Reviews Archives - Page 121 of 589

MAJESTIES: “VAST REACHES UNCLAIMED”

Feb 102023

(Professor D. Grover the XIIIth returns to NCS with the following review of the debut album by Majesties, which is set for a March 3rd release by 20 Buck Spin.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. It is well-established canon at this point that your friendly neighborhood professor is a great fan of Tanner Anderson and his work in Obsequiae. Aria Of Vernal Tombs stood easily as my favorite black metal album and I was skeptical that anything could equal it, and honestly nothing did until Obsequiae‘s follow-up, The Palms Of Sorrowed Kings. Asked now, and I swear to you that I could not choose a favorite between the two, as they are both absolutely brilliant.

I tell you this because when I heard first of Majesties, I grew excited nearly to the point of arousal. Driven by my initial impression of the first track released, ‘The World Unseen‘, it seemed that Majesties was essentially Tanner Anderson and friends performing Lunar Strain-era In Flames-style melodeath, an impression bolstered by the release of a second track, ‘In Yearning, Alive‘. My friends, let me tell you, that seemed like a perfect combination, like the genius who first combined chocolate and peanut butter. And then I got to hear the entire album. Continue reading »

AHAB: “THE CORAL TOMBS”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Feb 092023

(Ahab rose again from the watery depths with a new album that was released last month by Napalm Records, and today we follow that up with a review of the album by our Sacramento-based writer DGR.)

Turns out that when a solid chunk of your region spends the first three weeks of the year under flash flood warnings and with one of its main highways effectively underwater, leading to some very dramatic New Year’s photos that aren’t too far from your house, it’s hard to keep your thoughts cogent around a nautical-doom album, no matter the quality. Who knew? Apologies to Ahab on that one.

It is wild to think about just how large the gap was between albums for Germany’s underwater-doom specializers. You never would’ve figured that a band who had a pretty solid track record of new releases every three or so years would suddenly see a near-eight-year gap between albums, but alas, to keep things succinct, it had been a sizeable wait for the group’s newest album The Coral Tombs – with only live albums and collections in between to keep people interested. Continue reading »

THE SOUND OF SUFFERING

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Feb 092023

(Andy Synn presents three recent releases which might ease your pain)

As some of you may be aware, the last 18 months or so have been a steady stream of set-backs, fuck-ups, and tragic events for me, all culminating (I hope) in my upcoming surgery to remove an infected wisdom tooth.

So… yeah, I’ve been in quite a bit of pain – both physical and mental – for a while now, and this has clearly carried over into my listening habits (especially in the past month or so).

Still, I’ve always found that a good dose of auditory agony can serve as a pretty effective painkiller in other areas of life, so here’s a selection of things that have been easing my suffering recently.

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Feb 072023

(Andy Synn recommends four albums from last month which you may have overlooked)

So we’re officially one month into the new year and… my list of artists/albums that we didn’t cover in January is already four or fives times longer than the ones we did write about.

Maybe it’s time to accept that it’s impossible for us to stay on top of everything, and just be happy with what we are able to do?

Hell, usually it’s another couple of months of stress and strife before I/we inevitably come to this realisation, so perhaps this is a sign of what I think they call “growth”?

Whatever… here’s four releases from January that you might have missed (but which, thankfully, we didn’t).

MITHRIDATUM: “HARROWING”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Feb 072023

(This is DGR‘s extensive review of the debut album by the multi-national band Mithridatum, recently released by Willowtip Records.)

Mithridatum are a new death metal trio that are part of a much larger musical wave taking place within the metal scene. Over recent years the concept of a dissonant death metal band has been a slow-growing sub-section of an already fractured and widely spread subgenre of metal to begin with. Reflective of the large motions in the quest for the nebulous ‘heavy’, many artists have found new vitality in making some of the ugliest and most unapproachable music out there, where a listener can recognize the barest components but otherwise spend just as much time fighting to find the appeal in any of it, or having the music actively reject the idea of approachability.

There’s so much incredibly cool stuff happening within the spinning vortex of sound that emanates from Mithridatum but you’re just as often subjected to nightmarish sonic hellscapes as best as the band could write them. Fascinating? Yes. Friendly? Not a chance in hell. Harrowing may be one of the more apt titles out there for the five songs and thirty-five minutes of music on the group’s first full-length release. Continue reading »

SANGUISUGABOGG: “HOMICIDAL ECSTASY”

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Feb 062023

(Here’s Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by Ohio-based Sanguisugabogg, released on February 3rd by Century Media Records.)

Normally this brand of death metal is not my thing. Early Cannibal Corpse was once my go-to for this kind of thing, which these days often gets labeled as gore-grind. These guys are clearly tired of being tied to such labels, and aside from the low guttural vocals, they have set themselves apart from being another spawn of Cannibal Corpse’s mutilated womb with their fetish for grooves. There is a pungent whiff of hardcore to some of their riffs, which have the breakdown feel.

Normally when it comes to a band that knocks my headphones back due to the sheer density of their sound, my first concern becomes, can they write songs? The first two here earned a thumbs up in this department. Thus the challenge for a band who lives off brutality for the sake of brutality was to keep interest. Which they did with their evershifting flow of groove-drenched riffs. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: FVNERALS, WALLOWING, MORTE FRANCE, FAGUS, SKOGNATT, AHASVER

Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET No Responses »

Feb 052023

I hope this Sunday is treating you well. Or maybe you’re landing here on Monday… or Tuesday… or (heaven forfend) on Hump Day (what a lot of time those people have been wasting).

My Sunday is off to a slow start, thanks for asking. I had a riot of a Saturday night. Splattered on the couch with the cats, binge-watching a fantastic series I don’t need to name (it was Slow Horses) until way late. So I was late to rise and feeling very groggy. But there’s nothing like plunging into a lake of black and black-adjacent metal (sometimes only barely black-adjacent) to kick-start your heart. Here’s what I surfaced with today: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SCÁTH NA DÉITHE — “VIRULENT PROVIDENCE”

Album Reviews, Premieres 2 Responses »

Feb 022023

Track lengths on albums and EPs can vary significantly, but the most common seem to be in the 4-5-minute range. Even when some song lengths creep up into the 10-minute range, most releases still include enough individual tracks that interested listeners can do some “sampling”, i.e., listening to a song or two in order to decide whether to take the plunge into the entire record.

Scáth Na Déithe‘s new album Virulent Providence does not allow this. It includes only two tracks, each of them in the vicinity of 20 minutes long, and those two are also conceptually connected, so even listening to just one of them diminishes the impact of the album as a whole.

Obviously, this is a risky approach, especially in an age filled to overflowing with distractions, where minds constantly flit from thing to thing and patience is in short supply. The demands for immediate gratification and tendencies toward quick impulsive decisions can make the prospect of investing 20 minutes in a single composition, or two of them that demand that much time, a daunting one. The desire for sampling won’t go away either, and so there’s also the risk that people might just spend a few minutes listening to the start of one of these two long tracks, and make a snap decision based on that alone.

But we’re here to tell you that Virulent Providence is well worth all the attention it demands, because the album is a remarkable one. It’s also difficult to fathom how it could have been broken up into shorter pieces without severely sacrificing what makes it so remarkable. It’s simply one of those albums that, to be fully appreciated, requires immersion in the whole saga. Fortunately, it turns out that becoming immersed in it isn’t difficult at all, and as long as there isn’t some external event that forces you to stop, you probably won’t have any sense of a clock ticking and time passing. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, JANUARY 2023

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Feb 012023

Katatonia

(Gonzo has delivered to us another monthly round-up of his favorite releases for the month that just ended.)

And we’re back.

January has already found its way into our rearview mirror, and not a moment too soon. It’s been 6 degrees Fahrenheit in Denver for the past few days and I can’t feel my nuts. No respite seems to be on the way. It’s the land of the ice and snow over here, to be sure, but it also gives me a good reason to sneak a larger-than-usual portion of whiskey into my coffee. Is it coping with being a daytime corporate asshole, or is it a problem?

No one knows.

Moving on!

January is a notoriously shit time for new music, but if the first month of ’23 is any indicator, that trend may very well be on its way out. Whether it’s something in the water or labels just deciding to not take January off for a change, I’m already impressed with some gems I discovered this month – here’s the best of the bunch.