AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABYSSAL TOMB — “BURIED”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 302023
 

We’re ghoulishly happy to help spread the word today about a new Australian death metal band, Abyssal Tomb, and their debut 5-track demo Buried, which will officially be released tomorrow.

Though the band is new, the members aren’t newcomers. The lineup consists of songwriter and multi-instrumentalist Stuart Callinan from Galaxy and Sylvan Awe (whose fantastic new album we premiered here just yesterday), lyricist/vocalist Rohan Buntine (Battlegrave), and drummer Tim Wright (Munitions / Blunt Shovel).

They describe their aspirations simply and directly — to “celebrate death metal in one of its early forms, honouring bands such as Obituary, Morta Skuld and early Six Feet Under“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SYLVAN AWE — “PILGRIMAGE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Nov 292023
 

The artwork on the front of Sylvan Awe‘s new album Pilgrimage (their third) is one that will make most people stop in their tracks and stare for a while. It’s a slightly cropped and inverted image of a 1920 painting by the German artist Ferdinand Leeke, who died three years after completing it. The title is “Parsifal on the Way to the Grail Castle“.

Leeke seems to be best known for his depiction of scenes from Wagnerian operas, most of them commissioned by Richard Wagner’s son Siegfried after his father’s death. “Parsifal on the Way to the Grail Castle” doesn’t seem to be one of those 10 commissioned paintings, but may have been similarly influenced, given that Wagner did compose an opera called Parsifal, based on the legend of the Grail Knight.

What that legend has to do with Pilgrimage is open to conjecture, though Parsifal himself engaged in a pilgrimage back to the sanctuary where ailing Grail Knights kept watch over the Grail, after Parsifal vanquished the necromancer Klingsor and retrieved from him the Holy Spear (which pierced the side of Jesus as he died on the cross), ultimately reuniting it with the Grail. Continue reading »

PHOBOCOSM – FOREORDAINED

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 282023
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album from Phobocosm, out next week on Dark Descent Records)

With all the digital ink that’s been spilled about Death Metal this year you’d think that more of it would have been dedicated to Canada’s Phobocosm.

Then again, perhaps the band’s gloomier, doomier brand of oppressive, post-Immolation heaviness is just a little too dark, and a little too demanding, to receive the same sort of wider acclaim which has been lavished on many of their more popular peers.

But the fact that it demands a little more from its audience also means that Foreordained offers more rewards in the long run.

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THUNRAZ — “BORDERLINE”

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Nov 282023
 

The Estonian band Thunraz, the solo project of Madis Jalakas, has been in a creative surge from its inception, releasing a pair of EPs and a pair of albums since 2018. If anything the surge has strengthened, because Thunraz is following its latest album Revelation (released about five months ago) with yet another album that comes out today, on CD and digital formats.

The new album is entitled Borderline, and it includes nine songs, one of which — “You and Me” — we premiered a few weeks ago, along with a head-spinning red-shifted video. Today, of course, we’ve got all of it for you. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ETT DÖDENS MASKINERI — “KULTURKRIGET”

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Nov 272023
 

Kulturkriget is the name of the forthcoming second album by the Swedish hardcore punk band Ett Dödens Maskineri, whose name seems to translate to “a machine of death“. As the album’s title forecasts, its lyrical themes explore “the tumultuous battleground of the culture war that saturates every facet of modern existence,” dissecting issues that range from “identity politics and media manipulation to ideological clashes.”

Anyone with eyes to see and ears to here knows that society in almost all of the world is fractured more severely than it has been in generations, and there seems no imminent way out of it, the fractures so deep and jagged that repairing them would seem to require some kind of wizardry beyond the capacity of mere mortals.

The music on Kulturkriget is undeniably in line with such thoughts — bringing forward intensely evocative melodies that are bleak and furious, heart-broken and seeking escape, desperate but defiant. The piercing and haunting power of the melodies and the relentless dynamism of the music is part of what makes the album stand well out from the pack, but it’s still a punk album at its core, and so it’s also raw and raging, confrontational and caustic, and a damn good antidote for anyone whose adrenaline is at low ebb. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MISERY SPELL, FLUKT, REVA, SATANIC WITCH

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Nov 262023
 

This is one of those Sundays when I didn’t have any inkling of what I might choose before beginning to choose. I had so little inkling that I spent some time searching out where the word inkling came from since I didn’t know. (The answer is at the end of this post. Hint: it has not a drop to do with ink.)

Lacking any preconceived ideas I just started wandering through very recent releases, to see what might take hold. Hopefully what I chose will take hold of some of you too.

MISERY SPELL (Russia)

It took all of about two minutes for me to feel completely drenched by the music on this Saint Petersburg band’s new album Абсолютная тьма (“Absolute Darkness”), which was released just yesterday. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON SATURDAY: MORBID SACRIFICE, MOTOROWL, KRASSEVILLE, TORPE, TRIUMPH OF DEATH

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 252023
 

I woke up before the sun rose today because it’s harvest season and I have crops to gather.

Ha Ha, no that’s horseshit. I have no idea why I woke up before the sun on this Saturday morning, especially given the number of adult libations I consumed (as usual) on Friday night.

The only good that came of the early rising was my ability to experience the coldest morning of the year so far, at least where I live near Puget Sound. As I slurped my coffee and inhaled the first cigarettes of the day in the blackness outside, my phone reported 35°.

On further reflection, my opening line wasn’t entirely horseshit. I do have crops to gather in, musical crops… the time of reaping is ever upon us here. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): FRAUGHT — “TRANSFIXED ON DYING LIGHT”

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Nov 232023
 

Here in the U.S. many people are celebrating Thanksgiving Day today, a national holiday first officially announced by Abraham Lincoln during our Civil War but modeled on a 1621 harvest feast shared by the English colonists (“Pilgrims”) of Plymouth and the Wampanoag indigenous people (who had previously occupied the Plymouth site but had been decimated by smallpox).

We have many things to be thankful for here at our humble site today, and one of those is Transfixed on Dying Light, the debut album by the Irish band Fraught. Founded in 2018, they survived a change of name (from Drought to Fraught), the rude interferences of the covid pandemic, and the kinds of other difficulties that beset any band trying to make underground music they believe in rather than following whatever way the prevailing winds are blowing.

Fraught are one of those bands who are given to experimentation, inspired by their many influences but driven to interweave them in ways that don’t neatly get circled by genre boundaries. That was already becoming evident in their MMXIX demo (released in 2020) and their first EP, 2021’s Splitting Tongues, but more evident still in this new album, which we’re giving you the chance to hear in advance of its release tomorrow by Argonauta Records. Continue reading »

SYLOSIS: “A SIGN OF THINGS TO COME”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 232023
 

(In September Nuclear Blast released a new album by the UK’s Sylosis. Our writer DGR, who never rushes into anything, finally got around to setting down thoughts about it, which is what you’ll find below.)

If you’ll forgive the slightly more personal approach to this one, Sylosis are a band that I’ve followed for a long time now, spanning almost a decade plus of their career – starting when they first signed with Roadrunner (they popped up on their news page and believe it or not, it was one of the ways I would find bands) and then across multiple record labels, lineup changes, and even a hiatus while its members spread out to other projects.

I’ve espoused the theory before on this site but I’ve always felt that Sylosis are one of those groups that are a fantastic gateway band, mostly credited to their three-part combination of thrash, metalcore, and melodeath that has them resting somewhere in the center. It’s the VIT, INT, DEX triangle that you’ll see in some roleplaying games of their musical career. They may never fully dive into the full depths of being one particular type, but their combination of them has held enough power to draw people in from multiple directions, and just as possibly, to send people off into exploring other parts of the metal world once they make the same connection of what Sylosis are constructed out of. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PESSIMYSTIC — “BURNT OFFERING”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Nov 222023
 

Pessimystic is a clever name for a band, one that amalgamates two concepts or themes that will be familiar to adherents of extreme metal. It was chosen by a trio of musicians from Ottawa who first came together only this year, though the writing process and general concept originated in 2022. They played their first show only in September, opening for Sunless and Thantifaxath, a couple of very good groups to share a stage with.

What we have for you today is a premiere stream of the first public recording of Pessimystic, an EP named Burnt Offering that will be released on November 24th. It’s described as “an apotropaic oblation of self-surrender through self-destruction and unity through detachment”, and conceptually it “contemplates divine retribution and conjures the apocalyptic imagery enshrined in the human psyche.” Pessimystic indeed. Continue reading »

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