(Andy Synn encourages you to give Dreamwell‘s new album – out this Friday – a chance)
Before you go any further, I encourage you all to go read what I wrote about Dreamwell‘s previous album, which was one of my favourite records of 2021.
Finished?
Well, now let me tell you why – as good as Modern Grotesque was – In My Saddest Dreams… is even better.
We are fast approaching Dying Victims Productions‘ October 20 release date for the debut album of the Bogotá-based speed metal band Reckless. Or rather, that album is rushing toward us with the momentum of an 18-wheeler whose brakes have failed at the zenith of its power.
The band jam the pedal down on the very first track, “Kneel Before the Gods“, and they don’t ease up very much until the closing track “Unholy Odyssey” has run its own riotous course. It’s an album fueled by adrenaline, and it’s a big transfusion of adrenaline for listeners, but as you’ll discover from our full streaming premiere, the thrills derive from more than just the music’s turbocharged intensity. Continue reading »
(Here’s Todd Manning‘s review of a new EP from the Salt Lake band Deathblow.)
It’s a bit baffling to me that the word ‘crossover’ does not appear a single time in the press release for the latest E.P. from Salt Lake City-based Deathblow because that’s exactly what kind of damage they’re dealing out. Rotten Trajectory spewed forth into this decaying world on September 29th, courtesy of the appropriately monikered Sewer Mouth Records.
For the youth not familiar with the term crossover, it was used to describe that late eighties-early nineties blend of punk and thrash characterized by acts such as D.R.I., Crumbsuckers, and early Excel. Deathblow tread similar territory but update their sound with a smidge of death metal brutality. Continue reading »
This makes the fourth time we’ve premiered music from the Edmonton-based death metal band Display of Decay since 2014. The last time, in 2018, we began this way:
If you imagine Display of Decay as a big rocketing road machine with a roaring jet engine in place of the usual pumping cylinders (and that’s not hard to imagine at all), the brakes obviously failed a few hundred miles ago, to the vicious glee of the blood-lusting demons at the controls. When you listen to their new album, Art In Mutilation, it’s patently obvious that they’re having a howling good time, and their full-throttle, take-no-prisoners enthusiasm is highly contagious.
Five years later, Display of Decay are finally following up Art In Mutilation with a new album (their fourth full-length) named Vitriol, which will be released by Gore House Productions on October 20th. The album title alone suggests that the band’s music is no less bloodthirsty than it was before. If anything, they’ve doubled-down on the slaughtering — but not at the cost of what makes their music simultaneously so damned contagious. Continue reading »
(On October 13th Necrogenesis Records released a new EP by the Japanese band Desolate Sphere, and it caught our writer DGR by surprise in more ways than one, as he explains in the following enthusiastic review.)
Who doesn’t love themselves a good ole’ fashioned Friday the 13th release date? Even across waters and international borders the idea is fun….or most likely lost, since Western world superstitions probably rest at the corner of fuck all and jack shit in terms of how much Desolate Sphere might be aware of it.
But needless to say, while we’ve often portrayed the date as being a harbinger of bad luck and decent slasher films in this corner of the world, last Friday gifted us a pleasant surprise in the form of Maledictus, a new EP from a newer death metal project hailing from Japan.
Lesser creatures out there might admit that they were drawn in almost by their album art alone but we…..oh, that’s what we did too? Oh, well in that case…with our attention initially grabbed entirely by the fiery and bright orange album art, Desolate Sphere‘s Maledictus proceeded to surprise on multiple fronts, though the tracklist being only five songs and the average tempo of every song hovering just shy of blisteringly fast was certainly a bonus. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn catches up with NCS favourites Sulphur Aeon following the release of their fourth album)
I doubt there’ll be many people willing to argue against the statement that Sulphur Aeon have long-since proven themselves to be one of the best bands in Death Metal – hell, in Metal in general – operating today.
After making an impressive impact with their 2012 debut, Swallowed by the Ocean’s Tide, they then blew practically everyone away with the inhuman intensity of 2015’s Gateway to the Antisphere, only to then turn around and knock people’s socks off all over again with the more epic and melodic strains of The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos in 2018.
So to say that the band have set themselves a very high bar would be an understatement, and I want to make it clear that when I tell you that Seven Crowns & Seven Seals isn’t quite the quantum leap that …Scythe… was from Gateway… (or Gateway… was from Swallowed…) that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It simply means that Sulphur Aeon are finally settling into their own strange and sinister skin.
Today marks the third time we’ve premiered and reviewed a release by the Venetian band Askesis. The first was their 2016 debut EP The Path to Absence (here), and we followed that with their 2018 demo Black Ontology (here). Now we have a full stream of their debut album Beyond the Fate of Death, which is set for release on October 20th by Time To Kill Records. It’s a concept album inspired by “The Myth of Sisyphus”, a 1942 essay written by the philosopher Albert Camus.
“Dawn of the Current Inferno” was the first single from the album. The band described its inspiration in these words, which we share here because they also seem to provide insights into the album as a whole (as we hear it):
“‘Dawn of the Current Inferno‘ serves as a testament to the power of artistic expression to push boundaries and challenge societal norms. It encourages us to embrace the enigmatic and the unexplained, reminding us that within chaos, there’s a hidden order waiting to be discovered. This composition is an invitation to embark on a journey of introspection, where we confront our own biases and preconceptions, and ultimately find a deeper connection to the world around us”. Continue reading »
(Below is DGR‘s review of a new EP by Exhumed, which is out now on Relapse Records.)
Still catching up on everything that has passed through the void between the two eardrums in the last few months. This is going to be a weird/wild journey by the time we call it.
Exhumed‘s sudden release of their new EP Beyond The Dead came as a pleasant surprise. Their album To The Dead ranked pretty high with yours truly, and just about any time the band are tearing through a bevy of death and thrash riffs with a high-low vocal interchange tends to leave us in a happy place.
Exhumed have traversed through a few genres over the year but always within a familiar heirarchy; that a band calling themselves Exhumed are familiar with the worlds of deathgrind and goregrind should come as no surprise. Beyond The Dead comes from the grindcore songwriting philosophy of sudden-appearance/sudden-exit, and that includes the way Beyond The Dead appeared, with the band releasing it at the tail end of August just as they were gearing up to hit the road. Continue reading »
This would have been an outstanding week to compile a roundup of new songs and videos before now, to make a dent in the towering wall of new music that’s arrived since last Saturday. Alas, I couldn’t manage it.
The wall still towers, even higher now. This is a very small dent, though a lot of the music will likely put a big dent in your skull — though not at first.
A HILL TO DIE UPON (U.S.)
Based on their past work, which we’ve lauded repeatedly around here, the news of new music from A Hill To Die Upon would be eagerly welcomed, but the interest level has gone up even further because of the guest appearances on their new album, The Black Nativity, which include Karl Sanders (Nile), Ole Borud (Extol), Bruce Fitzhugh (Living Sacrifice), and Sakis Tolis (Rotting Christ). Continue reading »
(On October 19th Debemur Morti Productions will release a new EP by The Amenta (albeit a 40-minute “EP”). We’ve already showered its advance tracks with attention, but today we have a review of the entire release by DGR.)
The fun part about any release from Australia’s avante-garde black metal clusterfuck The Amenta has always been the opening paragraph wherein the author spends a good five or six sentences tripping over their own feet while attempting to describe what The Amenta is. To say that the band have existed off the beaten path would be putting it politely; instead it’s more like The Amenta saw the ‘path’ and proceeded to beat it to death.
Early on, the group saw various permutations into and out of the symphonic black metal scene and their first few albums are jammed full of big sweeping synths, various noises, and plenty of riffs for their chosen vocalist at the time to soar over, but there’s always been a stubborn part of the band that has refused to be put down, and beginning with their V01D EP, the band have long settled into ‘fuck it’ mode and let their artistic tendencies run mad. Continue reading »