PANPHAGE: “JORD”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jan 122018
 

 

(The solo artist behind the Swedish black metal band PanPhage has declared that the new album Jord will be the last Panphage record (for reasons discussed in this interview). It is being released today via Nordvis Produktion, and here we present Norway-based Karina Noctum’s review.)

 

Panphage is a Black/Folk one-man band from Sweden. Jord, the latest album, and the last one, comes two years after the release of the full-length Storm. The cover picture of Jord is from some Swedish autumnal landscape. The title of the album translates to “soil”. Most of the song titles are related to the soil/earth theme, e.g. (as translated), “Silent mountain ridge”, “Unsown shall the fields grow”, all revolving around heritage and the earth’s cycle of life and death.

The beginning of “Odalmarkerna” (cultivated fields) reminds me a bit of Iron Maiden actually. But as the album develops, the folk elements become more and more blackened. The album has an atmosphere, an old one. Especially the guitar and drum sound bring the ’90s black metal feeling back quite often. The Bergen scene comes definitely to mind here. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: THE PREDECESSORS — “ROT”

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Jan 092018
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the debut EP by The Predecessors from the UK.)

 

It’s a simple fact that not every band knocks it out of the park on their first try. And, in today’s high-speed, high-attrition digital world – where a thousand new releases are just a few keystrokes away, and new bands have to crawl and scrabble and claw for even the merest scrap of attention – it’s all too easy for an otherwise talented young band to slip between the cracks simply because they don’t quite have all their pieces in the right place yet.

Which is very nearly what happened with Nottingham quintet The Predecessors and their debut EP, Rot. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MHÖNOS — “LXXXVII”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Jan 052018
 

 

The sounds of Doom are as manifold and multi-faceted as a garden of night-blooming flowers, some alluringly beautiful and some poisonous, some that tower and some so seemingly incorporeal that your hand might pass through them as if through a mist. The sound of the French band Mhönos, as captured in their new album LXXXVII, is the sound of nightmare, the sound of oppression and paralysis, the sound of derangement and death in a freezing void. It is the incantation for an unsettling trance that haunts the mind for hours after its final silence.

The album is being released on CD and DLP by Dead Seed Productions and on tape by Zanjeer Zani, and today we are premiering the album through a stream from Bandcamp, where it is also now available. Continue reading »

SINISTRO: “SANGUE CÁSSIA”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  No Responses »
Jan 052018
 

 

(We present Andy Synn’s review of the new album by the Portuguese band Sinistro, released today by Season of Mist.)

 

Is it just me or… are we undergoing something of a Doom renaissance right now?

I may be somewhat late to the party in acknowledging this – explicitly at least – but it definitely seems to me that the last 6-12 months have seen a real resurgence of interest in the style, bolstered by a plethora of truly spectacular releases running the gamut from the more gothic end of the spectrum, all the way to the groaning weight of the most crushing Funeral Doom, via the brooding misery of the always-welcome Peaceville sound…. with little sign that this slow-moving tide is starting to slacken off or ebb.

But, with albums as good as Sangue Cássia still coming out, why would we want it to? Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HELLISH GOD — “THE EVIL EMANATIONS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jan 052018
 

 

Hellish God may be a relatively new name in the annals of death metal, but one need not be clairvoyant to predict that it’s a name which will spread like wildfire, much like their particular brand of musical brutality blazes like a hellish bonfire. Their debut album is The Evil Emanations, and it’s set for release on Monday, January 8th, by the Italian label Everlasting Spew Records — but we’re giving you a chance to hear all of it today. If you were thinking of blasting your weekend to smithereens and burning what’s left of it to the ground, you’ve come to the right place.

Hellish God’s line-up includes current and former members of such bands as Antropofagus, Imposer, and Mindful Of Pripyat, and this new album (which follows their 2016 EP, Impure Spiritual Forces) is conceptually focused on the Qlipoth — “metaphorical shells which represent evil spiritual forces in the Jewish mysticism”. The music embraces a particular kind of old-school death metal sound that’s recommended for fans of Azarath, Rebaelliun, Centurian, Krisiun, and Abhorrence. Continue reading »

WATAIN: “TRIDENT WOLF ECLIPSE”

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Jan 032018
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Watain, which is slated for release on January 5 by Century Media.)

 

There once was a band named Watain
Whose music and gimmick became
Extremely divisive
They dressed up like bikers
And from it reaped “fortune” and fame

Ok, so the above limerick may not be 100% accurate, but I think it gets the broad strokes right for the most part. But perhaps, for an album as important (and potentially provocative) as this one, some more context is needed? Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ENTHEOGEN, JASSA, DAEVA, UR, NIGHTGRAVE, INFERNOTION

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Jan 022018
 

 

This is the second part of a post I began here on the last day of the old year, delayed by one day so that I could recover from a cataclysmic hangover produced by unforeseen New Year’s Eve revels; the old year died, and then I felt as if I had, too.

I’ve collected streams of six albums here, all of them released in December or November, accompanied by nothing that would justify the term “review”, only a few inadequate words of description and praise that I hope will induce you to explore the music. This won’t be the last of my efforts to catch up with music released last year, though inevitably we’ll start paying increasing amounts of attention to the march of metal in 2018.

ENTHEOGEN

Andy Synn already included this record on his listing of 2017’s “Great Albums”, and it recently appeared on Brendan Sloan’s list (here) as an Honorable Mention — but only because he thought it would be greedy to put more than one Alex Poole project in his Top 17 list (the other being Chaos Moon). Yet despite this attention, both at NCS and elsewhere, I wanted to give my own nudge to those who haven’t yet heard Without Veil, Nor Self. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: EUCLIDEAN, BALMOG, BHLEG, SAMMATH, BLACK KNIFE

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  12 Responses »
Dec 272017
 

 

I’m three days late with this week’s edition of SHADES OF BLACK, and still woefully behind in sharing new music in a blackened vein that I’ve discovered over the last month. I’m bound and determined to do at least one more of these features before 2017 is interred in a moldy grave, as long as I’m sufficiently unbound by other distractions.

This particular collection includes one complete new album, advance tracks from two more, some new live videos, and a new single.

EUCLIDEAN

To begin this selection of music, I want to strongly recommend Quod Erat Faciendum, the debut album of the Swiss band Euclidean, which was released on December 21 and came strongly recommended to me by starkweather and by Miloš. Continue reading »

POST-CHRISTMAS NECROSIS: ATOMWINTER, LIMOS, REX DEMONUS, HUSK

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 262017
 

 

I hope everyone had a good Christmas Day, even if the day itself is nothing special to you. As you may have seen, NCS was alive and kicking despite the holiday, with three premieres yesterday. And we’ll continue to kick for the rest of the week with a rollout of more year-end lists by NCS contributors and invited guests, plus assorted other posts.

I wasn’t able to get a SHADES OF BLACK post done for Sunday, but it’s coming soon… and may be a two-parter, because there’s a lot I want to write about. But to start the six days that remain before New Year’s Eve, I selected three recent songs and one new EP that sound like the antithesis of peace on earth, good will toward men, because I can only take so many demonstrably impotent platitudes of that nature before I have to dose myself with flesh-eating music.

ATOMWINTER

The consumption of flesh commences with a track from Catacombs, the new third album by the German harbingers of total death in Atomwinter. The album will be released by Trollzorn on February 9 (digital, CD, and gatefold LP). And isn’t that a hellishly fantastic album cover? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: PESTILENCE, ATARAXY, WHOREDOM RIFE, TALSUR, VIELIKAN, HOLYARROW

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Dec 222017
 

 

After a nearly two-week vacation in which I blogged very little, I returned to Seattle late last week and was promptly slammed by my fucking day job, unforeseen personal obligations, bad weather, and a whole bunch of NCS articles to write or edit, including the continuation of our LISTMANIA series, interviews, reviews, and a bunch of premieres. I can’t really say I need another vacation already… but I kind of do.

Anyway, I haven’t written one of these round-ups in 12 days, and I’m way behind in even listening to all the new songs that have appeared since my vacation began 19 days ago. I started working on this collection early this week but decided to include a couple of songs that have appeared more recently. I hope to do more catch-up round-ups this weekend, including a Sunday SHADES OF BLACK feature, because holidays don’t mean shit around here.

PESTILENCE

Roughly four and a half years after their last album, Pestilence will release a new one via Hammerheart Records named Hadeon, and earlier this week Hammerheart previewed the album with a single called “Multi Dimensional“. It didn’t take long for my NCS comrade TheMadIsraeli to send me an alert about the song, wth a positive message. Continue reading »

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