THE CIRCLE – OF AWAKENING

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 102023
 

(Andy Synn reviews the debut album from The Circle, out 18 August)

While we try our best here at NCS to keep up with everything that’s coming out, the truth is we’re easily distracted by shiny things and loud noises, so we don’t always catch every new release before it comes out.

But we do try our best, at the very least, to keep an eye on bands and artists we’ve written about before – case in point, check out The Circle‘s first EP, Metamorphosis, which I reviewed here back in 2021 – to see how they grow and develop over time.

So how does the band’s new album, Of Awakening, compare to their debut?

Continue reading »

TIDELESS: “EYE OF WATER”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 082023
 

(On September 15th Chaos Records will release the second album by the California band Tideless, and today we’ve got Wil Cifer‘s impressions of the music to share with you.)

2023 has so far become an impressive year for death metal .Many bands continue to sharpen the blade forged in Tampa, others make conscious attempts to wander their own path. California band Tideless set themselves further apart from the status quo with their sophomore release Eye of Water.

The aggression is dialed back as they lean in a post-rock direction with a cinematic sonic scope. At just under seven minutes the opening track is the shortest song on this album, as the songs seem to require extended track lengths to lay the groundwork for the breadth of the dynamics they are building toward. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 072023
 

(Andy Synn catches you up with a bunch of releases from last month you may have overlooked)

Since it’s likely I won’t have chance to write much else this week – we’re filming a new music video, for one thing, and prepping for that is taking up more time than I expected – I’d better make today’s “Things You May Have Missed” column count, hadn’t I?

I don’t think you’ll be disappointed though, not least since this bumper edition contains six, rather than the usual four, albums – several of which I have no doubt will end up making numerous appearances on lots of “Best Of…” lists come the end of the year.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: BLACK BIRCH, BLOOD ABSCISSION

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Aug 062023
 

I don’t feel great, thanks for asking. Within an hour after finishing yesterday’s roundup it became evident that I was coming down with a cold. (My spouse brought it home with her last week, so I don’t blame yesterday’s bands.) By dinnertime last night I felt like fresh shit, and didn’t sleep worth a shit either. I don’t think it’s much worse this morning but it’s not any better either. One of the few things that makes me look backward with fondness on covid is that I went two years without a cold. Staying away from human germ-carriers was a big silver lining.

I was tempted to just blow off this usual Sunday column and instead wallow in misery. Didn’t seem quite fair to share my thoroughly clogged and befogged headspace with innocent bands, or to interrupt their performances with ugly hacking and explosive blasts of sneezing, even though I was able to re-listen to the parts that were interrupted with rail-gun blasts of snot.

Well, but the world is not a fair place. It brings colds and music writers who don’t know when to shut up, and I thought forging ahead with this column might temporarily take my mind off my miseries. So it did.

BLACK BIRCH (Sweden)

Black Birch describe themselves as an “Atmospheric Black Metal duo from Southern Sweden” (the two of them are Gina Wiklund and Ulf Blomberg), with an ethos that is “Antifascist & vegan”. I see on their Bandcamp page that they’ve been releasing a sequence of seven singles since January of this year, and on September 1st they’re going to release a self-titled EP on vinyl and digital formats that includes two of those previous singles and two new songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SAMHAIN — “THE COURIER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Aug 032023
 

Our subject today is The Courier, Emanzipation Production‘s forthcoming deluxe vinyl reissue of demo tapes first released by the Danish band Samhain in the mid-’80s, now remastered by Tue Madsen. The advertising for this special album-length release (and the extensive liner notes accompanying it) refer to is as “a piece of metal history“. It further includes these quotes:

“Samhain helped us kickstart our career because they believed in metal! Forever thankful and I‘m happy to see their music being re-released. Hail Samhain!” Mille Petrozza, Kreator

“This is the kind of riffs bands like Obituary have made a career out of touring with for 30 years. Samhain played those riffs way earlier. And Obituary fucking rules!” Tue Madsen, producer, Antfarm Studio

“Way better musicianship and production than on the first Hellhammer demos. You guys were already way ahead of them. This shit is heavy as shit. In a primitive, good way!” Monte Conner, metal industry legend

All of this is entirely appropriate, but let’s be real: There are vast numbers of metal fans out there, old as well as young, who will greet this kind of prose with a shrug. There’s a musty smell to history, and a question about why people who aren’t history buffs, collectors, or folks trying to re-live a vital time in their own past, should pay attention to music created by teenagers 40 years ago, given that we’re already drowning on a daily basis in non-stop typhoons of music that’s brand new.

For people like that, we say: Forget about everything you’ve just read above. Pretend that Samhain is a brand new band who is just now releasing The Courier for the first time, and listen to what they’ve done. It will make you forget about history right damned fast. Continue reading »

HARBOURED: “HARBOURED”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 032023
 

(DGR fervently hopes that ‘better late than never’ holds true here, because the Harboured album he’s now reviewing below has been out in the world since mid-March via the Lost Future label.)

Though we’ve tried to prevent it from happening, it seems that as the years have gone on we’ve grown accustomed to pulling back the veil on the well-intentioned chaos that runs this site. Bare with us then, as we’re about to do it again in regard to the March release of Colorado’s Harboured.

You’ll recall that Labor Day weekend was host to Northwest Terror Fest up in Seattle, and we’ve intertwined ourselves with it more and more each year. As a result, the site tends to go quiet as three of us get wrapped up in working on and attending said show, especially since travelling with a laptop is a veritable pain in the ass and as a result yours truly does not fly with one anymore. Which means that I’m restricted to my phone for writing, which for lack of better terms ‘is not happening’.

Like previous years I tried to build up a massive review document I could chip away at and then backload into the site before leaving, so that there would always be ‘something’, even for days when we were all away from the internet as a whole. 2023 provided the fantastic opportunity of having a tiny release-window lull then, which allowed for a massive amount of musical catch up, and those of you who saw the site around that time likely saw the results of twelve or thirteen different writeups – some of which were still rolling out by the time yours truly had returned home.

Colorado’s Harboured were part of that initial review document, and up until the literal moment that I walked out the door to drive to the airport, were ones that I was wracking my brain around getting something said. I had listened to their self-titled release so much that it felt wrong not to get it out there for other people to experience before I left — but that didn’t happen.

Now months later, ham-handed as it may seem, we’re going to try to rectify that wrong. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVEW): BLIGHT HOUSE — “BLIGHT THE WAY”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 022023
 

“Frank Owen Gorey is not a well person. Frank Lloyd Blight is not a well person either. Physical illness provided the genesis for their collaboration. Mental illness has kept it going…. Would it be too un-empathetic to say I hope the two Franks never get well? I’m only being honest about my greediness for their music. Wellness is overrated anyway, especially when it comes to death metal.”

Those were among the words I spewed in the context of premiering a song from Summer Camp Sex Party Massacre, an album by the two Franks under their chosen band name Blight House that Nefarious Industries released almost exactly five years ago.

Back then it seemed evident that these two had either shunned, or been shunned by, the outer world, preferring the confines of a swampy basement and whatever collection of mechanical and unspeakable organic materials they used in making their thoroughly demented and disgusting death metal. How delightful it must have been for them to see almost everyone else forced by the pandemic into a similar isolated existence!

Well, they must have taken some delight in that state of affairs, because now Blight House is returning with a thoroughly macabre new album. While others may be fumbling about looking for something to light the way out of all the dark tunnels in which we find ourselves, the two Franks have rediscovered how to Blight the Way — and you will learn how they’ve done this through our premiere stream of the new album that bears that name, in advance of its August 4 release by Syrup Moose. Continue reading »

AETHERIAN: “AT STORM’S EDGE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 022023
 

(DGR won the cordial wrestling match among us NCS slaves for the fun of reviewing the eagerly awaited second album by Aetherian, just recently released by Lifeforce Records.)

If this is your first exposure to Aetherian, with no idea where the group hailed from or what they looked like, we’d be curious what would happen if you hit play on the group’s newest album At Storms Edge and tried to guess those answers.

We wouldn’t fault you one bit for looking into the colder European climes for your answer, as Aetherian are especially good at the sort of melancholy-infused doom hybrid that has worked its way into the melodeath scene proper over the past few years. We’d even forgive you if you too had thought of the same vein that Insomnium mine their music from being threaded throughout At Storm’s Edge. But Aetherian don’t come from the cold north. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: DECOHERENCE / DEITUS / THE SUN’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE NIGHT

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 022023
 

(Andy Synn presents a killer collection of British Black Metal to tantalise/traumatise your ears)

As I may have mentioned a few times already, my experience of 2023 so far has been that the proggier side of the spectrum has been producing a lot of the most interesting and impressive albums of the year.

Sure, I know there’s been a lot of digital ink spilled about the health and fertility of the Death Metal scene as well but, to my ears at least, most of it has erred more towards just “good” rather than “great”, with a lot of the praise seemingly confusing “quantity” for “quality”.

But we also shouldn’t count out our more blackened brethren either, as there’s been a slow but steady drip-feed of absolutely fantastic Black Metal albums coming out over the last six-seven months too, and today’s edition of “The Best of British” features three more examples that could well throw some discord into your end of year lists come December time.

Continue reading »

SHADOW LEGION: “SHADOW LEGION”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 012023
 

(Today we present the following guest review by Lonegoat [from the Necroclassical project Goatcraft] of the forthcoming debut album by Pittsburgh-based Shadow Legion.)

The enigmatic genesis of “Dark Metal” traces back to the murky depths of the underground past, entered into lexicon by Bethlehem‘s daring 1994 opus, fittingly titled Dark Metal. Closer inspection of the “Dark Metal” categorization reveals a bewitching amalgam; an alchemical union merging the raw essences of heavy metal, death metal, and black metal, seasoned with an infusion of epic and pagan elements.

While Aeternus remains cryptic on the matter, they undoubtedly embody this heterogeneous blending, as do other bands such as Mefitis, who enthusiastically embrace the appellation to chart their own perplexing course within this realm. Pendath, a luminary of Mefitis, also corroborates this perspective, adding that “Dark Metal” defies codified classification while displaying an ineffable melancholy that transcends the rational mind, arousing an intuitive sensibility positioned beneath the surface. In addition, Serpent Ascending‘s acclaimed 2022 opus, Hyperborean Folklore, dutifully explores this synthesis as well.

Shadow Legion‘s lengthy debut album, which comes out on August 9th, firmly embeds itself in the domain of “Dark Metal.” At its molten core, a blistering display of guitar virtuosity rivals the legendary mastery of Trey Azagthoth, setting the band apart from their peers and charging the music with electrifying transcendence. The dance of visceral, melodic, and warlike percussive riffs, often extant for prolonged periods, casts a dark martial atmosphere. As is the trait of “Dark Metal,” the influences of epic heavy metal, death metal, and black metal coalesce seamlessly in an intuitive framework, and palatial acoustic sections offer moments of majestic respite. Continue reading »

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