BUTCHERBIRD: “DROUGHT/DELUGE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 112025
 


Artwork by šaška

(On May 30th Drowning Sea God Records will digitally release the debut EP from the London-based metallic hardcore band ButcherBird. Wil Cifer has had a chance to hear it, and sent in the following positive review.)

I’m always up for checking out a hardcore band that is willing to venture off the beaten path. So here we are with ButcherBird, a hardcore band from London that has a metallic groove to their feedback-squealing attack.

The angry shout of the vocals is the most straightforward thing about the overall sound this band is throwing at you. They do use breakdowns, but these cropped up in less expected places. There is a more rock n roll vibe underlying the whiplash of angular riffs, making them more of Rollins Band than Full of Hell when it comes to the sonic scope these guys have crafted. Unwieldy sections of choruses collide to create a celebratory ambience. They are not fueled by a singular mood, but express a wide range of varied emotions with little pretense. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SONUM — “THE OBSCURE LIGHT AWAITS”

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Apr 092025
 

(written by Islander)

Those of us who first came across the Italian death metal band Sonum through their 2021 EP Divide et Impera encountered a head-spinning array of wild musical adventures, a free-wheeling experimentation in which death metal was only one of many stylistic twists and turns. They followed that with their somewhat less genre-bending but still multi-faceted 2022 debut album Visceral Void Entropy, and now they’re returning again with their new full-length The Obscure Light Awaits, set for release on April 11th by the Dusktone label.

Since their last album, Sonum‘s lineup has dropped from five members to three, and by some measures their music has become more streamlined as well, certainly more carefully structured and cohesive.

But let us quickly banish any thought that Sonum have become “conventional”, in any sense of the word. This is an ingeniously elaborate and thoroughly dazzling album of progressive and atmospheric death metal (though its varying moods are quite dark), and heads that lean into it won’t stop spinning until it’s over — as you will learn for yourselves through our premiere today. Continue reading »

CARONTE – SPIRITVS

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 092025
 

(Andy Synn wants you all to help him make Caronte a much, much bigger deal)

In light of the increasing success of bands like Unto Others and Tribulation, as well as the massive popularity of a little band you may have heard of called Ghost, it’s surprising that occult Doom coven Caronte haven’t received a similar amount of love and attention.

Maybe it’s because they’re still – despite their love of infectiously psilocybic melodies and gloomily gothic grooves – a little too dark, or a little too rough and rugged (though to me that’s actually part of their appeal) to appeal to a more “mainstream” audience quite as much, or maybe they’re just hanging out with “the wrong crowd” (they’re still very much associated with the Black Metal scene to some people… heck, it was at Inferno Festival that I first encountered them myself).

Whatever the reason, however, I’m making it my mission to give the band’s profile a bit of a boost… especially since their new album, Spiritvs (which comes out this week), might just be their most artfully accessible yet!

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): FINAL DOSE — “UNDER THE ETERNAL SHADOW”

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Apr 082025
 

(written by Islander)

Like other genres of extreme metal, a good case can be made that black metal in its earliest stages evolved from punk rock. But black metal continued to evolve in ways that essentially left punk behind. Some bands did not completely cut the tie, but many did, and so the fundamental tropes of subversive “second wave” black metal as they took shape in the early ’90s, and which persist to this day, bear little resemblance to where things started.

Yet in more recent times, maybe most notably over the last decade I’d say, we’ve seen a new emergence of punk influence in black metal, not really a rolling back of the clock to the earliest days but a hybridization of punk, hardcore, or crust and second wave Scandinavian black metal.

Many bands have embraced that hybrid form, and Final Dose from the UK are one of them, and one of the best. But they have also evolved, bringing other stylistic ingredients into their mix besides those two main ones in order to better express the emotional torrents that fuel their work.

The results are vividly on display in their viscerally powerful new album Under The Eternal Shadow, which we’re premiering and reviewing today in advance of its release on April 11th by Wolves of Hades. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 082025
 

(It may be April, but Andy Synn is still catching up on March’s bumper crop of releases)

Like I said last week (and also yesterday) it’s patently impossible for anyone to keep up with everything that’s released each month… so the best move is to not even try.

Of course, I’m immediately going to contradict that by covering another quartet of releases from March, but the point still stands.

After all, despite my best efforts here (and last week) I’m still not going to be able to write about the new ones from Cult of Fire (Czechia) or Cthuluminati (Netherlands) in full, or talk about the immersive Post-Metal intensity of Båkü (France) or Druma (Germany), or give hefty death-dealers Nothing (Australia) and Thanatophobia (Russia) their due.

On top of that, while I’m really liking the new Gates to Hell album the fact that they’re already signed to a big label and getting a lot of coverage means that it’s probably best for me to focus my efforts elsewhere (same for the vicious, visceral – yet slightly too long and drawn-out for its own good – new one from This Gift Is A Curse).

And even though I’ve been loving the new Teitanblood (unsurprisingly) I feel like our good buddies at AMG already said everything that needed saying about that one, so make sure you go and read their review for some cool insight into that one.

But, anyway, enough of all my that… let’s get to the music, shall we?

Continue reading »

ZEOLITE – L’APPEL DU VIDE

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 072025
 

(Andy Synn kicks off his week with a bit of down-under Deathcore violence courtesy of Zeolite)

People often ask me – well, not so much “often” as “occasionally” – how I keep up with everything that’s released each week.

And my answer is… I don’t!

Oh, I used to run myself ragged trying to have an opinion on every album or EP that came out, but I soon realised that  a) this wasn’t good for me (and was stopping me from actually enjoying my life), and b) every single one of these releases actually deserved more of my time and attention if I wanted to do them justice (which is why I’m so sceptical/scornful when people claim to have listened to 100+ albums every month… as they’re clearly more concerned with showing off the quantity, rather than the quality, of their listening).

And so I made the decision (the healthy decision, I think) to work smarter, rather than harder, going forwards, and to focus more on just covering whatever I felt most enthusiastic about – whatever I felt I had some insight into or that I had an interesting angle on – so that I could dedicate more time to fewer albums overall.

Which brings me to L’Appel Du Vide, the recently-released second album from Australian Brutal/Technical Deathcore/Death Metal crew Zeolite.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MIDNIGHT, ALIGN, FURNACE, STREGA, ARV, FLUISTERAARS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Apr 052025
 

(written by Islander)

I don’t have a “physically active lifestyle” these days, yet some nights my body acts like I just ran a marathon. Last night was one of those. I conked out and woke up more than 9 hours later. Not even the part of my brain that always nags me, even asleep, about the need to get this Saturday column in shape could resist the bear-like compulsion to hibernate.

So, a very late start today, made later by the time needed to overcome grogginess. Still groggy, even after reading godawful global news stories while inhaling a cocktail of caffeine and nicotine, I glanced at the godawful big NCS in-box. Here’s the first message I saw:

Please take a moment out of your day to listen to the new track from Casa Mondo “Same Words.” It is a taste of Afro Reggae Summer Niceness and would give your followers a warm fuzzy feeling 🙂

I nearly wrote back to ask how in the world we got on this person’s list. We must be on many lists that have zero to do with what we do, because I see dozens of e-mails like this every day from musically remote planets (remote from our own ugly little asteroid).

Of course I didn’t write back, but I thought, the only warm fuzzy feeling our followers might want from music at NCS would be a feeling of fungal infection. And “niceness”? I think our definition of “nice” is not what Casa Mondo had in mind. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SERPENTES, GOLEM OF GORE, CRUST, ANZV, CAGED BASTARD, SKUGGOR

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 042025
 

(written by Islander)

I keep an electronic calendar and a paper calendar of premieres I agree to run for NCS. Belt and suspenders, as people use to say before suspenders went the way of the Dodo. But sometimes my pants fall down anyway, like when the plans of a band or label change and I’m being distracted by something else when I see that and then forget to change either calendar.

That’s what happened today. I had an album premiere on the calendar, but when I went hunting for the “assets” for the premiere I saw the e-mail chain where a schedule change had happened. So I found myself with time I didn’t expect to have today, and decided to make this roundup of new songs and videos as a bit of a head-start on the weekend roundups. My selection strategy was to pick the newest things I saw that I liked this morning. Hope you enjoy what I chose.

(In case you’re wondering, I do have assistants in my NCS work, but mainly they delete things I’ve written and introduce typos by walking across the keyboard. They’re less useful in keeping my pants up.) Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, MARCH 2025

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 042025
 


Forlorn

(Our Denver-based writer Gonzo is back with another monthly roundup of reviews and recommendations. Today’s varied collection includes four albums released in March and one from February.)

Well well, here we are again with a new month, and I’m writing this exactly a week later than I wanted to. Refused are officially fucking dead – at least, to everyone who saw them Tuesday night here in Denver – and I’m still getting my voice back after that show. “CAN I SCREAM” indeed.

It’s been quite the active week for heavy music around the Rockies. By the time this gets on our site, I’ll have likely already seen Meshuggah tear another hole in the space-time continuum, and I always look forward to that. I’m glad I managed to get this column out the door, though, as I’m headed to Roadburn in a couple of weeks for a much-needed break. Leaving the country, even if temporarily, seems to be the right move for now. There’s chaos and stupidity around every corner in the US, and I can only live in violent opposition to fascism for so long.

Since I don’t have high hopes for getting an April edition of this column out into the world, it’ll give you more time to dive into these 5 albums for March. You won’t be sorry. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VERHEERER — “URGEWALT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 032025
 

(written by Islander)

The title of Verheerer‘s new album (their third) is Urgewalt. Like many German words, it probably doesn’t have a precise English translation, but based on our own searches it could be rendered as “elemental force” — “a sense of raw, untamed, and powerful force, often associated with nature or something fundamental.”

In the context of the album, that force is the absolute will of humanity to destroy, to the point of self-destruction. The album’s even more specific context is the horror of World War I, as described in this press preview of the record (which will be released on April 4th by Vendetta Records):

The new album was composed and written with this basic idea in mind and with the First World War, which revealed a new level of cruelty and dehumanization and at the same time shaped our world like no other conflict to this day, the canvas was also found on which Verheerer paint their very own pictures. Of the loss of humanity in an industrial machine of destruction, of seduction and the mechanisms of power that make the incomprehensible possible in the first place.

And thus the album’s cover art (by Misanthropic-Art) is a fitting one — the remains of creatures who irresistibly fought and died, horns locked together and unable to escape. It’s a representation of the truth “that every supposed victory in this bloody game must be paid for all the more dearly.” Continue reading »

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