Reviews Archives - Page 70 of 601

SURRENDER TO DEATH: A HISTORY OF THE ATLANTA METAL UNDERGROUND VOL. 1

Aug 232024

(In the following article our contributor Wil Cifer, who spent a lot of years in Atlanta, comments on a compilation set for release on September 6th by Boris Records and Deanwell Global Music which serves as a retrospective of the Atlanta metal underground from 1982 to 1999. It includes remastered original recordings by more than 20 bands from the area.)

In the ’80s Norway was not the bustling mecca for metal the media tries to portray it as today, so even Atlanta, Ga was impressive to me at 12 years old when I began visiting my grandparents in the States for a few weeks in the summers at their Stateside home just outside the city limits of Atlanta. My first exposure to what the music scene in America was like in the flesh is captured in Surrender To Death: A History of the Atlanta Metal Underground Vol. 1, a compilation by Boris Records and Deanwell Global Music. For me, it’s a fun indulgence of nostalgia for those summers spent venturing into the city for all-ages shows. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ATAVISTIA / HOLY BLADE / SOLNEGRE / TIDES OF ACCRETION

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Aug 222024

(Andy Synn recommends a quartet of short but sweet recent releases to check out)

We’ve featured a bunch of pretty big and/or up-and-coming bands this week – Spectral Wound, Fleshgod Apocalypse, Leprous – so maybe it’s time to shift focus back on some lesser-known names?

And since I also haven’t covered anywhere near enough EPs so far this year I was thinking… why not kill two metaphorical birds with one proverbial stone and write about a bunch of short-form releases that, perhaps, haven’t gotten enough attention?

LEPROUS – MELODIES OF ATONEMENT

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Aug 212024

(Andy Synn continues his on/off love affair with Leprous, whose new album comes out 30 August)

Being “heavy” is not the same as being “good”. We all know that, right?

But I must admit, as someone who first fell in love with Leprous back when they were still serving as Ihsahn‘s backing band, and who still believes that Bilateral is one of the best and most unique albums of the new millennium, I was certainly excited by the announcement that Melodies of Atonement was going to showcase a “heavier” side of the group than what we’d seen/heard in recent years.

Don’t get me wrong, I’ve continued to be a fan (to a greater or lesser extent) of the band’s output – Coal and Malina are also still firm favourites, and there’s some great tracks on The Congregation, Pitfalls (including the outstanding “The Sky Is Red”), and Aphelion (whose cinematic highs more than make up for the record’s occasional lows) – but the idea that they might be bringing back some of the edginess and punchiness of their earlier work(s) certainly had me intrigued.

Of course, as any sensible person might have predicted, MoA isn’t just Bilateral, Part 2 – there’s some moments here that probably deserve that comparison, but overall the two albums really share only the most basic musical markers, enough to tell that they’re related but probably not enough to make them genetically compatible – as the Leprous of today is quite literally not the same band they used to be.

Even so, however, I can tell you now that the group weren’t lying when they said that this would be a “heavier” album… even if the story is a little more complicated than that.

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE: “OPERA”

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Aug 202024

(DGR wrote the following review of the new album by Italy’s Fleshgod Apocalypse, which will be released this Friday, August 23rd, by Nuclear Blast Records.)

Given that Fleshgod Apocalypse have up to this point had a seventeen-year career and now six albums to their name, it’s surprising that the group have never had a straightforward self-titled release.

Often used as either the initial opening statement of a group’s career – the proverbial flag in the ground of “this is who we are as a band” – or, having become more frequent, a later-in-the-career platform for either reinvention or just outright reminder that they in fact still exist and are going strong, the self-titled does have a surprising amount of cultural cachet to it.

If you were to view the self-titled as the platform for reinvention, often the resurrection of a group or the crystalizing of a particular lineup, now would be such a time for it in Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s career, with only two of the members from the early days of their career still standing and three others now full-time members of the lineup, with a few of them having held steady in a live-lineup status since the release prior to 2019’s Veleno, and one having been such an integral part of the band’s sound and stage show that it was surprising they hadn’t been upgraded sooner. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HATCHEND — “SUMMER OF ’69”

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Aug 192024

(written by Islander)

The name of Hatchend‘s debut album is Summer of ’69. As you can see, the cover art is a collage of Charlie Manson’s face covered with what appears to be Marilyn Monroe’s hair, or maybe it’s Sharon Tate’s. It was in the summer of ’69 when Manson’s cult murdered at least nine people, including Tate.

Hatchend‘s drummer Rikard Wermén asks, “Where were you in the Summer of ‘69? You got any proof of that?” I know where I was. I was alive then in Texas, and sentient enough to remember learning about the Manson cult’s murders as they came to light, along with a lot of other things happening that summer, including the Apollo 11 moon landing, Woodstock, and the release of Bowie’s Space Oddity. Vanity prevents me from showing the proof, because it would reveal how old I was then and thus how absurdly old I am now.

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, the members of Hatchend weren’t alive in the summer of ’69, though they’re definitely not young kids. Also interesting, I haven’t found anything which explains why they chose that title for their album. Now that I’ve written this, maybe it will be revealed.

But regardless of the title’s inspiration, the music on Summer of ’69 kicks a big boatload of ass, as wild in its own way as the wildness of the turbulent times some of us lived through in that summer of 55 years ago. Continue reading »

SPECTRAL WOUND – SONGS OF BLOOD AND MIRE

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Aug 192024

(Andy Synn gets deep in his cups with the new album from Spectral Wound, out Friday)

Blame it on whatever you want – the insidious influence of social media, the growing desperation of Youtube “critics” and their need to monetise their “hot takes”, or simply the seemingly endless (and futile) competition for attention in an overloaded digital world – but it definitely seems like a lot of the nuance has been bled out of our ability to engage with, and analyse, music.

The fact is that if you were to listen solely to the mass-media hype machine you might start to think that new albums come in only two forms, either “best album ever” or “total fucking garbage”, to the point where I’ve seen some of the more excessively online fans of certain bands absolutely losing their shit if a writer decides to give one of their favourites anything less than a perfect score.

There’s also an expectation – one which I find entirely unfair and thoroughly counterproductive – that a band’s new album must be “better” (which is an extremely loaded word when it comes to art in the first place) than their previous one, which ends up creating an impossible set of expectations as well as discouraging risk-taking and/or experimentation.

And the reason I’m saying all of this (which some of you may already have worked out) is because I don’t think that Songs of Blood and Mire is better than 2021’s fantastic A Diabolic Thirst… but to say it is anything less than its equal, now that would be a crime.

SHADES OF BLACK: HÄXENZIJRKELL, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, TOUR D’IVOIRE, HYVER, HORNS & HOOVES

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Aug 182024

Häxenzijrkell – photo by Sophia W

(written by Islander)

Two days ago I woke up with a burst blood vessel in one eye. The entire space in the sclera between the iris and the inner corner of the eye had turned a deep and solid red, as if some devil-worshiping artist had figured out how to photoshop the real me.

It doesn’t hurt, nor has it affected my vision, but it looks hideous. The Mayo Clinic’s website says this condition (a “subconjunctival hemorrhage”) will heal itself in a couple of weeks, as the conjunctiva slowly absorbs the blood over time. The same site lists potential causes, but none of them seem to fit my situation, unless I rubbed that eye really hard in my sleep.

For the sake of symmetry, I’ve wondered if there is a non-painful way to burst a blood vessel in the other eye. I thought if I played today’s selections of black metal extra-loud, that might do the trick. So far, no luck; a blown-out eardrum is more likely, but blood draining from the ear canal would also create a kind of symmetry, yes? Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE, PART I: BETWEEN REALMS, LAMENTARI, TRAIL OF TEARS, AS THE SUN FALLS

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Aug 162024

(DGR is attempting to clear out a backlog of reviews he has been planning for some time, beginning today with a collection of writings for four bands who released records in May of this year.)

You could probably set your watch by this – right down to the opening sentence even – but it seems once again that the back half of the year has crept up faster than one might expect, which means it is now time for the honoured tradition known as ‘clearing the slate’.

These are quicker, more stream of consciousness reviews than I generally prefer to do, and although the brevity is certainly appreciated, it does still kind of bother me personally that I’m not quite diving as deep into an album as I would generally like to.

This may come as shocking but even though I’ve had extended periods of radio silence on the site throughout the years, that doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily stopped listening to music. Instead, the musical net behind the good ship DGR remains constantly deployed, and full, even after I’ve removed and returned any protected species to the their homes in the wild.

What you see here are albums that’ve slowly built up in the collection over the year, some recent and others very clearly and assuredly not so recent. Some of these are even releases that I intended to write about before fucking off for the entirety of May, when I jammed out something like eleven or twelve reviews so the site wouldn’t go completely dark while we were all out in the wild that is both Terror Fest and Deathfest.

Either way, if I don’t at least attempt to kick this boulder downhill, the act of leaving so many releases I’ve been listening to without at least something to help get them to a wider audience is going to bother me until December… when I’ll be doing this again during year-end list season. Continue reading »

TOLMINATOR REPORT: DAY 4

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Aug 152024

(Today we share with you Didrik Mešiček‘s report on the fourth and final day of the star-studded Tolminator festival in his home country of Slovenia, which ran this year in late July. It’s again accompanied by excellent photos, including another large Flickr gallery at the end, made by Katja Torkar/Bloodbat Photography. For Didrik‘s reports on the festival’s first three days, go here, here, and here.)

The final day began with a bit more fever which also meant a bit more cocaine (still a joke, calm down) and that meant I couldn’t wait for the entire thing to be done. Combined with the lineup being mostly thrash this, wasn’t my favourite day, yet Saturday started with a band that seemed like it could be interesting – the Italian Astral Paralysis.

Metal Archives lists the band as progressive death metal and while their actual playing wasn’t bad there weren’t too many hints of anything progressive. Given that this was the only band on the lineup that went anywhere near proggy vibes, that was disappointing and definitely something I’ve been missing. The band’s biggest problem is, however, the vocalist who was stiff on stage and looked quite terrified. His vocal skill is good, he just needs to relax and play a lot of shows and that should be a lot easier and result in this band going places. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: KUROKUMA / SUNFALL / TENDRILS

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Aug 152024

(Andy Synn provides three more recommendations for some home-grown British brutality)

I must apologise for my relative lack of writing/posting over the last couple of weeks – I’ve been pretty busy with a combination of personal, professional, and musical stuff (we’ve got a festival show coming up, for one thing, which will be our first time playing as a three-piece, and then spent all Tuesday this week hanging out at a local brewery and helping out with the creation of a signature beer for the band) which means I haven’t had as much time, or energy, to devote to NCS as usual.

But while I’ve not been able to write very much that hasn’t stopped me from listening… and today’s triptych of album reviews is a product of all that time spent sifting through all the musical chaff to pick out the real diamonds in the rough.

Which may be a mixed metaphor, but I’m running with it all the same.

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