VANUM / VARAHA / VIELIKAN / VIMUR

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 292019
 

 

(This is a quartet of reviews written by Andy Synn, gathering together impressions and streams for four excellent new albums by bands who happen to share a first letter.)

Did you know they’re planning on doing a full-length movie version of Sesame Street?

I didn’t until recently, but I guess it just goes to show that anything which the studios believe can be turned into a movie will be turned into one eventually.

Still, as long as they avoid the temptation to make it a “dark and gritty reboot” I suppose it can’t be that bad, right?

Anyway, this has very little to do with the bands I’m writing about here today, other than to act as a cheeky little segue into me saying that today’s article is brought to you by the letter V and the number 4. Continue reading »

TURIN HORSE: “PROHODNA”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 292019
 

 

I learned of this just-released new album by the German band Turin Horse from Rennie (starkweather), who never steers me wrong. In genre terms, the music is a hybrid, and a rich mix of dark ingredients it is, pulling from sludge, doom, black metal, and post-metal, with vocals that are also varied.

A dark and desperate atmosphere shrouds the album, but within this harrowing cosmos of sound the band use a changing palette of bleak and fiery colors to maintain a tight grip on the listener’s attention. They anchor the songs with a titanically heavy low end (the bass is mountainous), capable of figuratively pounding your body into fragments when the band put their mind to it, and grinding the remnants into even smaller fragments. And as if the sheer physical brutishness of the music weren’t devastating enough, they create melodies of dismal and desolating power. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2019: DAY 4

 Concert Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 262019
 

 

(In what has become an annual tradition, our man from the UK, Andy Synn, attended Inferno Festival on April 18 – 21, 2019, in Oslo. We have been posting his reports on the event this week, day by day, accompanied by a few of his photos, and this is the final installment.)

 

The fourth and final day of Inferno Festival this year was a tale of woe and suffering… for me anyway… which began the previous evening.

By the time I got back to my hotel after Taake the night before I was already spiralling pretty hard. I had a raging fever, my legs were barely holding me up, and every single part of me felt simultaneously frozen and on fire and covered in sandpaper. For the next fourteen hours (trust me, I counted them) I was unable to sleep, unable to rest, and unable to do anything but sweat and shiver and curse my own existence.

Thankfully I eventually managed to drop off, as otherwise I think I might honestly have gone insane, although by this point it was early Sunday afternoon, which made it extremely unlikely I was going to see all the bands I wanted to. But I did manage to see some. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2019: DAY 3

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 252019
 

 

(In what has become an annual tradition, our man from the UK, Andy Synn, attended Inferno Festival on April 18 – 21, 2019, in Oslo. We are posting his reports on the event this week, day by day, accompanied by a few of his photos.)

 

What can I say about the third day of this year’s Inferno Festival?

Quite a lot, as it turns out, although, for various reasons, still not as much as I’d hoped. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HEATHE — “ON THE TOMBSTONES, THE SYMBOLS ENGRAVED”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Apr 252019
 

 

On May 30, 2019, Wolves and Vibrancy Records will release the debut album of Heathe, a project born in Aalborg, Denmark, with a core of a single individual and an ever-changing line-up. The album, entitled On the Tombstones, The Symbols Engraved, is colossally heavy and about as physically compelling in its massive rhythms as anything you could find. It’s also intensely disturbing and disorienting, capable of making mincemeat of your brain and clawing at your emotional well-being at the same time as it metaphorically pounds the hell out of your body.

The album is a single 38-minute track composed of different repeating sequences which flow into each other. You can pick out elements of doom, black metal, and noisy hypno-rock in this evolving hybrid of corporal punishment, emotional abrasion, and mental hallucination, but everything is united in a way that makes the music seem to have been borne this way in an instant, rather than cobbled together from disparate pieces. To be carried away by it, without losing interest, is a natural reaction despite how harrowing the music becomes, even though it takes a while to recover from the whole trip. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MURG — “STRÄVAN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 252019
 

 

In 2015 the enigmatic black metal duo Murg, who come from the rural mining areas of Bergslagen, Sweden, began a conceptual trilogy with their remarkable debut album Varg och Björn (“Wolf and Bear:), which delivered memorable, atmospheric melodies within thorned membranes of ripping savagery. Roughly 18 months later they continued their narrative with Gudatall (“Godpine”), an album that might have been even better, encompassing music that was both incendiary and staggeringly downfallen. And tomorrow they will complete their terrible tale with the release of Strävan, which is the most overpowering of all the albums (in more ways than one).

Murg’s narrative concept, which has inspired the three albums, is profoundly bleak, summed up in these excerpts from the press materials provided by Nordvis Produktion, which will release the new album on April 26th: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VERWÜSTUNG — “GOSPEL OV FURY”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 252019
 

 

If performed live in a club, Verwüstung’s new album Gospel Ov Fury would leave most people ringing wet and gasping for air. Their brand of feral black thrashing mayhem is relentlessly propulsive and thoroughly evil, persistently capable of channeling berserker-level chaos and triggering all sorts of fast-twitch muscle fibers, including the ones in your neck (though most people can’t headbang this fast, even they’ll want to).

Gospel Ov Fury will be released by Handful of Hate on May 1st, though there’s way more than a handful of hate in these nine songs. But while viciousness and rage set these songs on fire, these demonic Belarusians also happen to be skilled song-writers and top-shelf technicians. Not content merely to fly like the wind, or even to pack their songs with one virally infectious riff after another, they’ve paid attention to the appeal of dynamism, as you’ll discover for yourselves through our premiere of a complete album stream at the end of this post. Continue reading »

THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT: “V2 – VERGELDING: DAWN OF THE PLANET OF THE ASHES”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 252019
 

 

This review is very late. The fault is mainly mine, though I do think the band share a certain amount of the blame. My first trip through their latest album damaged certain vital cognitive faculties (the ones that tell me who I am, where I live, and what day it is), and the injury became more severe as a result of subsequent trips. A memorial service for the fallen brain cells resulted in further delay, even though I was the only person who bothered to attend and the deceased had already been cremated (by the music).

Still, I should have done better, even under disabling circumstances, especially because V2 – Vergelding: Dawn of the Planet of the Ashes has been out since November 15, 2018, when there were still turkeys awaiting slaughter for Thanksgiving (I wonder how many farmers used a stream of V2 to exterminate them?), and I had even received a handsomely packaged (but not autographed) physical edition of the album. Amends must be made, and now they have been (I hope). Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL 2019: DAY 2

 Concert Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 242019
 

 

 

(In what has become an annual tradition, our man from the UK, Andy Synn, attended Inferno Festival on April 18 – 21, 2019, in Oslo. We are posting his reports on the event this week, day by day, accompanied by a few of his photos.)

Day 2 of this year’s edition of Inferno Festival started off on a promising note, as I woke up feeling heartily refreshed and full of piss and vinegar… and once I’d been to the bathroom, emptied my bladder, and brushed my teeth, I was still feeling pretty fresh, so was able to make it down to the gym for an hour, then off into the centre of the city to have a wander and find some food, before finally making my way back to Rockefeller where, over the course of the evening, we’d all be treated to at least three headline-worthy (or almost headline-worthy) performances, perhaps as the universe’s way of making up for yesterday’s slightly lacklustre finale! Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GAAHLS WYRD, INTOTHECRYPT, SLAEGT, LEVITAS, SIASKEL

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  7 Responses »
Apr 232019
 

 

I’m torn between the desire to back-track and continue to catch up on new advance songs that I failed to notice over the nearly three weeks when I couldn’t devote time to round-ups, and the steady impulse to focus on things “hot off the presses”. This particular collection reflects that schism: There’s a bit of both in here.

GAAHLS WYRD

The timbre of Gaahl‘s voice dominates the opening of “Carving the Voices“, which Metal Hammer premiered a week ago. Like a prophet who might actually be clairvoyant or an ancient enchanter who has just emerged from a centuries-long imprisonment within a gnarled oak, the deep resonance of his voice conveys the possession of wisdom both profound and full of dread. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries