DAYLIGHT DIES: “A FRAIL BECOMING”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Oct 112012
 

 

(Earlier this week Candlelight Records released the new album by North Carolina’s Daylight Dies. Here’s TheMadIsraeli’s review.)

Daylight Dies have reshaped the landscape of melodic death metal almost overnight.  Their brand of somber, melancholy, doom-infused walls of mourning melody has proven to be quite fucking badass, with a virtually flawless discography that has consistently commanded attention.  The way they weave the music with signature melodic transitions filled with sonic bereavement and darkness is something no other band does so well, each riff, section, or theme in itself taking the listener on a journey. This is one of those bands who just have a perfect batting record, a capacity for unleashing tear-soaked depressive weight conveyed with jolting heft.

Now we have A Frail Becoming, the group’s fourth LP to date.  Daylight Dies have added a new emotion to their palette of despair and misery, a sense of angst that gnashes at you with a wolve’s fangs.  This is a quality not so much heard in the music, as it is felt (although I would say this album is noticeably more aggressive and angrier than their previous efforts), though the band still maintain their lumbering doom cadence.

The album is definitely a high point of the year. While established bands who’ve followed in their footsteps such as In Mourning and newcomers such as Okera have provided us excellent releases this year, A Frail Becoming proves that Daylight Dies are still the sole masters of their craft. It delivers the same consistently high quality they’ve maintained throughout their three previous full-lengths. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DOOMSDAY S/T

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Oct 102012
 

Chicago guitarist Jeff Wilson is a busy dude. In addition to his bands Chrome Waves and Wolvhammer, both of which we’ve praised here at NCS in the past, he’s also a driving force in a new collective called Doomsday. He’s got some heavyweight talent along for the Doomsday ride, too:

Bassist Bob Fouts (The Gates of Slumber, Chrome Waves, Apostle Of Solitude)
Guitarist/vocalist Jon Woodring (Bones)
Drummer Zack Simmons (Goatwhore)
Vocalist Zion Meagher (Anti-Human Thesis).

In some ways this group is like a Nachtmystium alumni reunion, since Wilson, Woodring, Simmons, and Meagher were all previously involved with that band — and Doomsday’s self-titled, six-song EP was engineered by Nachtmystium’s Sanford Parker, along with Carl Byers (Coffinworm). It will be released on November 6 by Wilson’s newly founded label Disorder Recordings, and it features brilliantly occult cover art by Christina Caperson.

Okay, now that I’ve gotten the details out of the way and nearly sunk this review under the weight of all those links, I do have a few words to say about the music: It’s really fuckin’ good. Continue reading »

PLANKS, TRAINWRECK, LENTIC WATERS, KNIFEFIGHT

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 102012
 

I caved in to impulse again this morning.  While browsing the interhole to see what was happening in the world of metal, I saw a Facebook post by Planks about a show they’re playing in Plauen, Germany on November 16 with two other German bands, Trainwreck and Lentic Waters. Event details can be found here. The show seems to be part of a two-day fest called Deaf Row, and I came across a flyer for the fest that I thought was cool enough to paste on the top of this post.

Hannover is on the other side of the world from where I live in Seattle, so it seems unlikely that I’ll be at that show, unless of course the Seattle tech geeks figure out how to get my fuckin’ teleporter working again. I’ve become a big fan of Planks but didn’t know anything about Trainwreck or Lentic Waters, so I thought, what the fuck, time to check out some new music!

PLANKS

I first heard the music of Planks over the most recent Labor Day weekend and wrote about them here. What I heard was a Bandcamp stream of Planks’ amazing new album, Funeral Mouth, which is being released on October 12 but can be downloaded via that Bandcamp link right now.

In compiling today’s post, I discovered that Planks also recorded a split with one of the other bands featured on that November 16 show, Lentic Waters. The split was released in June of this year on vinyl by Apocaplexy Records (which can be ordered here), but it turns out that Apopoplexy also made the split available for free download via a link on this page. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FULL ALBUM STREAM OF UNDERCROFT’S “RUINS OF GOMORRAH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  4 Responses »
Oct 092012
 

Roughly a decade has passed since Undercroft left Chile for Northern Europe. Roughly six years have passed since the band’s last studio release, during which time Undercroft’s vocalist and bassist Alvaro Lillo became a live performing member of Watain. But this group has re-grouped, and the blood of their homeland beats in this new album, the band’s sixth since 1995, Ruins of Gomorrah.

Undercroft hook you up like Frankenstein’s monster. They drive those iron bolts into your neck and then bring down the lightning in one super-charged rhythmic blast after another until you just can’t help but jump and bang your helpless head. This is maggot-ridden, old-school death metal that’s so packed full of deep-grooved, beefy riffs and mauling percussion that even rotting flesh could not help but move with the rhythm.

But as much of a riff-monster as this album is, it’s also something more. Listen to “El Triunfo De La Muerte” and “Emplando Al Invasor” and you’ll hear the rhythms of South America in the “tribal” drumming and the melodies, and you’ll even be surprised by brief trumpet notes in the latter track before being engulfed in a decimating explosion of blast beats and huge, grinding riffs. And, holy hell, there are congas and acoustic guitar in the title track. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: REVOCATION — “TERATOGENESIS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Oct 082012
 

(In this post, TheMadIsraeli reviews the Scion A/V release of a new EP by one of our favorite bands, Boston’s Revocation.)

I’m just gonna put this out there: Scion A/V are my heroes.

So we’ve got a new FREE EP from hybrid deathrash hoplites Revocation titled Teratogenesis.  I don’t even know what the fuck that title means, but I love the album art and this EP contains some of the best music Revocation have written so far.  The assault of Teratogenesis is definitely more brutal and more focused as compared to the band’s last opus, Chaos of Forms, which I reviewed last year.

It seems that when a band does an EP, especially if it consists of material meant only for that EP, the result tends to be more intense.  I like this situation, because it’s here when a band just goes completely balls-deep with the more brutal aspects of their sound.  As such, don’t expect to find anything on Teratogenesis comparable to the more experimental numbers found on Chaos of Forms.

Teratogenesis is nothing but an adrenaline rush of hyper-speed fusion metal that definitely brings more of Revocation’s thrash influences to the forefront.  Everything else Revocation are known for is still here, it’s just that apparently they wanted to write something fast as fuck, which this EP definitely is.  Continue reading »

RITUALS / DEZAFRA RIDGE: SPLIT LP

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 072012
 

I’m feeling doomed today. I started with a review of the debut album by Seattle doom duo Bell Witch, and now I’m moving on to the new LP-length split by Rituals from Phoenix, Arizona, and DeZafra Ridge from Leipzig, Germany. Both bands are new discoveries for me, and very fortunate ones. Though their musical approaches differ from each other, the songs they’ve created for this split on the Alerta Antifascista label are excellent.

RITUALS

Each of the two bands contributes two long songs to the split, with the pair created by Rituals clocking in at more than 9 minutes each. Forlorn guitar notes and the harsh whistle of a cold wind open “It Means Nothing”, and a slow, shimmering guitar melody follows that, with the intermittent thump of a drumbeat backing it. Eventually, ragged vocal roars convey bestial malignancy as the glittering guitar melody builds in intensity.

Past the halfway point, the intensity diminishes and a clean dual guitar harmony weaves seductive magic. The vocals build to a harrowing howl. The song seques into a slow, beautiful, hypnotic finish. The aura is one of bereavement and pain, but the melody is also glorious. There’s an almost post-black metal feel to this doom, and it strikes a strong emotional chord. Continue reading »

BELL WITCH: “LONGING”

 Album Reviews  17 Responses »
Oct 072012
 

So much of the metal I listen to is so fast and furious that when I dived into Longing, the debut album by Seattle’s Bell Witch, I felt like a sprinter who’d been dropped in his tracks, as if the gravitational pull of the Earth had suddenly been quintupled. The pace of this tremendously heavy music is far slower than the beat of a human heart, yet a heart beats within it, as the songs push and pull between the sounds of devastation and salvation.

Longing is an apt title for this album. Its six atmospheric tracks create an uncanny ambience of loss and despair, a sense of isolation and depressive wistfulness, and often the feeling of unavoidable catastrophe and even horror. Yet the dark and brutal hopelessness of the songs is offset by slow, beautiful melodies — not cheerful ones, mind you, but profound expressions of melancholy.

The music is amazingly simple and spare. The only instruments employed by the Bell Witch duo of Dylan Desmond and Adrian Guerra are bass and drums (respectively), and their voices. I assume the bass is a six-string instrument, because those aching melodies are often carried by notes that climb up the register, often free of the massive distortion that surrounds the cave-in chords at the bottom of every song.

Two of the tracks — and they are the shortest ones — consist of no instruments but the bass, and no vocals. In “Beneath the Mask”, slow, reverberating notes and chords provide grim accompaniment for a sample from the Roger Corman 1964 horror classic Masque of the Red Death, in which the Satan-worshipper Prince Prospero discovers the identity of the Man in Red. The final track, “Outro”, is simply a bass solo — ponderous, booming, yet still woven with bleak melody. Continue reading »

SATURDAY SOUNDINGS: CAUSEMOS, TYRANT OF DEATH, CALIGULA’S HORSE, AND DEATHEMBER

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Oct 062012
 

Here’s another round-up of new musical discoveries from the last 24 hours. NCS writer DGR delivered the first two of these items to my in-box, for which I bow down in gratitude. NCS reader Austin S-K brought me the third one, for which I bow down in gratitude. I came up with the fourth one on my own, but I’m now unable to straighten up so you could bow down in gratitude to me. Not as limber as I used to be. I’ll be spending the rest of the day staring at the floor. And headbanging.

CAUSEMOS

Causemos are a Finnish band who yesterday released their debut album, Infinite Event, as a pay-what-you-want (or pay nothing) download on Bandcamp. (I suppose you might also call this an EP, since the songs only total about 25 minutes of music.) Causemos brand their music as “cosmic space metal”, which is not a bad description. I would elaborate on that description as follows:

Causemos weave together symphonic keyboards and technically demanding melodic death metal, with vocals that move seamlessly between brutish howling/growling and really nice soaring cleans that reminded me a bit of Dave Hunt’s clean ceiling-busters for Anaal Nathrakh. The music is intricate and vitally dynamic, ranging from bombastic hammering to astral streams of progressive ambience. The music has a grandiose and sometimes spacey quality, but not at the expense of headbanging rhythms or infectious melodies — of which there are many. Continue reading »

CONVERGE: “ALL WE LOVE WE LEAVE BEHIND”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Oct 042012
 

Late yesterday I discovered that Converge had launched a full-album stream for All We Love We Leave Behind on YouTube. Originally, I intended only to include that piece of news in a post I was putting together with other new music streams that surfaced yesterday. But as I listened to the album and began attempting to describe briefly what I was hearing, the post began to take the shape of a review.

It’s not the kind of review I would normally write — I haven’t listened to the album multiple times, or made notes about what I was hearing, or sat back and attempted to collect my thoughts after putting some space between me and the music. Hell, I’m not even 100% sure that I’m matching up the songs with their correct titles, because there’s no index to the album stream that tells you for sure when one song stops and the next one starts — and given the dynamics within the songs and the nearly seamless flow from one to the next, it’s not always patently obvious (though the changing artwork is a signal).

But fuck it, I’m so caught up in what I’ve heard that I’m going with my near-stream-of-consciousness first impressions, and that’s that.

********

All We Love We Leave Behind will be released by Epitaph Records on October 9. In its “deluxe” limited-edition CD format, there are 17 songs (14 songs on the regular release), and that deluxe edition also includes a hardcover, clothbound book with 48 pages of full-color original art by vocalist Jacob Bannon. Honestly, I’ve been looking forward to this release almost as much for the artwork as for the music. In fact, I pre-ordered that expensive limited edition copy because of anticipation over the artwork, having heard nothing of the music. (You can see the variety of bundles and formats for the album at this location, where they can also be pre-ordered.)

But because of this full-album stream, the music is now available for all of us to hear in advance of the official release, and I unwittingly made a wise call in pre-ordering this baby. The stream not only includes the music, it also includes much of the individualized artwork that Jacob Bannon created for each song, and the art is amazing, as I suspected it would be. And the music? It’s equally amazing. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GOSPEL OF THE HORNS – “CEREMONIAL CONJURATION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Oct 032012
 

Sometimes I think that if a hateful supreme being brought his fist down on an astral kill-switch for metal and stopped the flow of new music forever, thundering “THOU HAST ENOUGH, AND THERE WILL BE NO MORE!”, we’d all still be fine. I listen to a lot of music, but every week I discover some new band I’d never heard of before, with a history and a discography unknown to me who prove to be worth the time. After many years of listening, I know I’ve still barely scratched the surface.

Take Gospel of the Horns as an example — and by the way, isn’t that a fine, fine band name? It even turns into the acronym G.O.T.H. This band trace their roots to Melbourne, Australia, in the year 1993. They’ve toiled in the darkness for nearly 20 years (with the inevitable changes in line-up), producing a couple of demos, a couple of EPs, two albums, and a compilation, and yet they are new to me.

My introduction to G.O.T.H. came through a five-song 12″ vinyl EP released a bit earlier this year under the name Ceremonial Conjuration, with the music waiting behind the venomous gaze of that goat creature on the cover. What I got was a fistful of slashing, guitar-driven black thrash ‘n’ roll.

G.O.T.H. know how to riff your face like a barbed flail, snapping your head back and forth with one galvanizing chord after another. Trading off between punk rhythms, speed-metal fury, and mid-paced head-busters, G.O.T.H. have created one purulent mass of filth encrusted infection, each song bent on domination and every one very damned effective in accomplishing the mission. Continue reading »

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