BAHRRECHT: “NUIT DE NEIGE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 302011
 

(For our third album review of the day, here’s Andy Synn’s take on the 2011 release by French band Bahrrecht on Ketzer Records.)

I originally picked this album up solely because of its dark, brooding cover art, depicting an ominous figure, shrouded in shadows, his distorted, cadaverous features crowned by a skeletal helm. Contained within I found ten tracks of violently cathartic black metal, a revenant risen up from the depths of the genre’s murky past.

The Bahrrecht itself is an enigmatic beast, concealing its true self beneath layers of lies and deception. Through its veins flows the titanic spirit of the lords of Blashyrkh, whilst beneath its bestial hide lurks a very human malice. Its powerful sinews flex with dark promise, moving with the dissonant grace of Deathspell Omega, its black heart beating in time with the angular aggression of latter-day Marduk.

Musically, the album stays true to these elements, inter-mixing its blasting savagery with imperial majesty and tribal mysticism, delivered with a freshness and vitality that belies its ghoulish nature. Yet behind its grim and frost-bitten visage lurks a mind as sharp and deadly as a steel trap, twisting and turning with serpentine aplomb, shedding the skin of ages past and discarding the useless remnants of useless nostalgia in favour of the sharpened clarity of reborn vision. Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: “A FRAGILE KING” (Take 2)

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Nov 302011
 

(This is the second of today’s two NCS reviews of A Fragile King. The author of this one is Islander.)

Much has already been written, including in our own articles at this site, about what prompted Greg Mackintosh to write Vallenfyre’s music and to bring his friends together to record it. But although the album may have been born from the death of Mackintosh’s father, A Fragile King is anything but sentimental.

At a time when the most popular death metal is all about flash and speed, sonic firestorms calculated to make jaws drop in wonder at the performers’ technical wizardry, Vallenfyre throw themselves back in time to recapture the gory glory of European death metal in its early days, when young dudes who would become legendary were prowling the musical landscape under names like Nihilist, Dismember, and Bolt Thrower. Communing with those grisly spirits, Vallenfyre have produced a master work of doom-shrouded, early-days death metal.

The album owes its success as much to tone as to style. The bass and rhythm guitar are tuned low and heavily distorted, producing that beautifully raw, crushing, gut-churning tone of giant chainsaws cutting through dense old wood. The higher-register (but still distorted) guitar leads and solos provide a piercing contrast to all that mammoth grinding — but the sound is no less ill. The beautifully crafted leads and solos writhe and squirm and bore into the skull like overheated brain drills, the insidiousness of radiation sickness compared to the blown-transformer buzz of the other stringed instruments, but equally deadly.

The percussion rhythms are also something of a throw-back. With minimal use of blast-beats and double-bass, Adrian Erlandsson enlivens the music with fills that are as interesting as they are remorseless (and, of course, we get a healthy serving of tasty d-beats, too). And then, there are Greg Macktintosh’s vocals . . . Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: “A FRAGILE KING” (Take 1)

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Nov 302011
 

(This is the first of two NCS reviews of A Fragile King by Vallenfyre. The author of this one is TheMadIsraeli.)

If you didn’t already get the point from our numerous posts about these guys, they’re the shit.  Islander was going to review this, and I hope he still does. I’d hate to think I stole some fun from him, but considering that this is filthy, dank, dingy, doom-soaked, old-school death metal, it’s right up my fucking alley and I can’t resist writing a review.  If you’re a total whore for bands like Asphyx or Hail Of Bullets, as I am, you’ll find a comfortable home here.

If the banshee wail of feedback that starts “All Will Suffer” doesn’t give you a clue, its crunchy buzz-saw toned opening trudge of a riff will.  The entire song is a slog through disease-ridden, stygian marshes at its finest.  The first thing that immediately sticks out is a quality that makes for great death metal:  The ability of a band to insert subtle hints of melody into an otherwise atonal framework.  This is definitely one of the strengths that Vallenfyre has going for them in spades.  A Fragile King is loaded to the brim with memorable half-melodies, we’ll call them.

“Desecration” actually has a purely melodic outro, a mournful one with an almost funeral-doom character, in contrast to the song’s otherwise dissonant and sinister aura.  Other tunes like “Ravenous Whore” or “Cathedrals of Dread” bring the speedier moments of savagery, eviscerating everything above and below.

The riffs are solid, burdensome, and colossal in scope.  Listening to them almost produces a sensation of being drowned in a tidal wave of blood-soaked flesh. What also hooks me about this album is the absolutely immense Winter vibe (fittingly, I recently wrote a “Revisiting the Classics” piece on Into Darkness). “Seeds” really channels that feeling, but raises it (or rather sinks it) to an entirely new level of grim and morbid.  You can literally feel yourself subsiding into the floor. Continue reading »

CORMORANT: “DWELLINGS”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Nov 292011
 

(NCS writer BadWolf provides this review of the new album by Cormorant, which is still streaming at NPR, and which BadWolf calls “the album of the year.” )

These times are trying. The throat of winter is upon me here in the Midwest as my country prepares to enter its third year of depression and poverty, its eleventh of war. I drive home from work, NPR has nothing but bad news, and the only metal I can find on the radio during daylight hours is The Devil Wears Prada on the local Christian station. It was just Thanksgiving, what have I got to be thankful for (besides my family, friends, and relatively good health)?

Cormorant.

When these Bay Area wunderkinds released their debut, Metazoa, it was an amazing experience lost amidst a bumper-crop of instant-classics. Cheers to the underdog, the completely independent album that fought for our attention against heavyweights like The Way of All Flesh, ObZen, Crack the Skye, Watershed, and Blue Record.

Three years later, the follow-up, Dwellings, has arrived.

For those who are unaware, Cormorant’s music fuses narrative drama and melodic riffage. They borrow techniques from nearly every metallic subgenre, as well as folk and even classic rock, but don’t adhere to a single school of heaviness. This is the mixed martial arts of extreme music—Amon Amarth riffage into Ved Buens Ende weirdness. Their songs can be long, short, or anywhere in between. Those people put off by Opeth and Enslaved’s new records should find Cormorant to be a more than worthy successor. Continue reading »

VEKTOR: “OUTER ISOLATION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 282011
 

(Here, TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Arizona’s Vektor.)

Originality is a loaded word when talking about music of any sort.  Some would argue there is no originality any more, that we have exhausted every worthwhile note combination, every beat, every possible syncopation and harmony imaginable.  If you’ll notice, and correct me if I’m wrong dear NCS readers, I have never used this word once in any of my reviews to describe a band’s sound as a whole.  I feel, however, that when it comes to intergalactic blackened space death jazz thrashers Vektor, “original” is exactly the word that must be applied.

No one else out there sounds like these guys, and they do what they do with unmatched conviction. I don’t know how many of you who read NCS heard this band’s debut album, Black Future, but to deny the UTTER SHEER FUCKING INSANITY of the music on that album would definitely be foolhardy. Vektor kind of fell off of my radar, though, after I listened to Black Future so many times that it created its own black hole and collapsed its own universe into it.  It was only like last fucking month that I found out Vektor would be releasing a new album entitled Outer Isolation.  To say I was pumped would be a huge understatement. To say that this album takes Vektor’s sound to the next level would be an even bigger fucking understatement.

For the uninitiated, Vektor play a crazy, fuck-nuts hybrid of thrash metal, black metal and death metal with jazz coloring.  But they don’t just add small doses and elements of these styles; they fully incorporate and combine them in all of their glory into cohesive, atom-smashing assaults.

In a nutshell, Vektor’s sound is something that by all conceivable logic should be impossible to pull off with such proficiency and legitimacy.  One would expect that their strategy would lead them in a completely directionless meandering, with a train wreck at the end (and that’s the ending I think just about anyone else would reach if they were to attempt what Vektor has done). That Vektor has avoided those pitfalls is part of what makes this album truly stand out.  The number of bands who have genre-blended this seamlessly and successfully I think could be counted on your fingers. Continue reading »

ABIGAIL WILLIAMS: “BECOMING”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Nov 282011
 

(Andy Synn has had the chance for an advance listen to the next album from Abigail Williams — Becoming — which is not due in stores until January 24. As you’ll see from Andy’s review, it made quite an impression.)

Very much an album of music put together as an individual artistic statement, Becoming effortlessly embodies that central paradox of black metal; the more the bounds and prescribed rules of orthodoxy are stretched, the more the central tenet of the genre, “do what thou wilt”, is given shape and form.

Throughout the 55+ minutes of music contained on this disc, the group weave a tapestry of their influences together into a sound that, whilst still woven through with slender, gossamer threads which tie it to the past, is fuller and more realised, yet at the same time more dream-like and unearthly, than anything that has gone before.

The venomous ire of the vocals remains undimmed, each spiteful tirade and scornful diatribe spat forth with vehement fury like flames from the mouth of hell itself, raising them above the empty cascades of hollow invective that  spill from the mouths and minds of so many of their so-called peers.

The scathing incandescence of the guitar work melds restrained technicality with devastating, brazen intensity, the guitarists thrashing, scratching and clawing at their instruments like those possessed, underpinned throughout by serpentine bass-lines which flow and undulate seductively through the warp and weft of the music and by the towering drums of Zach Gibson, who gives a varied and multi-faceted performance whose monstrous speed and colossal power is matched only by its unyielding grasp of the many intricate subtleties and nuances of performance and restraint required to give breadth and depth to the lengthy and complex structures of each piece.

In addition to all this, however, it is the group’s use of real strings and piano work that is one of the strongest and most distinctive elements on the entire album, manifesting in a manner which eschews the predictable “symphonic” approach in favour of more subtle and refined compositions. This more classically inclined ideology sees a wealth of keyboard tones and stringed accompaniments employed as singular instruments in and of themselves, each designed to contribute in a specific and precise way to each song, adding another voice to the choir of rapturous instrumentation without ever succumbing to the devilish temptations of symphonic pomp and excess. Continue reading »

ANTEDILUVIAN: “THROUGH THE CERVIX OF HAWAAH”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Nov 222011
 

There is a certain style of death metal that I think of, in shorthand fashion, as horrifyingly avant-garde. Some people might prefer the term “progressive”, but I don’t think that word captures the atmosphere of cold, terrifying, otherworldly abomination conveyed by the music. Among current practitioners of this style of death metal, Portal, Mitochondrion, and Dragged Into Sunlight usually come to mind first. Now, I have to add Antediluvian to that list.

Like Portal and fellow Canadians Mitochondrion, Antediluvian are now on the Profound Lore label, which today is officially releasing their debut album (following an assortment of demos, splits, and an EP). It’s a nine-track monstrosity titled Through the Cervix of Hawaah. I’ll try to describe why I like this album, though to be brutally honest, it may be the result of compulsion rather than voluntary choice: After all, when Cthulhu extends his tentacles, few can resist.

When I included Antediluvian in that group which included Portal, Mitochondrion, and DIS, I didn’t mean to imply that the four bands sound alike, and they don’t, but they all succeed in creating a chillingly inhuman atmosphere of dread and catastrophe, in part by employing unusual musical ingredients that aren’t part of the standard stock-in-trade of death metal.

In Antediluvian’s case, the musical mix includes both “conventional” death metal elements and unconventional ingredients, plus remnants of the band’s more black-metal leaning origins. Perhaps most noticeable is the unusual style of drumming. The rhythms are unpredictable, sometimes seeming to be a step or two away from the beat you expect, sometimes almost out of sync with the bass and guitars (though I suspect that’s an aural illusion). The toms are used more frequently than in most death metal, lending the fills a kind of tribal sound (that is, if demonspawn organized themselves into tribes). There are blast beats, but they come sporadically, in bursts, and they sound more remorselessly methodical than as an attempt to break a speed record. Continue reading »

HELL: “HUMAN REMAINS”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Nov 212011
 

Record Label: Nuclear Blast | Year: 2011 | Genre: Heavy Metal

By Willard Shrapnelspear

Hell thrash Iron Maiden, hands down. Granted, I was never a huge fan of Iron Maiden to begin with, but this record refines the traditional NWoBHM sound so flakkin’ well that they detach the phrase “old school” from the not-so-glamorous connection to phrases like “narrow-minded” and “uncreative”. Unlike Iron Maiden’s let’s-play-safe-and-try-going-a-little-prog approach to their music on The Final Frontier (which somehow gave the record an annoyingly “mute” sound and draggy-as-hell play time; in comparison, this record sounds much brighter and thoroughly interesting throughout the long playtime of 1 hour 6 minutes), Hell have been creatively bold by deciding to incorporate symphonic and power metal elements into their technical brand of Satanic, prosaic heavy metal instead—a timeless move that should be greatly lauded!

Many old school heavy metal bands from the ‘80s and ‘90s had been known to utilize extremely recognizable power metal elements in their music, such as fantasy-oriented lyrics and high-pitched clean singing (e.g., Manowar, Helloween, Gamma Ray), so what’s so special about Hell’s rendition of such a trend in the 21st Century?  (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »

BETRAEUS: “TOWARDS THE SUN”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 202011
 

(In this post, TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut EP by Mancunian metallers Betraeus, released on November 14 by Seige of Amida.)

“For fans of Opeth, Death, Cynic, Bloodbath and Insomnium”

This was all it took to pique my curiosity when I saw the words in Hold Tight! PR’s press release about Betraeus.  Towards The Sun is not an EP I want to beat around the bush about: This is really, really, really good, and I want to see a full-length post-haste.

Despite the comparisons above being true to one degree or another, though, I’d add that there is quite a bit of Daath and Gojira influence going on as well. If you haven’t gathered already, this combination of influences results in a sound that is quite diverse.  None of the music is entirely death metal, or thrash metal, or any such thing. It’s its own sound. While Betraeus peg themselves as a prog death outfit, I would be more inclined to call them a straight-up progressive act.

This EP contains six tracks, three studio recordings, two live tracks, and a radio edit of one of those studio recordings. The first studio recording, “Towards the Sun”, which is the EP’s opener, does a pretty good job of summarizing what this band is all about and it was a smart choice as a lead-in track.  It’s a nearly 10-minute epic spanning everything from Opeth-ian, dreary, macabre doom-death tendencies, to Gojira/Daath-styled technical thrashy riffing, to Insomnium-style melodic passages and themes, all combined with jarring yet fitting transitional phases that keep the music unexpected and fresh. I think you’ll be hard pressed to predict any part of this song.

Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries