MASS OBLITERATION

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Sep 222010
 

Here at NCS, our minds are disorderly and usually afflicted with attention deficit plague. Occasionally, though, we find a strangely calming influence from notions of symmetry and connection.

For example, we started the week with a post on an Italian brutal-tech-death band called Blasphemer whose just-released EP was produced by Rome’s Stefano Morabito and his 16th Cellar Studio and whose songs lyrically focused on serious themes. We followed that yesterday with a piece on, uh, banjo metal. Today, we decided it would be pleasing to put a bookend on this side of the banjo-metal post with a piece on Mass Obliteration — another Italian death-metal band who have also recently released an EP, also produced by Stefano Morabito, and also lyrically focused on serious themes. We feel strangely calmed.

But not calmed by the music. The music makes us feel jittery and slightly deranged. It’s a deep throwback to early-90’s death metal, with powerful connections to albums like Incantation’s debut, Onward to Golgotha, or the early works of Immolation and Grave. Are you ready for “a grinding onslaught of rotten anarco-death metal”? If so, then Mass Obliteration is just the ticket for you.  (more after the jump, including a track from that EP . . .) Continue reading »

BLASPHEMER

 Album Reviews  11 Responses »
Sep 202010
 

Blasphemer is a 5-piece band from Milan, Italy. The band came into existence in 1998, but because of years of “drinking and fucking around” (their words), they didn’t buckle down and release a full-length album until 2008’s On the Inexistence of God (which was produced by Stefano Morabito at 16th Cellar Studio, who has done similar work for Hour of Penance and Fleshgod Apocalypse). They’ve also now recently released a 5-song EP on Comatose Music called Devouring Deception that includes a remastered version of a previously released single (“Cloaca of Iniquity”), a cover of a song by Broken Hope (“I Am God”), and three new original songs.

Principally on the evidence of the 2008 LP, Blasphemer seems to get categorized with bands like Severed Savior, Deeds of Flesh, and Defeated Sanity under the banner of Brutal Death Metal. The Marco Hasmann cover art of the EP (which you’ll see after the jump) points in that same direction — a winged monstrosity admiring his handiwork after eviscerating a voluptuously nude angel.

Some brutal-death aficionados might continue to classify the EP under that banner, but we hear something a little different. Yes, the music is like a horde of army ants cascading through your brain with pincers snapping voraciously — but with choreography. The sound as we hear it is a bit closer to Fleshgod Apocalypse than likes of Deeds of Flesh usually deliver, and as most of you long-time readers know, that’s high praise here at NCS.  (more after the jump, including a Blasphemer song . . .) Continue reading »

ODYSSEY

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 162010
 

A few years ago my day job took me to Spokane pretty regularly. It’s in far eastern Washington, near the Idaho border. Culturally and politically, it’s a world apart from Seattle. The town itself is not much to look at, but you drive 20 minutes in just about any direction, and you’re surrounded by physical beauty. I also liked every person I met there — every one.

There’s metal in and around Spokane. Every now and then a group of us will make the drive east to catch a tour that inexplicably hits Spokane but bypasses Seattle, and there’s usually a good turnout of headbangers. But for new bands, it’s probably not an ideal place to launch a career. Not that we really know what we’re talking about — it’s just a guess.

So our dog-like ears perked up when we saw a Facebook post from the always-interesting Jesse Zuretti (The Binary Code) recommending that his friends check out a 3-piece Spokane band called Odyssey. Not something we could resist, (a) because of the source of the recommendation, and (b) because of the band’s location.

Odyssey has just released a new 4-song EP called Schematics, which follows on the heels of their September ’09 hour-long debut album, Objects in Space. It’s the EP that we’ve now heard, and it’s very strong. No clean singing on that EP, or any other kind of singing. It’s an instrumental brain scrambler that’s completely engrossing. We’ll try to explain why . . . after the jump. Continue reading »

EMBRYONIC DEVOURMENT

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Sep 132010
 

It’s difficult to know whether to take this seriously:  Northern California’s Embryonic Devourment dedicates their new album, Vivid Interpretations of the Void, “to the people helping to expose the reptilian agenda,” specifically including David Ickes, Zulu shaman Credo Mutwa, conspiracy theorists Phil Schneider and Alex Jones, and “The Sumerians”.

If you don’t know, David Ickes is a British writer, speaker, and former media personality whose writings argue that shape-shifting alien reptoids have been controlling the course of human events for thousands of years and have inserted their own genetically compatible humanoid slaves into positions of power.

Embryonic Devourment’s fixation with the reptilian threat goes well beyond the album dedication. Lyrically, the songs are all about that, too — that and nothing else: Shape shifters “killing people fast”, the controlling dominance of “eternal ancient gargoyles,” the “messages lying beneath older worldly tablets,” the intertwining “of repto ancestry through history,” “lizard eyes pierc[ing] your mind hypnotized,” and more.  The album as a whole stands as a warning to the merely human: “Beware thy master god of disaster.”

Stranger things than this have inspired musicians, though this is certainly strange enough. But hey, we’re keeping open minds about the reptilian agenda. We run across people almost every day who act like reptoids. Who knows? Maybe they really are.

Plus, we’re keeping open minds as a show of respect for the music — which is an inventive and strangely pleasing amalgamation of cathartically extreme styles. (more after the jump, including an ear-grabbing song . . .) Continue reading »

FROZEN

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Sep 112010
 

We’re way late with today’s post. There’s a long story behind the delay, but it’s not very interesting, so we’ll just save it. Again for uninteresting reasons, we’ll probably be late tomorrow, too. And because we’re late delivering our product, we’ll be refunding 15% of your NCS subscription fee, no questions asked. Now that we’ve done something that makes us feel better about our tardiness, on with today’s post:

Is it possible for something to be both cold and hot at the same time? If the subject is the temperature of some piece of matter, including the molecules of the air, the answer is usually no. It’s either hot or it’s cold or it’s something in between, but not both hot and cold at the same time. Unless it’s fried ice cream, of course.

But once you get away from describing the temperature of matter, the answer changes. Take people, for example. Some people can be both “cold” and “hot” at the same time. It’s in the eye of the beholder, but some people can be hot precisely because of their coldness.

When it comes to extreme metal, music can definitely be both cold and hot at the same time. You can’t touch music, of course, but music produces sensations and emotional reactions that can be described with adjectives, such as “cold” and “hot,” that typically apply to tangible things.

Frozen is a metal band from the ancient town of Cadiz, which is situated on a narrow spit of land on the sea-coast of southern Spain. Frozen describes its music as “cold black metal”, and there is indeed an icy quality to the music. But it also burns, and the band’s latest album, The Unborn, has become one of our most-listened-to black-metal finds of the year.  (more after the jump, including a song to stream . . .) Continue reading »

FRACTAL GATES

 Album Reviews  20 Responses »
Sep 092010
 

Do you remember the first time you listened to extreme metal — of any genre? Do you remember which band it was? I bet you do. I know I do.

For me, in terms of my musical tastes, it was like I was traveling on a train and someone flipped a switch without warning and shunted the car onto a side track that headed off at a sharp angle into an entirely different landscape. The band that flipped the switch for me was In Flames. It could have been some other band, because it was a pretty random experience, but that’s who it was.

The music was so different from anything else I’d heard. It was like I’d unwittingly reached out and grabbed a live power line — it sent a current bolting through and just torched my head. I wouldn’t have been surprised if my hair had started smoking. That combination of fast, powerful aggression with harsh vocals and catchy, melodic hooks was completely arresting. I went off down that side track and never came back to the main line.

Since then, I’ve gotten into other kinds of music that’s more extreme than In Flames — certainly more extreme than what In Flames has become in recent years — but probably because of that first experience, melodic death metal is still what grabs me the hardest, and when I hear it done right, it still gets me charged up like nothing else.

Last week I listened to the latest album from a Parisian band called Fractal Gates, and it reminded me of what I felt the first time I listen to In Flames — not because Fractal Gates is an In Flames knock-off, but because they’ve succeeded so well in combining dark, threatening power with soaring melodies to produce a galvanizing result.  (more after the jump, including a song to hear, and some very interesting album art . . .) Continue reading »

YORBLIND

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Sep 082010
 

Last week, I got a series of attention-grabbing messages from my NCS collaborator IntoTheDarkness. In one, he urged me to check out a band called Yorblind, calling it “one of the best melodeath bands I’ve heard in a loooong time.” In another, he pushed me to hear Fractal Gates:  “Sooo good. In the same vein as Yorblind and Incarnia — new melodeath bands that kick ass. In Flames really was never this good lol.”

“In Flames really was never this good”?  Really?  Well, ITD is sometimes given to overstatement, particularly when he’s trying to get me to pay attention, and I’m sure he didn’t know I would quote him verbatim. On the other hand, when it comes to metal, he’s a lot harder to please than I am. So if his aim was to get my attention, he succeeded.

Oh, and I’m soooo fucking glad he succeeded, because, really and truly, these bands are soooo good. I spent much of the Labor Day weekend using them as a soundtrack to my R&R (what little of it there was), and the music just made everything sharper, more invigorating, more zap-headed. It made me happy all over again that somewhere in the dim mists of the past I started listening to metal.

I started out intending to write about both bands in a single post, but decided that just wouldn’t be right. So today the focus is on Yorblind, and tomorrow will come a few hundred words about Fractal Gates.  (more after the jump, including, as usual, a track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

WIDOW SUNDAY

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 032010
 

Forrest Gump famously said that “life is like a box of chocolates — you never know what you’re gonna get.” There’s some truth to that. There’s also some truth to this:

Life is like a box of hand grenades with a few of the pins pulled, and you don’t know if you’ve lifted out a live one until it goes off and leaves a bloody stump in place of your arm.

Fortunately, Widow Sunday‘s 2010 album In These Rusted Veins is more like a box of chocolates. From song to song, you don’t know what you’re gonna get, but it’s all sweet. Every now and then, it also blows your arm off.

Sometimes we read album reviews that criticize bands for playing too many different styles of metal on the same album. Sometimes, the criticism is that the band isn’t good enough to pull off all the genre-jumping. Sometimes, it just seems the reviewer thinks a band ought to define its sound and stick to it — apparently for no good reason.

Widow Sunday apparently sees no good reason to be defined by one style or another. They’re also talented enough to pull of a mix of styles without falling flat on any one of them. In These Rusted Veins is almost like a mixtape or a playlist of different bands, except it’s the same band. And they go far beyond simply not falling flat — they crush everything.

In fact, the one constant on the album, despite an impressive range of musical flavors, is that all the songs make you wanna jump up and start bouncing — or slamming into things.  (more after the jump, including a track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

BURNING GHATS: FOOL’S GOLD

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 022010
 

(Thinking out loud, which is how we do our best thinking. And possibly our only thinking.) Ah, what have we hear? Why, it’s new metal! Should we listen? Let’s weigh the pro’s and con’s.

On the plus side: It’s an EP from Burning Ghats. We sure liked the last thing from them we heard (see our review here). Maybe this will be good, too. They also have another cool album cover to go with the music. We like pretty album covers. We especially like the big crab. Lots of times, eye-catching album covers mean good music.

Also, we can download the EP from our favorite online distribution platform, Bandcamp. And Burning Ghats have set up the download with one of those pay-whatever-you-like choices. Awesome!

Now, what about the con’s? Fuck, we can only think of one negative — we don’t have enough fucking time to listen to all the fucking music we want to hear! Even though we’ve shoved all music other than extreme metal out of our lives, there’s still not enough fucking time! If we listen to this, it means we won’t be listening to something else today.

Well, that’s a pretty piss-poor reason not to hear this EP. We can carve out more time today by ignoring our friends more than usual, going to the bathroom less, and cutting back (more) on sleep. Besides, there’s always tomorrow to listen to other music, right? We won’t die in our sleep or get cut down crossing the street, most likely. So there — problem solved!  (more after the jump, of course . . .) Continue reading »

K-K-K-KATAKLYSM!

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Sep 012010
 

Anyone who’s listened to metal for very long has a mental list of bands whose new albums they’ll buy sound unheard. For us, Montreal’s Kataklysm is one of those bands. They’ve also been putting out albums for almost 20 years, which means that most diehard metalheads already know whether Kataklysm is their thing or not. But honestly, it’s hard for us to imagine any fan of extreme metal not liking the band’s latest release, Heaven’s Venom. It’s a fucking barn-burner.

It doesn’t represent any kind of seismic shift in Kataklysm’s brand of death metal, but that’s part of the band’s appeal. They have a distinct sound that they’ve stuck with and honed over time like the veteran pro’s they are, and their albums also reliably include a few songs that step outside the band’s dominant territory to keep things interesting. In other words, you know what you’re going to get, and when it’s as good as the franchise Kataklysm has built, that’s just fine.

Everything on Heaven’s Venom is big and powerful: Big-assed, sawing riffs that generate industrial-strength, nail-driving rhythms; those “northern hyperblasts” shot from the drumkit like a cloud of angry hornets; dramatic melodies; and Maurizio Iacono‘s distinctive, passionate, grizzly-bear roars giving voice to powerful lyrics that you can actually hear.

Once again, Kataklysm has produced an irresistible onslaught of powerful grooves and dark melody, fist-pumping anthems and mosh-pit missiles, and enough variability in the pacing and instrumentation to make Heaven’s Venom an album worth hearing from start to finish.  (more after the jump, including a track to hear . . .) Continue reading »

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