvia that acted like an anesthetic, dulling but not deadening the pain, avoiding the onset of shock that might have killed the host.  Apparently they prefer the pulse of warm blood through their banquet instead of the cold, maggot-ridden dregs of cooling, lifeless flesh.

More than once, after seeing Jaws, I morbidly imagined the horror of being eaten alive by a carnivorous thing for whom I, for all my vaulting egoism, was to be nothing but food, my consciousness surviving long enough to realize that I was being eaten and would be digested and then shat out, my life amounting to nothing but nutrients for another.  But actually experiencing this firsthand instead of imagining it made my waking dreams a pale fairy tale by comparison.

I did not wonder who they were.  I knew.  After all, I had unwittingly invited them into the chamber of my body, opening myself to their hunger and their gnashing jaws. They entered through the ears. Continue reading »

METAL FROM ROMANIA: ABIGAIL AND SICULICIDIUM

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  8 Responses »
Oct 122012
 

On the same day last week I came across both of these very good Romanian bands.  The last time I came across a Romanian band that was new to me was in June (Void Forger), so to find two on the same day was like a message from some dark entity compelling me to write something. Actually, I’m pretty sure it was just a coincidence, but I’d rather be safe than sorry.

ABIGAIL

I have a post by MaxR at Metal Bandcamp to thank for my discovery of Abigail. As you’ll have realized by now, this is not the Japanese black/thrash band named Abigail. This group is based in Bucharest, though they’ve been around as long as those Japanese stalwarts, with their first demo dating back to 1994.

Despite their longevity, they have yet to release a full album, instead producing demos and EPs — though they are now at work on a projected 3-CD + DVD album entitled Dark Days Turned Into Blue Nights. What I heard was the band’s most recent release, an October 2011 EP named It Is the Night I Fear, which is available for free on Bandcamp. A review of that EP is next . . . Continue reading »

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