AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SIXES — “METHISTOPHELES”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

There’s no typo in the title of this post. Methistopheles is indeed the name of the debut album by the Southern California band Sixes. Think for a moment about such a union, about the scourge of meth joined to a conception of Lucifer not as a fallen angel but as the master of eternal tortures. Imagine desperation, derangement, and pain without end.

To be clear, I don’t know if that’s precisely the linguistic suggestion that Sixes had in mind when they coined the album title. My imagination could simply have fallen prey to the influence of the album’s music, which draws from poisoned wellsprings of sludge, stoner doom, and black metal to express abject misery in particularly devastating but perversely entrancing ways.

The music may turn your imaginings in other directions… none of them very pretty or comforting… but the best way to find out is to listen to the album. And you can do that now through our premiere of the record a few days before its March 1 release by Black Bow Records. Continue reading »

ANCST: “GHOSTS OF THE TIMELESS VOID”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by the German genre-benders in Ancst, which will be released on March 2, 2018.)

 

There are certain albums which hit you hard immediately, with a violent, whiplash-inducing punch right to the face. Then there are albums which deliver a slower, deeper, longer-lasting burn.

But the best albums are the ones which manage to do both, smacking you upside the head and knocking you flat on your ass, while also leaving the sort of heavy bruising which guarantees you won’t be forgetting the experience any time soon.

Now Ghosts of the Timeless Void, the second album by German blackened ‘core-collective Ancst, is most definitely one of the former… but only time will tell if it’s also the latter. Continue reading »

CATCHING UP ON 2017: CORAXO / DEADSPACE / SUCCUMB TO DEMISE

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Feb 232018
 

 

(In this post Andy Synn reviews three 2017 releases, by Coraxo (Finland), Deadspace (Australia), and Succumb To Demise (Kentucky).)

 

Despite the fact that I’m already overwhelmed by new and upcoming releases – next week alone I have Slugdge, Ancst, and Rites of Thy Degringolade lined up to review – I’ve decided to take some time out of my busy schedule to catch up on three albums which were released late last year and which, as a result, didn’t necessarily receive the coverage they deserved. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SCUMPULSE — “ROTTEN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  4 Responses »
Feb 212018
 

 

When you listen to the new Scumpulse album — and you damned well should — you won’t have time for any deep breaths. But the music is such a high-powered, adrenaline-triggering rush that you won’t miss the oxygen. Hyperventilation will take care of that for you. You can rest later.

The name of the album is Rotten, and it will be released by Gore House Productions in just two days, but you can listen to it today. You will find this Scottish band’s attack to be relentlessly pulse-pounding, but although its feral ferocity is indeed capable of taking a listener’s breath away, the band have packed the music with turn-on-a-dime changes, creating a genre-hybrid that’s a serious eye-opener. Continue reading »

DEVILDOM: “CURSE OF FLESH”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Feb 212018
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the new album by the Ukrainian band Devildom.)

 

In my line of work I encounter a lot of bands straddling the Black/Death divide, often pulling from the same pool of influences – Dissection, Dark Funeral, Morbid Angel, Behemoth, At The Gates… the list goes on – and often, for the most part, sounding relatively competent but largely interchangeable.

Every now and then though I stumble across a band who do it just that little bit better, with just that little bit extra style and panache.

A band like Devildom. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: REBEL WIZARD — “GREAT ADDICTIONS TO BLINDINGLY DARK, WORLDLY LIFE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

 

The first track on the new Rebel Wizard EP, “The sickness of all knowledge“, begins with an excerpt from a recording of a public talk given in 1981 in Amsterdam by the philosopher, speaker, and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti (b.1895 – d.1986). It reads as follows:

So knowledge has become all important
but knowledge is never complete.
Knowledge about anything is still incomplete,
will always be incomplete.
Therefore knowledge always goes with ignorance,
knowledge always lives within the shadow of ignorance.

Except you never make it to the final word “ignorance” at the opening of this EP. The word is cut off by a shocking explosion of sound. It’s as if you were calmly unlocking the door to your home while thinking deep thoughts, and becoming immolated by a blast furnace upon opening it. Continue reading »

AFGRUND: “THE DYSTOPIAN”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

 

(We present DGR’s review of the new album by the Swedish/Finnish trio Afgrund, which was released last month.)

 

There’s already been a couple of victorious return-from-the-ashes releases so far in 2018, and one of the earliest — after a long period of silence — was on January 5th, courtesy of Swedish/Finnish grind collective Afgrund.

Still somewhat embroiled in a dispute with others in their history over who owns the name has resulted in potentially two versions of the band existing. The three-piece group presented here consists of founding and long-time members Andy, Pat, and Panu, who among the three of them were with the band in one form or another from their first releases up to the 2012 album, The Age Of Dumb. On January 5th, this group returned under the Afgrund banner with a new album, eleven tracks jammed into a little over twenty-three minutes, delivering a dark and pessimistic fiery blast of grind-and-punk under the title The Dystopian.

The Dystopian feels like Afgrund returning home in more ways than one, not only because the lineup consists of founding members but also in the way The Dystopian moves and what it consists of. It sounds like Afgrund knocking down all of their old favorites all over again, reaching into a comfortably familiar bag of tricks in order to dispense high-speed blasts and yells about the world of today. The Dystopian is Afgrund performing a delicate balancing act, viewing the world through a current lens yet throwing themselves back in time in order to effectively restart the band. Continue reading »

CYPECORE: “THE ALLIANCE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 192018
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new fourth album by the German band Cypecore, which was released on February 16, 2018.)

 

I’ve known about Cypecore since the debut of their third album Identity, released in 2016. I don’t know a lot about the history of the band, but that record came after a 6-year gap between albums. I’ve never heard anything from those first two albums, only Identity, and the subject of today’s review. This new release by them is The Alliance.

Cypecore are not some futuristic black metal band, despite what you might immediately assume from their attire. Rather, they are a brawny, massive melodic death metal band with a lot of industrial/electronic elements sandwiched in. It’s all about grooves, hooks, and atmospherics with machine-gun rhythms and grandiose melodic set pieces. I’d call them Heaven Shall Burn mixed with Fear Factory and Reroute To Remain/Soundtrack To Your Escape-era In Flames, all things I happen to be a fan of. Continue reading »

NECROPHOBIC: “MARK OF THE NECROGRAM”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Feb 192018
 

 

(This is Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Sweden’s Necrophobic, which will be released by Century Media on February 23, 2018.)

 

There was a time, way back in 2009, when the constant kvetching and complaining about what constituted “real” Black Metal – mostly fuelled by a bunch of obnoxious elitists online desperately trying to portray themselves as the true heirs to a half-baked ideology cooked up by a bunch of disaffected Norwegian teenagers – started to take a real toll on my ability to appreciate it.

More and more it seemed that, despite being long associated (in my mind at least) with creative freedom and primal emotion, the Black Metal scene was becoming just as ignorant, insular, and cluttered with impotent keyboard warriors and perpetual adolescents, as any other.

Thank God Satan for Necrophobic then, who swept in at just the right time to help reignite my passion for the genre. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: WIEGEDOOD, ATRA VETOSUS, JUBAL, AGRONA, LUSTRE, KALMANKANTAJA, BLUTVIAL

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Feb 182018
 


Wiegedood – photo by Stefaan Temmerman

 

Saturdays and Sunday mornings have become challenging times for me in the thinking I allocate to these SHADES OF BLACK posts. Having listened off and on to a lot of new black metal during the preceding week, I think I’ve figured out by mid-day Saturday what to include, and then, by coincidence or cunning, a whole bunch of new stuff lands in my lap.

Yesterday was a prime example. Having narrowed my choices, they suddenly ballooned again, thanks to late-breaking recommendations from friends and readers, and e-mails from bands and labels. The flood of communications into our chaotic command center usually dwindles dramatically on Saturdays, but those that persist tend to focus on music from the black realms, and I tend to pay attention to them more quickly because everything else has kind of cleared out.

What to do? Well, one thing I did was to expand the volume of music in today’s post. And given my renewed resolution to cut down on the number of premieres I agree to write during the week, another option will be to collect more new music in a blackened vein for a week-day edition of this series.

WIEGEDOOD

I do my best not to read comments about music on the internet (or comments about almost anything else) unless they were written by friends or respected musicians, or unless they appear at NCS. I can guess that if I made an exception to that resolution in the case of Wiegedood’s new song and video, the majority of them would be juvenilia about penises. Continue reading »

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