AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ZUD — “A WILDERNESS LEFT UNTAMED”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 142017
 

 

ZUD’s A Wilderness Left Untamed is a big album, and not just in its nearly hour-long length. It’s brimming with ideas and bursting with energy. It’s fiendishly clever, but never comes off as calculating or manipulative. It’s ambitious, but not in the sense that, in the case of some other bands, could mean overreaching or even pretentious. It’s just hugely effective in tapping into primal urges in the untamed way that the best of the devil’s music always does, and it does that in very distinctive fashion.

The music is also damned catchy, damned adrenalizing, damned filthy, and… just plain damned. From minute to minute you can alternately rock out, careen about like a crazy person in a delirious frenzy, drift off into hallucinogenic reveries, engage in a lusting orgy, feed like a vampire, and let your freak flag fly like it’s 1969. And on top of all that, the band also rise up in moments of epic, luciferian majesty.

In a nutshell, with October fast approaching, you’ve just found the perfect accompaniment to Devil’s Night. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HIGHRIDER — “ROLL FOR INITIATIVE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  7 Responses »
Sep 142017
 

 

Highrider prove themselves to be sonic alchemists of a very high order on their debut album Roll For Initiative, creating an alloy of metal and rock ingredients that gleams like a rare jewel. The album will be released on September 15th (tomorrow!) by The Sign Records, and we have the great pleasure of sharing a full stream with you today.

The vibrant mix of styles in Highrider’s formula is fascinating. You can readily pick out the influences as you make your way through the album, but what you probably couldn’t have predicted is how creatively and seamlessly Highrider blend them together in every song. The music is thus both pleasingly familiar and marvelously unique — and it’s also massively infectious. Continue reading »

IMPETUOUS RITUAL: “BLIGHT UPON MARTYRED SENTIENCE”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Sep 142017
 

 

(Norway-based writer Karina Noctum, who usually brings us interviews, brings us another enthusiastic review, this time focusing on the 2017 album by Australia’s Impetuous Ritual.)

Even though it is coming out a bit late (sorry for this), I decided to write this review anyway. But before I attempt to describe this beauty of an album, I would like to tell you that Impetuous Ritual have nothing to do with Portal. If you thought they did, they deny this, even though it seems that pretty much everyone says so. Their mystical Roman-numeraled personas are to remain unknown, and that’s fine. Now we have lots of musicians called I, II, III, IV, and so on in BM. Someone should start using binary codes just to make a difference.

Back to the music. I think this is absolutely one of the best albums this year. It is very Australian! I adore the sound. True madness, darkness, and old-school feeling. The band show their cumulative experience in a piece that may seem raw, but is technical and well-produced. The album shows that it is absolutely possible to combine those qualities. This is the kind of album that leaves others with no excuses. Bad production and poor musical skills are by no means what makes something raw. Continue reading »

GIGAN: “UNDULATING WAVES OF RAINBIOTIC IRIDESCENCE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Sep 132017
 

(Andy Synn reacts to the new album by Gigan, out September 15 on Willowtip Records)

Last year I wrote a column attempting to delineate the reason (or, more accurately) reasons, why I listen to Metal.

But some bands are so weird and wonderful, so damnably difficult to pin down, that they defy explanation.

So I can’t necessarily tell you WHY I like Gigan… only that I do.

And maybe, just maybe, you will too. Continue reading »

UFOMAMMUT: “8”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 122017
 

 

(Wil Cifer review the new album by Ufomammut, set for relase on September 22 by Neurot Recordings.)

When I am searching for doom I want something that is just Black Sabbath worship. I’ve listened to those albums for over 35 years and can pull them off the shelf at any moment to revisit as needed… So it gets me excited to hear a band like these men from from Italy who must set bongs aflame across the world with their super psyche-filled doom.

Ufomammut take you out into the cosmos with a fuzzed-out density that is obscured by clouds of trippy haze. The vocals feel more Pink Floyd-like to me than carrying any kind of an Ozzy influence. Each song takes you further into the depths of their warped rabbit hole. Continue reading »

BENEATH: “EPHEMERIS”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Sep 112017
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli prepared this review of the new album by Iceland’s Beneath, released in August by Unique Leader Records.)

I was a 100% emphatic fan of Beneath’s sophomore release The Barren Throne. it was one of 2014‘s finest examples of technical/progressive death metal done with immaculate nuance and care. I wasn’t a big fan of the band’s first album, Enslaved By Fear, but it was different from The Barren Throne. Based on the band’s new album Ephemeris, I can now see that what I attributed to just natural evolution or getting better as a band wasn’t that. It’s actually that Beneath wants to write a different kind of death metal album every go around.

Ephemeris abandons The Barren Throne and it’s Suffocation-esque mix of bleak melody and noodily passages of inter-dimensional angular tangents, opting for something of a more opaque sci-fi aesthetic. Continue reading »

DAWN RAY’D: “THE UNLAWFUL ASSEMBLY”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 112017
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by the UK’s Dawn Ray’d, which will be released on October 2nd.)

Despite what some people might have you believe, Black Metal is not, nor has it ever really been, a monolith.

In fact if you look back at the early days of the scene, and in particular those responsible for laying its foundations, you’ll quickly become aware of the variety of personalities, approaches, and opinions which, collectively, contributed to the genesis of the nascent genre, while also planting the seeds for the variety of different styles and sub-genres to come.

Of course while the guiding principle of Black Metal may well be “do what thou will”, this doesn’t mean you can claim that anything is Black Metal. There are certain markers you still need to hit, certain rules you might say, that apply even here.

But within these (relatively loose) confines you’ll find a world of different approaches, different beliefs, different ideologies – from nihilism to humanism, asceticism to Satanism – all clashing and coalescing in a tumultuous display of pure passion and unflinching intensity.

Which is why, regardless of what you might think about their personalities or their politics, I have little hesitation in declaring The Unlawful Assembly to be one of the best Black Metal albums of the year. Continue reading »

THE LURKING FEAR: “OUT OF THE VOICELESS GRAVE”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 082017
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli prepared this review of the debut album by Sweden’s The Lurking Fear, released on August 11 by Century Media.)

Let’s revisit what Swedish death metal royalty group The Lurking Fear had to say when they announced their formation:

“We want our Death Metal ugly, twisted and possessed. We miss the urgency, intensity and ‘realness’ in a lot of the modern Death Metal, therefore it is natural for us to stray away from the streamlined sounds of today, but rather focus on bringing sheer, natural weirdness and horror back to the table…””

This band has a ton of prestige-level pedigree behind it. Besides being fronted by Tomas Lindberg, the king of the mid-range vomitus bark, the members have history in bands such as The Crown, Edge Of Sanity, Marduk, Cradle Of Filth, God Macabre — the list is fucking long. I also appreciate very much TLF’s mission statement because I agree that death metal nowadays is very much lacking the urgency, intensity, and realness it speaks of. I’ve reviewed, and others here have reviewed, plenty of exceptions to this rule of course — our site thrives on the deathly arts — but trust me that what we give praise to here is a baffling minority. Continue reading »

SEPTICFLESH: “CODEX OMEGA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 082017
 

 

(DGR wrote this extended review of the new album by the Greek band SepticFlesh, which was released on September 1 in North America by Prosthetic Records.)

It’s hard to believe that three years have already passed since yours truly was given the opportunity to review Greece’s symphonic death metal arbiters SepticFlesh and their album Titan. Since then, I’ve dedicated a fair share of words to the band, as their brand of orchestra mixed in with crushingly heavy death metal scratches just the right itch, but I always wind up musing about the same subject, which is how the band’s chosen genres combine in order to form the band as it is today.

It’s interesting to me because, pulled apart, the orchestral music genre and metal genre are two gigantic beasts in their own right, so the thought of combining them makes sense. It’s been done for years, of course, but the gentlemen in SepticFlesh have developed a unique mastery of it. Even in the hands of masters it can occasionally get a little unwieldy — because although the two combine well, in the world of SepticFlesh they are also treading a very thin line, and depending on what side of that line they land on is the version of SepticFlesh you’ll be getting at that point in time. Continue reading »

RASTER DENSITY: “MOTHER OV MANKIND”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 072017
 

 

(Here is Andy Synn’s review of the new album by the Finnish band Raster Density, which was released in May of this year.)

It’s been something of a banner year for the Technical side of the Death Metal spectrum so far, with new releases from both established luminaries (Decrepit Birth, Origin, Inanimate Existence) and up-and-coming acts (Replacire, Enfold Darkness) grabbing hype and headlines for their furious fretsmanship and shameless dedication to crushing complexity.

And while this torrent of technical tumult doesn’t show any signs of abating any time soon – with new albums from Archspire (which I should be reviewing next week), Fleshkiller (aka Extol 2.0), and The Faceless (which, yes, I have heard) all on the horizon – the sheer array of impressively OTT offerings clamouring for our attention means it’s inevitable that some bands will slip through the cracks.

Which, until now at least, had very much been the case with Finland’s Raster Density. Continue reading »

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