(Our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri prepared the following review and recommendation of the latest album by Tennessee-based black metal band Saidan, which was released about a week ago.)
Realizing that my writeups are overlong in this age of mass-consumption and shortening attention spans, I attempted writing with a number in mind. I’m a simple soul, so I went for 666 words on an album worthy of a master’s thesis.
The dramatically unconventional Italian band Laetitia in Holocaust haven’t quite reached the quarter-century mark of their existence, but they’re not too far away. In that time they’ve created a discography that is a cavalcade of aggressive surprises, and their latest addition is a forthcoming fifth album (not counting an early album-length demo). Entitled Fanciulli D’Occidente, it will be released by the Dusktone label on May 31st, and we’re premiering it in full today.
The album’s name translates to “Children of the West”, and we’re told that conceptually it’s intended as a memoriam to ancestors of European peoples and a wish that today’s children may prove themselves worthy of blood shed by those long-gone predecessors. It would seem to connect to the band’s own name, which stands for “happiness in sacrifice”. Continue reading »
(On May 31st Sound Pollution/Black Lodge Records will release the closing album in a trilogy about death by the Swedish band Wormwood, and today we provide Didrik Mešiček‘s review of the new record.)
There are not a lot of bands who haven’t made any bad records but I’d say Wormwood is one of them. The Swedes are celebrating their 10th anniversary this year and releasing their newest album, The Star, on May 31st, 2024, on Black Lodge Records. Their previous release, Arkivet, delved a bit into post-metal and came with a rather melancholic, misanthropic view, suggesting mankind deserves death for its role in the current events on the planet, but they’ve been known to involve folkier and more melodic elements in their tracks before that as well, so now it’s time to see what the new release offers. Continue reading »
(Here’s Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by the U.S. metallic hardcore band Candy in advance of its June 7th release by Relapse Records.)
It’s cool for a metallic hardcore band like Knocked Loose to be able to ride the hype machine on their way to becoming the next big thing, but Candy’s new album kicks you in the face harder with the kind of experimentation I expected to find on You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To. This should not be a surprise as Candy’s 2022 album Heaven is Here was one of my favorite heavy albums of that year. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn collides with the new album from Cobra the Impaler, out Friday on Listenable Records)
Greetings all!
Today I’m writing to you from the airport lounge at the Baltimore/Washington International airport, having just spent the last few days enjoying the sights and sounds (well, mostly the sounds) of another fantastic edition of Maryland Deathfest.
This has nothing to do with the subject of today’s review, however, it just felt like something worth mentioning as I/we get back into the regular swing of things here at NCS this week.
Anyway… last time we checked in with Belgian Prog-Metal types Cobra the Impaler I was lavishing praise upon their debut album, Colossal Gods, and describing it as a strikingly melodic, multifaceted mix of Mastodon, Alice in Chains, and Byzantine.
But, as DGR recently pointed out to me – and which their upcoming new album, Karma Collision, has only reinforced – it turns out I was ever so slightly off-base with one of those comparisons.
(Our writer DGR finally made his way to the debut album by the San Fernando Valley melodic death metal band Upon Stone, which was released in January by Century Media Records, and was moved to write about it at length in the following review.)
Upon Stone were a heck of an anomaly when they first appeared in the early part of 2024. Seemingly emerging out of the aether with a full-length album and a professed love for melodeath, it was eyebrow-raising to see the group gaining enough steam to grab headlines in the early part of the year, right about the time everyone is still on their post-end-of-year list collection comedown.
Admittedly, we’re late to the bus on this one. Upon Stone‘s first full-length Dead Mother Moon has been on the back-burner since its mid-January release, mostly waiting for a gap in time when we could truly explore the album’s deepest reaches but also to take a deep glance at why the band might’ve garnered such interest with its melodeath necromancy in the year 2024: a time in which even the old-guard are glancing over the mid to late ’90s era efforts of a lot of those bands in favor of material more in line with music from the mid-aughts. Continue reading »
(Hot on the heels of their blistering debut album, Festering Grotesqueries, Portland’s Dripping Decay spewed forth a new EP in January 2024 via Satanik Royalty Records, and DGR finally caught up with it, provoking the following review.)
Always being behind the eight ball when it comes to playing catch-up with music releases has proven to be the best sort of motivator in a twisted perversion of the idea.
When you have a deadline upcoming there’s always a sense that you can relax a little, and we have been lucky enough to receive our fair share of early promo works that have allowed us time to really soak in a release and absorb as much as it can offer. But the ones where we miss the bus or discover later? Now it feels like we owe them, which is strange given that many of these are ones we’ve found on our own time or became part of our own private collections to dive into.
This is the case with Oregon’s Dripping Decay and their late-January EP Ripping Remains (we did receive a timely promo, btw). Continue reading »
(Andy Synn provides a preview, and a pre-review, of the new album from Aseitas, out May 30)
Let’s get one thing straight – I happen to think that Aseitas‘s second album, False Peace is… well, I’m not going to use the word “masterpiece”, because that word has been so over-used and bastardised it’s basically become worthless and/or meaningless these days (though I am still a fan of, very occasionally, using it in its original meaning)… but it’s definitely what I would call an unsung and underrated underground gem.
With a sound that runs the gamut from Artifical Brain to Zao (taking in influences from everyone from Gorguts to Godflesh, Car Bomb to Cattle Decapitation to Krallice along the way) it’s the sort of album which doesn’t fit neatly into any one box – being part Death, part ‘core, part Sludge, part Tech, and more besides – and established Aseitas as a band with the potential to find fans all over the musical map.
And now, after lying dormant for four long years, they’ve emerged from hibernation with a brand new album (set for release next week via Total Dissonance Worship), and a new mutation of their sound – but is their latest evolution full of hybrid vigour, or a genetic dead-end?
(Daniel Barkasi provided us the following extensive report on the Tampa stop of the ongoing Chaos & Carnage Tour. All photos by: Brittany Barkasi @Turn off the Thunder)
The tour package dubbed Chaos & Carnage admittedly hasn’t always been a can’t miss for this scribe. Early adoptions didn’t completely appeal to my tastes, though there always have been a band or two that were very much in my wheelhouse. Variety is the spice of life, after all. Some have been outright dismissive of this tour package due to deathcore being a “dirty word,” but I’d argue that it’s way more logical to take each act on their own merits and go from there versus casting a wide net of negativity due to a label. You do you, though!
This year’s edition boasts the most varied and intriguing lineup to date. The mighty Cattle Decapitation are an all-timer, and were announced to be co-headlining with Carnifex. Support comes from Humanity’s Last Breath, Rivers of Nihil, The Zenith Passage, Vitriol, and Face Yourself. That’s a lot of bands that will get the blood pumping, and more importantly for yours truly, a diverse smattering of sound variances which could offer something for even the most discerning. Continue reading »
(Here, DGR devotes about 1400 words to extolling the virtues of Carrion Vael‘s newest album, which is out now on Unique Leader Records.)
There was a period maybe five or six years ago where a band like Carrion Vael would’ve found a good handful of compatriots within their current label home of Unique Leader Records. Their brand of high-speed melodeath, light implementing of symphonics to help break up the constantly whirring lead guitar, and tech-death hybridization has gone under a few names throughout the years – even cheekily referred to around here once as ‘black dahlia murder-core’ – but there was one pretty distinct carrier of that strain of metal, and at the time many of those groups would’ve been ensconced within the loving brutal bosom of Unique Leader.
However, things changed and something interesting happened within real time as the label’s priorities seemed to shift, favoring the low-and-slow approach of many up-and-coming deathcore groups, or leaning heavily into the brutal deathcore monstrosities that were being born out of former brutal death and gore-focused bands.
Nowadays the label is a tri-headed monstrosity of its own and many of the groups who were playing the high-speed, highly-technical style found a home in labels like The Artisan Era – whose own bands like Inferi found themselves leading the charge in recruitment – and Willowtip seems plenty happy to cast their net in those waters as well. Continue reading »