SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): G.N.L.S., SACRENOIR, VITAPHOBIA, D.R.E.P.

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Jun 252023
 

As forecast in Part 1 of today’s collection of blackened sounds, this Part compiles a small mountain of music — three complete albums and one complete EP. As also forecast, the music is nightmarish in different ways — some of it capable of causing skin to crawl, some of it blistering the flesh, and some of it accomplishing both objectives. But I also think the music is just as fascinating as it is frightening. I hope you’ll feel the same way.

G.N.L.S. (Greece)

Two weeks ago I wrote (here) about an album named Asphyxiating Late Night Sessions, which was a collaboration between Dødsferd‘s mastermind Wrath and m.Sarvok. But it wasn’t the sole result of their working together. Even earlier this year they released another collaborative album under the name G.N.L.S. (Geometric Nictation of Lament’s Space), and it’s a very different experience from the more recent release. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): IMPERIAL CRYSTALLINE ENTOMBMENT, WYRGHER, ASUNDER

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Jun 252023
 

Yesterday my spouse left me home alone for most of the day (the feline creatures were still there but they mostly left me alone too). That allowed me the time to do some deep diving in a search for music to write about today. Purely by coincidence, much of what I found turned out to be… nightmarish. Some of the songs make the skin crawl, others blister it, some do both, and almost none of it seems connected to what passes for reality in our world.

What I chose adds up to an unsettling but electrifying trip of significant proportions — three individual tracks (two from forthcoming records and one standalone single) and then a plunge into the depths of longer-form madness with three complete new albums and a new EP. Hopefully you won’t find this an endurance test but instead a relentless journey of mind-altering discovery.

To get things started before too much of the day gets away, I’ve divided it into two Parts, launching the individual tracks now so I can then turn back to finishing the much larger second installment, which will come later today Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ALKALOID, FILTH IS ETERNAL, OMNIVORTEX, TÁLTOS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 232023
 

Once again I’m beginning what I hope will be a three-stage march backward through some of the better metal I came across over the past week, most of it brand new and some of it only newly discovered. Stage One is today, with the next two stages planned for the weekend. (None of the stages will include the bludgeoning and blistering new Cannibal Corpse song, but only because you probably already know about that one).

ALKALOID (Germany)

The last time I included Alkaloid in one of these round-ups we had news and cover art to share, but no music from their forthcoming third album Numen. Now we do. You might assume from the song’s title — “Clusterfuck” — that Alkaloid are going to throw your head into an instrumental blender set to liquefy, but if so you might be surprised.

I read this in a press release before listening to the song: “‘Clusterfuck‘ might have a clean and catchy chorus, but even the fiery, finger-tapped solo that squiggles loose around the four-minute mark is crushed like an ant between colliding moons”.

I also read the following comment from the band (now a quartet consisting of Morean (vocals, guitars, concepts), Hannes Grossmann (drums), Christian Münzner (guitars), and Linus Klausenitzer (bass)), which reveals that the song’s title has perhaps more to do with its subject matter than its sounds: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): WILT — “HUGINN”

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Jun 232023
 

Today the Canadian atmospheric black metal band Wilt and their label Vendetta Records are releasing a new album named Huginn (though some purists may prefer to label it an EP). It comes as something of a surprise, since it wasn’t preceded by a single or advance publicity, but it is a very welcome surprise.

It’s certainly a welcome development here, as anyone would know who has come across our previous writings about Wilt’s music, including our comments about their 2015 debut album Moving Monoliths or our review of their second album Ruin in 2018. To pick out just a few choice words from the latter:

“[T[he masterful blending of dark metallic melody and dreamlike serenity found on Ruin makes a very good case that this undeniably talented (though underwhelmingly named) Canadian quintet deserve serious consideration as potential heirs to Agalloch’s vacant mantle (pun very much intended). Of course it’s not so much that Wilt sound exactly like Haughm, Dekker, and co., it’s more that the group’s sombre, evocative style examines and explores many of the same musical themes and ideas, although never in exactly the same way”.

Five years on from Ruin, and Agalloch have reassembled themselves, but Wilt have returned as well. These haven’t been five good years for the world at large, and all the dire and dreadful experiences they delivered have influenced what you will hear on Huginn. Here is what Wilt have told us about it: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CREPITATION — “MONSTROUS ERUPTION OF IMPETUOUS PREPOSTEROSITY”

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Jun 222023
 

It will come as no great surprise to people who’ve been fans of Crepitation for the last 17+ years to see how preposterously wild the title of their new album is. It is, in fact, Monstrous Eruption of Impetuous Preposterosity. The trip through the new album’s song titles is perhaps an even more gonzo ride. When words recognized by dictionaries and phrases acknowledged by grammarians aren’t up to the task, just scramble the fuck out of them over a high flame and season with gobs of syllables and a heavy salting of hilarity. That’s how you get things like this:

“Vicious Entwattering of Obstinant Nepotistic Shithouses”
“Priapismic Whisking of Mucilaginous Concrete Slurry”
“Devourification of Skewerised Rottiserie Hominids”
“Superkalifragelisticexpibabyshakeus”

Even when you can find the words in dictionaries, Crepitation have a knack for stitching them together in evocatively foul ways. For example, “Methanated Propulsion of Gaseous Levitation“. What better way to name a song that was inspired by the kind of wet farts that provide a queasy recurring lift to your stride? Continue reading »

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.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: SAMMATH — “GREBBEBERG”

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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!

Continue reading »

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