AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HEADS FOR THE DEAD — “IN THE ABSENCE OF FAITH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 282023
 

We are very happy once again to premiere music by Heads for the Dead. It’s the kind of happiness people feel when they wake up from supernatural nightmares and realize the monsters weren’t really eating your guts after all, or those who get thrills from the chills of horror movies in which the undead bare their rotten teeth and demons pierce the veil between worlds.

Horror in many forms is the bread and butter of this multinational death metal band, whose discography has swollen since 2018 to encompass an EP and three albums, and now there’s another EP shambling toward us, with a due date of September 1st via the venerable Pulverised Records.

As signified by its title — In the Absence of Faith — all the lyrics in these five tracks were inspired by horror-related movies “that deal with the concept of losing belief or getting challenged in extreme situations”. Continue reading »

BEFORE THE DAWN: “STORMBRINGERS”

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Aug 252023
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the comeback album by Finland’s Before the Dawn, which Napalm Records released at the end of June.)

When you follow music for a long time there are bands that after a while you figure are well and truly done — even though this is proving to be less of the case year by year — their logical conclusion reached or the fuel behind that particular project redirected into other forms.

When it came to Before The Dawn, it seemed like all of the energy driving the band had been redirected well into other directions when the group finally hung up its hat. Tuomas Saukkonen had multiple projects going at that point, and after Rise Of The Phoenix — which honestly is starting to feel more and more like invoking a curse, since naming your album something after a phoenix following a drastic lineup shift almost seems to doom future endeavors — closed up shop on nearly everything he had going and folded it into what would become Wolfheart.

However, after returning with Dawn Of Solace — another project that would’ve figured to be wrapped — in January of 2022, it seemed like the embers for all of those earlier projects hadn’t quite burned out like we thought. Continue reading »

BLUT AUS NORD – DISHARMONIUM – NAHAB

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 242023
 

(Andy Synn gazes into the abyss once more via the medium of the new album from Blut Aus Nord)

Why, you might ask, am I reviewing the new Blut Aus Nord album?

After all, you can already hear it for yourselves in full here, or simply wait until its official release tomorrow and form your own opinions.

Perhaps it’s because I just like to hear the (proverbial) sound of my own voice as I share my opinions online.

Perhaps it’s because I feel like I have something of interest to offer in my analysis that might help illuminate the album a little more.

Or perhaps it’s because, after listening to Disharmonium – Nahab so many times over the last few weeks this is the only way to purge these horrific visions from my mind.

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AUGURIUM — “UNEARTHLY WILL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 242023
 

One way to think of the Canadian band Augurium‘s new album Unearthly Will is as a tour through a potentially deadly wildlife refuge of arcane and even astral origins. It provides close encounters with a variety of musical beasts, some more extravagantly colorful than others (but still with teeth bared) and some more savagely hostile. By the end you might be relieved that you didn’t become a meal for the menagerie, yet electrified by all the close calls — and by the sweeping splendor.

Augurium‘s name is a Latin word for omen, and Omen was the name of the band’s 2017 debut EP, which was an omen of things to come but not entirely predictive. Adorned by an eye-catching cover of an intriguing young woman with hands ending in talons, and introduced by a sinister symphonic intro, it delivered a brand of death metal that was equal parts blistering, bludgeoning, and imperiously hellish, anchored by vicious tremolo-reliant riffing and berserk vocal monstrosity, and accented by melodies of cruel menace, pestilential terror, oppressive gloom, and demonic violence.

From there Augurium moved more in the direction of brutal death metal with their 2018 debut album Unhallowed Ascendance, but with more dynamism than is often found in that genre, even more fully embracing bombastic, thuggish grooves, the ugly distortion of eviscerating riffage, melodies of illness and agony, and bursts of obliterating mayhem. Yet still, the music had plenty of eerie, insidious, and sometimes surprising melodic elements that helped shroud it in an atmosphere that seemed genuinely infernal. Continue reading »

SLOW FALL: “OBSIDIAN WAVES”

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Aug 242023
 

(Today we present DGR‘s review of the new album by the Finnish band Slow Fall, which was released a couple months ago.)

It is always toughest reviewing the straight-shooters. They have a tendency to gum up the brainworks factory when you least need them to. Most of the time it’s because those albums are generally enjoyable but you find yourself constantly stumbling about an empty maze searching for a better way to describe ‘why’ rather than just the part where the band happens to excel at pushing the buttons to unleash good brain chemicals.

While we tug at that same thread though, there is also that sensibility that some of those groups are scraping up against the glass ceiling of releasing something exceptional and you can already see the signs of it in your current subject, it just isn’t quite there yet.

The halls of those who are cramming up against that breakthrough point are increasingly packed, and it’s an area we’ve often trawled over the years as we dig through the underground. Sometimes we get lucky and get to watch a band shoot through to bigger things. As always though, it ties back into the part where you can see exactly what the band are doing at that particular moment in time. There’s no mystery to the blueprint they follow, only how well they execute it.

Finland’s Slow Fall are one such group, whose early-June release of Obsidian Waves is scraping up so hard against the pathway to greatness that you can almost hear the glass cracking. Straight-shooting as they may be, there’s always room for a little bit more keyboard-inflected melodeath in the world. Continue reading »

MASSEN – GENTLE BRUTALITY

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Aug 222023
 

(Andy Synn continues his long-standing love-affair with Massen and their upcoming new album)

As much as I enjoy dissonance and discordance in my music, it remains true – even at the most extreme end(s) of the spectrum – that melody often plays the most important role in an artist’s output.

And why shouldn’t it? After all, melody is one of the prime (and one of the most primal) ways in which we communicate an emotion. Melody isn’t just about catchy hooks, it’s about telling a story.

But, perhaps just as importantly, melody can also tell you a lot about a band’s history as well – where they come from, how they became who they are – and explains so much about why, for example, Melodeath bands from Finland or Black Metal bands from Sweden sound different from their compatriots from other countries.

It should be no surprise then that, beneath their fiery mix of furious Melodic Death Metal, folk-infused Black Metal, and potent protest Punk, melody plays a key role in the sound of Gentle Brutality, the new album from Berlin-by-way-of-Belarus band Massen.

Continue reading »

GRAND CADAVER: “DEITIES OF DEATHLIKE SLEEP”

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Aug 222023
 

(Our man DGR takes on the new album by the Swedish death metal group Grand Cadaver in the following extensive review, just a few days before the record’s August 25 release by Majestic Mountain Records.)

Grand Cadaver are one of a large handful of throwback Swede-death metal projects that popped up over the last couple years. The stars must’ve aligned just right for the combination of the ‘thirty-year nostalgia cycle’, the trapped-at-home anxiousness of much of the pandemic, and the general creative explosion that seems to have emerged from a lot of people determined not to let Bloodbath have all the fun over the past few years, that we’ve wound up with quite the resurgence of that particular style.

You can always argue that it never stopped, and like much of heavy metal, there is never going to be any one style that actually fully ‘stops’. Given the genre’s obsession with corpses, murder, and the shambling dead therein, it would make sense that it would also continue to lurch along in the underground while the spotlight focuses on other trends.

The recent uptick of such bands, however, also includes groups of seasoned musicians who’ve largely made a career out of other styles of music coming back around to what they grew up with and cut their teeth on, which is largely why it seems like lately you’ve been able to see bands with incredible resumes to their varying parts. Grand Cadaver are one of those,  and they’ve kept pretty busy since launching in 2020, having issued one album and an EP up until now, and now this year we’re being treated to the group’s second full-length, Deities Of Deathlike Sleep. Continue reading »

WEREWOLVES: “MY ENEMIES LOOK AND SOUND LIKE ME”

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Aug 212023
 

(In the review below, DGR explains at length why he has had so much dumb fun with the latest Werewolves album, which Prosthetic Records released earlier this month.)

Credit where credit is due: Werewolves know exactly what they’re doing in their year-over year churn to see just how much the metal community is willing to let them get away with.

They continue their hot streak of fantastic album titles with their newest release entitled My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me, and when you open one of your videos with a set of knuckles being literally dragged across the ground, the ability to plead the fifth on the accusation of having fun with just how dumb they make their music flies right out the window. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ASAGRAUM, MYCORRHIZAE, SKØV, FELONIE

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Aug 202023
 

Pro tip: When you know the wind is shifting and it’s going to blow a mass of wildfire smoke into your area overnight, remember to close the windows in your bedroom so you don’t wake up with watering eyes and clogged lungs.

Of course I forgot to do that. To compound the idiocy I still went outside on my deck today for the usual morning coffee… and cigarettes… while watching a rising sun turned the color of Hell.

I suppose there’s a fitting synchronicity in listening to black metal while feeling nasty and thinking about Hell. I’m obviously trying to find the silver lining… or at least a lining that looks like fire and ash.

ASAGRAUM (Netherlands)

Of course, given the conditions described above, it felt completely natural to begin today’s column with a song called “Impure Fire“. The choice seemed even more natural based on the heated and harrowing nature of the music. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GREAT FALLS, THE KEENING, DIKASTERION, COPROLITH

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Aug 192023
 

Well, no unforeseeable calamities befell me or our indomitable site in the last 24 hours, and so I’ve probably set a record for us today with the fourth roundup of new music in a row. If you include tomorrow’s Shades of Black column (barring a calamity), that will be five in a row.

The incredible thing is that even with so many daily installments, one after the other, there’s still a big pile of worthy new metal I haven’t managed to feature, and in that respect there’s nothing particularly unusual about the last week. Every week, the flood just keeps surging.

GREAT FALLS (U.S.)

I fibbed a little. Not everything in today’s collection surfaced during the last week. These first two songs, “Trap Feeding” and “Old Words Worn Thin“, are a tad older than that. They’re both from a new album by this devastating Seattle crew that will be out on September 15th through Neurot Recordings. Continue reading »

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