SEEN AND HEARD: UNDULATION, GATHERING STONES, NOTT, NUCLEAR DUDES

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jun 212023
 

I started working on this roundup of new music on Juneteenth, the U.S. holiday that was observed two days ago. Couldn’t finish it in time, due to a little celebration of the day that I was involved in. (Even my white-as-chalk family in central Texas celebrated it when I was growing up there eons ago, mainly for the excuse to feast on soul food, not so much to commemorate the final surrender of the Confederate army, and it has stayed with me even here in Washington State where it became an official holiday only last year). I couldn’t finish the roundup yesterday either, but finally, success.

Still buried in new music and with my brain knotted trying to figure out what to do, I decided to cut this Gordian knot by focusing on just a few recent releases from bands in the Pacific Northwest near where I live now. Although they’re all from the same region, however, you’re in for a real musical roller-coaster ride.

UNDULATION

First up is An Unhealthy Interest in Suffering, a head-spinning debut EP released by the Seattle band Undulation about 10 days ago. Here’s how the band themselves describe their music:

“Behind an oozing velvet curtain stand Undulation, Le Gran Guignol of Cascadia. Through the dappled sunlight of broken rose windows, their ritual begins like a writhing, pulsating wyrm thirsty for innocent blood. Painting a horrid beauty like gallows in a field of flowers, their cacophony blooms into a blurred, surreal vision of melodic blackened death metal. Undulation cometh.”

Continue reading »

RANĂ – RICHTFEUER

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 202023
 

(Andy Synn would like to call your attention to the fiery new album from Rană)

A while back – way back when I actually had time to write articles and opinion pieces as well as reviews (weren’t those heady days?) – I wrote a piece interrogating what it was which made Metal my genre of choice.

At the time I chose to focus on the feeling of “power” inherent in the music, that sense of energy and electricity which – even at its darkest and doomiest – Metal possesses that I just can’t seem to find in other genres (which isn’t to say I’m not a fan of other styles of music, it’s just that I have different reasons for loving them).

But there’s more to it than that. Indeed, these days at least, it’s as much, if not even more so, about the passion behind the performance… something which no “AI” generated facsimile or written-by-committee cash-grab can ever capture or replicate… and, in that regard, I’ve yet to encounter (m)any other releases so far this year that are as passionate as Richtfeuer.

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SHADES OF BLACK: SAMMATH — “GREBBEBERG”

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jun 182023
 

In yesterday’s round-up of new music I mentioned a risk that might imperil today’s column, and the risk became a reality. It’s a minor miracle that it’s here at all, though it’s shorter than I planned and comes much later in the day. In fact, it’s limited to thoughts about a single new album, which I hope you will find worthwhile.

And by the way, Happy Father’s Day to any fathers who happen to drop in here (it’s a U.S. holiday, but the good wishes extend to good fathers everywhere).

SAMMATH (Netherlands)

Sammath are a true rarity — rare in part merely because they have survived for nearly 30 years as a band. As we all know, life expectancy is low for bands in the metal underground, where no one can make a decent living doing it and even minor obstacles thrown up by life can rapidly derail promising futures. But Sammath are an even greater rarity: They haven’t just survived and persisted for such a long stretch of time, but somehow they’ve just released an album that I dare to say is the finest one of their 30-year career. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SNORLAX — “THE NECROTROPHIC ABYSS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Jun 162023
 

It’s not as if we didn’t already know that the Australian project Snorlax (the solo work of Brendan Auld) was capable of making music that causes listeners stop suddenly in their racing tracks, and leaves them feeling kind of gob-smacked. Especially on the band’s debut album II, that became vividly evident. But still, the band’s new album The Necrotrophic Abyss is astonishing, and we’re lucky to get to premiere it today.

Here, the band’s evolving unification of black and death metal has reached full fruition, flowering into compositions that are bludgeoning, violent, and bewildering, elaborate in their constant permutations but both viscerally frightening and soul-crushing in their renditions of desperation and downfall — and all of it executed with jaw-dropping technical skill and captured with remarkable production quality.

On this album, to put it more succinctly, the unexpected becomes expected, and the result is a compact record that stands well out from the pack as we near the halfway point of 2023. It’s not the kind of thing you hear once and move on from. It’s the kind of thing that’s like your own personal Pandora’s box, waiting to be opened again and again, to witness with stark fascination its manifold evils fly into the world over and over. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ALTARAGE / DĀMIM / INNUMERABLE FORMS / MORNU / TRIPHEAD / WOODS WITCH

 SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 162023
 

(Andy Synn collects a series of six short-form releases you may not have heard)

Time, as they say, is a cruel mistress.

No matter what we do, she never seems to give us enough of herself, and always demands that we try to do more, write more, say more, with what little she allows us to have.

It means that we frequently have to make some harsh decisions when it comes to what we do, or do not, cover here at NCS, and so it’s inevitable that stuff we might otherwise have liked to write about – for example, the delicious new Depeche Mode covers record by SOM – sometimes doesn’t make the cut.

Which, ultimately, makes it extra important that you all check out the following EPs… because so much already gets missed out that you really can’t afford to let these pass you by too!

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AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HOLY DEATH — “NECK WOUND SESSION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 142023
 

We’ve been fans of the underground California death/doom band Holy Death ever since coming across their second EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, soon after its release in February 2020. We’ve followed them closely ever since, like a pack of hounds chasing after a car, witness the fact that we’ve written about them on seven separate occasions over these three years.

And so my heart sank last September when I read a statement by the band’s vocalist/guitarist Torie John that jut a few days after the band released their 2022 Moral Terror EPs he was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer, and that it had spread from his thyroid to his lymph nodes.

Torie also explained that the cancer could be treated with surgery, and that it was curable. At the time of that first announcement, he was still searching for a surgeon and hospital to perform a complete thyroidectomy and removal of lymph nodes. Ultimately, the search was successful, and the extensive surgery on his neck was scheduled to take place last November.

What did he do to prepare for the surgery? Of course, he and his bandmates spent November 5, 2022, recording a new release with Raul “Riff” Cuellar at his Riff Audio studio in Burbank. Naturally, they named the record Neck Wound Session. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: AEFFECT / THE BLEEDING / WALLOWING

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jun 142023
 

(Andy Synn presents three more prime-cuts of British steel)

The ever-fertile UK scene has produced a lot of new releases so far this year.

Some of them I’ve loved, some of them I’ve not been too fond of, and some of them… I just haven’t had a chance to listen to.

But these three stood out to me recently (even if I’m a little late getting to them) and felt like they deserved more attention, both from me and from our readers!

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SEEN AND HEARD: BLUT AUS NORD, HORRENDOUS, BLAST SHIELD, THUNRAZ, DØDSFERD

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jun 132023
 

In part, this roundup of new songs and videos (plus a recent EP and two complete new albums) is an effort to make up in part for the absence of Shades of Black two days ago, when an unexpected intervention by my fucking day job de-railed my plans. So, there’s blackened metal here, but not exclusively so. I do think that despite the considerable stylistic variation within the collection, it’s all mind-bending in different ways.

BLUT AUS NORD (France)

The last time I mentioned the news of Blut Aus Nord‘s new album Disharmonium – Nahab I had artwork to share, but no music. Now I have music, but wouldn’t have had it for a Shades of Black column two days ago because the song was just released over the last 24 hours. Continue reading »

DYSEASE: “ERA OF DECAY”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 132023
 

(In the following review DGR catches up with one more release from the now-vanished spring of 2023, and this time it’s a debut EP by the German band Dysease.)

Sometimes genre-tags for a band can be amusing, mostly when it comes to the times where the ‘progressive death metal’ tag is applied. Such is the case with Germany’s Dysease – whose name lights up the dopamine centers of the brain over here because we love a good smashing-rocks-against-each-other level pun – and their debut EP Era Of Decay.

Released in the middle of March, the Dysease EP arrived in the hallowed NCS burnt-out corner office sometime in April, but as you’ve noticed, one of the more common refrains around here is how the day job tends to take everything from us. However; that doesn’t mean we’re willing to fully let something go, and in the case of Era Of Decay the constant return to the idea of being ‘progressive death metal’ was enough to keep one wondering what exactly was happening within the EP. Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST: DAY 3

 Concert Reviews  3 Responses »
Jun 122023
 

(We were very fortunate that our Denver-based friend Gonzo made the trip to Seattle for the recent fifth edition of NCS-sponsored Northwest Terror Fest, and took it upon himself to report on the experience of all three days. You can find his report on Day 1 here and on Day 2 here. Below you’ll find his write-up of the third and final day, accompanied by photos again made by the excellent photographers John Malley and Jimmy Stacks, and by our editor islander.)

When you hit day 3 of any festival, it always feels like an accomplishment. If you’ve made it to this point, you probably deserve a merit badge for endurance or alcohol tolerance. And why not?

Personally, I’d settle for one more night of ear-splitting music and behaving badly in public, but that’s just my preference. My only goal for tonight would be to remain coherent enough to feverishly type on my notes app while trying not to get swallowed up by a rampant mosh pit.

I took my last remaining shreds of enthusiasm and trudged once again into the black hole of Neumos/Barboza. One more night of terror was all that was left. What madness would await tonight? What insanity would Ghoul unleash upon us as the closing headliner? And more importantly, would the inflatable animals make another surprise appearance?

It was time to get answers. Onward! Continue reading »

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