SATURNALIA TEMPLE: “AION OF DRAKON”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Jan 162012
 

(Gaia [ex-TNOTB] returns to our site with a review of the new album by Saturnalia Temple.)

Aion of Drakon
Saturnalia Temple
[AJNA Offensive]

1. God is Two
2. Black Magic Metal
3. Aion of Drakon
4. Ancient Sorceries
5. Sitra Ahra Ruled Solitary Before Creation
6. Fall

48 minutes

Have you ever had that dream where it’s really urgent and really important to get somewhere, but things are holding you back? Cobwebs, mud, vines, family members, waves crashing down on you; you spend your strength fighting off and fighting through it all to get to do this really important thing. Desperation sets in, and you feel hopelessly lost, the ground elevates around you, and you fall. Then there’s that stomach-plunge feeling, and you literally jerk awake in a moment of absolute terror.

Saturnalia Temple are the deluge of mud that surrounds your knees and forces you into a crawl. They tap into that feeling of desperation and play on your astral paranoia; they channel the occult, raise their altars and pillars, and summon the beasts in the forests. They tether you down, they plunge their knife, then you wake in terror. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: STEALING AXION

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
Jan 162012
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the 2010 EP of a Tacoma, Washington, band called Stealing Axion — whose debut album is on the way — and we’re offering a free NCS download of the EP, too.)

Some of you may recall that not long ago I engaged in a bit of a fueled rant about djent in which I suggested (among other things) that the term should be replaced with “progressive groove metal”.  A lot of the best bands who have come out of this so-called djent scene often REALLY have nothing to do with “djent”.  Sure, they might incorporate a Meshuggah-like moment here and there, but when it comes to bands like Textures, Hacride, or in this case Stealing Axion, they simply do not fit into the djent mold as most people understand it.

This self-titled EP came out in 2010, perhaps a bit outdated for some who read this site for the newest and coolest in metal badassery, but Stealing Axion is no band to scoff at.  I’m mainly reviewing this EP as a prelude to the band’s debut full-length, Moments, due this year, which I also plan to review.  So, consider this review a primer and a sampler of what’s to come.

Stealing Axion is an unusual band indeed.  A band who borrow from Tool and Sevendust just as much as they do Meshuggah or Lamb Of God, Stealing Axion is ramping up to become a new leading force in the progressive groove metal movement, delivering a diverse sound that remains monstrously heavy at every corner, with a stunningly crushing mix brought by Acle Kahney of TesseracT fame (who is also  mixing and mastering Moments). Continue reading »

THY CATAFALQUE: “RENGETEG”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  20 Responses »
Jan 102012
 

I listened to a lot of albums in 2011, most of them new releases. I made mental lists and written lists of the ones I wanted to review, not because I think I’m particularly good at it, but because I want to do my part to help spread the word about music I admire and to support good bands so they’ll continue making music that makes me happy ( yes, it all comes down to selfishness in the end).

Of course, I fell down on the job miserably. I just didn’t get around to reviewing everything I wanted to praise in 2011. With the new year under way, I know that psychologically I’ll feel motivated to focus on new releases this year instead of trying to catch up on writing about 2011 albums.  But if I never write about another 2011 album, there’s one I cannot leave unheralded — Rengeteg.

If this 2011 album from Thy Catafalque consisted of the 9 minutes and 20 seconds of “Fekete mezők” and 51 minutes of mind-numbing elevator music, I would still be happy. “Fekete mezők” is one of my favorite songs of the year. But that song is just the beginning of an album’s worth of musical marvels — and no two of them are alike.

The songs flow into each other without pause, pulling the listener along with them as they cross a constantly changing landscape of sounds and emotions. The idea of crossing a landscape isn’t just the feeling conjured by the movement of the music. It also emerges from the lyrics.

The words are in Hungarian, but they’ve recently become available in English translations, and I found them interesting to read while listening to the album (for the umpteenth time). If there’s a concept I can discern, it is one about the unity of life and matter, about the connectedness of human beings to the Earth, and more than the Earth, to the star-spawned matter of which we and it are made. Continue reading »

PDP: “MASS DELUSION”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jan 102012
 

(Today TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut album of a band called P.D.P., which took form within the halls of Hollywood’s Musician’s Institute. The album was released last August by Heavyocity Records. P.D.P.’s official site is here.)

Two names.  Pantera and Fear Factory.

P.D.P (no I don’t know what the name means, and they refuse to disclose what it means on top of that) is a band offering a nice reinterpretation of groove metal of the old Pantera school of thought.  Bring in some industrial tinges, 8-string guitars, the willingness to be fast instead of relying on groove as a crutch, and the ability to write interesting riffs, and you’ve got yourself a helping of head-bobbing goodness I can get behind.  This is their debut Mass Delusion.

The first song, “A Word to the Wise”, immediately delivers a succinct, classic Fear Factory styled opening with machine gun percussive attacks and solid, simple, hefty riffs.  A nice dose of tasteful melodic shred is also injected courtesy of guitarist Dane Markanson and vocalist/guitarist Greg Harrison (a trend that continues throughout the whole album).

Songs like “Prototype Ares” and “Bleed Out”, which follow, showcase their slower, more groove-oriented side.  Both songs utilize the massive low end of their 8-string guitars quite well to create a mammoth-sized, continuous punch to the nuts (I just know they are going to get pegged as some kind of Meshuggah copper simply because they execute riffs in the register of THALL (there is that word again)). Continue reading »

ERRA: “IMPULSE”

 Album Reviews  11 Responses »
Jan 082012
 

(In this post, TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut album by Alabama’s ERRA.)

It should be noted that when I typed this band’s name into Google Images, I was greeted by a myriad of pictures of scorching-hot bodacious Indian babes. This band has already won brownie points.

But in all earnestness, this is the first of my request posts. At the request of Joey Harrel of Substructure (whose debut EP we review here), I checked out this band. ERRA come from odd territory for heavy music of any sort, hailing from ALA-FUCKING-BAMA. One would automatically expect this to suck, the band coming from a place I associate with rotten teeth and the stench of teen pregnancy, but in fact this shit is pretty cool, boasting an assault of energetic, progressive metalcore composed of huge melodies, big riffs, and titanic breakdowns.

This is their debut, Impulse.

“White Noise”, both the single and opener for this album, is a hard-hitting, precision-driven stage-setter of bendy riffs, huge melodic chords, and polyrhythmic attacks. It’s quite obvious that ERRA isn’t trying to be the most brutal, the most technical, or the most outstanding; they just want to play some good-ass, heavy melodic metal, brimming with energy. Continue reading »

VICIOUS BASTARD: “POST ABORTION LUST”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jan 072012
 

(TheMadIsraeli emerges from his holiday cocoon with his first review of 2012. He’s not exactly easing into things.)

Alright NCSer’s, I’ve decided my work on year end-content has been putting off my output for too long, so, while you will see those things from me eventually, I got tired of not being able to stroke my own ego by reading my own sexually stimulating prose on our glorious website.

Speaking of sexually stimulating shit…

This is Vicious Bastard and their debut Post Abortion Lust. You’re probably thinking, “Oh great, this is another grind/pornogrind/deathgrind album from among the billions that are out there. Why should I give two fucks?” Here is a small excerpt off of Vicious Bastard’s Facebook page.

“5 Piece brutal grind assault featuring members of MALEVOLENT CREATION, VENOMOUS CONCEPT, WAR OF THE SECOND DRAGON and live member of ANAAL NATHRAKH”

Interested now? Thought so. Continue reading »

PTAHIL: “FOR HIS SATANIC MAJESTY’S GLORY”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Jan 052012
 

Get an eyeball-full of that album cover, would you? Purple, red, and yellow: colors that are just meant to go together, even if they don’t teach that combo at interior design school. Cloaked acolytes standing before a great, cloaked, faceless being, and a monstrous firepit blazing with white heat, and the roasting flesh of the disobedient filling the nostrils of the faithful with a sickly sweet aroma. Or maybe it’s just hot dogs. It’s hard to see into that firepit.

I missed this album when it had its North American release in November. It’s about to be discharged in Europe, on January 16, by Wraith Productions. DECIBEL magazine’s on-line site started streaming the album in full yesterday (here), which is what caught my eye, and then my ears.

Try this on for size: echoing vocals dipped in lye and then scalded in the smoking blood of a battlefield; fuzzed-out sludgy riffs and rough solo’s that hit you down in your gut and make you want to hit back; punk and rock and doom rhythms that are as catchy as a new strain of STD; ingenious production that’s somehow both sharp-edged and full of DIY distortion; and lyrics that conjure satanic rituals full of bile and venom.

That’s the sound of Ptahil on their debut album, For His Satanic Majesty’s Glory. No fucking around, no pretense, the kind of black metal that’s usually hot instead of cold, the kind that makes mean drunks want to inflict pain in the mosh pit, rock ‘n’ roll for the utterly damned, stoner metal for the corpse-paint set. Continue reading »

FETUS GRINDER

 Album Reviews  16 Responses »
Jan 042012
 

 

(NCS reader Black Shuck provides this guest post about an eviscerating Canadian band.)

DEAD BABIES. On a related note, let’s talk about a band called Fetus Grinder.

Fetus Grinder are a death metal trio from Vancouver, British Columbia, and as the name might imply, they are firmly entrenched in the “let’s be as gory and offensive as possible” school of death metal. This initially made me think of Cannibal Corpse, but between the gore and the music they actually remind me a lot more of Carcass’s third album (Necroticism: Descanting the Insalubrious, that in-between period they had before they went melodeath, but after they stopped playing pure grindcore). The music is upbeat and groovy, rather than the downtuned blastfest one might expect from their name and song titles (although I’ll discuss their speed in a minute).

Speaking of guitar tuning, I don’t know which one they’re using, but it seems higher than you usually find in death metal, and that combined with their riffing style helps give the music an oddly peppy feel. This is a good thing. I could be wrong about the tuning, I don’t have the best ear for such things. But it sounds good nonetheless.

Also, listening to Fetus Grinder marks the first time I have ever thought, “Damn, microwaving a cat is catchy.” So there’s that. (“Microwaving a Cat” is my favorite song off their new album, and has been officially classified by the Double Secret Congressional Committee of Metal as “catchy as all fuck”)

Fetus Grinder have just released their second album, Rather Unpleasant, which you can download for free at bandcamp (http://fetusgrinder.bandcamp.com/). Their first album, Terror in the Women’s Clinic, is also available on bandcamp for a pay-what-you-want deal (1 CAD minimum). What struck me about Fetus Grinder, and inspired me to write this post, was the incredible amount of musical growth in the two-year period between those two albums. Continue reading »

TOP 10 OVERUSED WORDS IN EXTREME METAL ALBUM REVIEWS

 Album Reviews  22 Responses »
Jan 032012
 

(The dude who has written for NCS as “Willard Shrapnelspear” also wrote briefly as “Rev. Will” for The Number of the Blog before that site shut down following massive technical problems that appear to have deep-sixed the site’s archive of web posts. We agreed to give Rev. Will’s homeless TNOTB posts a home, beginning with this one — which reminded me of this post I wrote for NCS back in the dark ages.)

Warning: Take one glance at these words and find yourself waking up in the hospital from an overdose of (visual) cheese.

By Rev. Will

I would have added “old school” into this list if not for the very obvious fact that it is made up of two words. Excluding the really quintessential terms like “riffs”, “solos”, “metal” et cetera, here is a list of words that I thought have become really overused and cheesy over the past few months of metal blog-scouring I did to pre-occupy my stay-home-and-be-a-metal-nerd hours. Some of them are mostly used in a very misleading context, while the rest are pretty normal-looking, everyday words… which is why you guys should already try your best to stop repeating them over and over again, dolts. Continue reading »

AMORPHIS DEATHMATCH Round 3: “ELEGY”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jan 012012
 

(Here’s Round Three of Trollfiend’s head-to-head, no-holes-barred cage fight with Amorphis. Trollfiend gets a whiff of perforated bowel at the end — but whose? To catch up on what’s going on here, read this post.)

The first two rounds of this gladiator combat were pretty much write-offs for yours Trolly…I knew the opponents I would be facing, was intimately familiar with all their savagery and skill…I knew I was no match for either.  I still faced them in the ring, because I knew the sight of my blood would arouse you, and I am here for no lesser reason than to have you all cheer over my broken corpse.

However, my next opponent, 1996’s Elegy, is a relative unknown.  I have a vague recollection of facing it once before, many years ago, and as I recall I defeated it readily by exposing the weak spot in its armour, the clean vocals of Pasi Koskinen.  However, I am an old man now, and not as swift with the killing blows as I once was.  Elegy has had time to practice, train, and learn MY weaknesses.  I don’t know how this fight will turn out, but I know for sure that it will be bloody.

The opening attack, ‘Better Unborn’, is a clever manoeuver, taking my love of Middle Eastern rhythms into account, but I parry it easily.  This is worrisome, however…an album released in 1996 has LEARNED MY WEAKNESSES.  As I fret over this development, my heart grows cold, because ‘Better Unborn’ was a feint, and it worked.  While I was worrying, ‘Against Widows’ came in and smashed off the side of my skull with the dual hammerblow of harsh and clean actually working together in a song. Continue reading »

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