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OBSCURITIES – VOLUME I: WHAT DID WE (ALMOST) MISS LAST YEAR?

Feb 012024

(Daniel Barkasi, an NCS writer from long ago, has returned here with the first installment in a planned monthly column. In this inaugural edition he recommends 10 albums released last year that deserve a closer look.)

Welcome NCS readers to my first, brand new column of music that’s been bouncing around in my often deranged cranium. I feel vigorous.

What we’re going to be doing here is highlighting releases that have – at least, according to my spidey senses – slipped under the radar and haven’t gotten much attention or buzz. We’ll cover an undetermined number of these unsung heroes monthly. Most of these will be relatively current and put out within the last few months, but I also don’t want to be that rigid all the time, so we’ll do so liberally and make sure to add a release date for each entry.

For this inaugural piece, I’m going to highlight a few albums from 2023 that were unsung gems that deserve a little love, in no particular order. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, JANUARY 2024

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Jan 312024

(Gonzo returns with another end-of-month roundup of recommended releases, this time shining a light on albums and EPs released by six bands in January.)

January is such a bullshit month.

It’s cold as all fuck, everyone’s burned out – financially, emotionally, professionally – and shows/tours are few and far between. To pile it on, it’s also customarily a terrible month for new music. I wasn’t expecting to unearth much during my monthly search of metal’s grimy underbelly to include in this feature.

Lo and behold, I was dead fucking wrong. 2024 has already seen so many good releases in just over three weeks that I actually had to figure out what not to include here. (Coincidentally, three of the releases are from France, so make of that what you will.)

Regardless of geography, the sharp rise in early-year quality in 2024 is making me rethink old paradigms. Is the January curse on its way out? Am I reading too much into this? Is reality a lie? Are the machines reading my thoughts? Fuck. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HASTURIAN VIGIL — “UNVEILING THE BRAC’THAL”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Jan 312024

Possibly drawing upon a reference in the Ambrose Bierce short story “Haïta the Shepherd”, and/or stories in Robert Chambers‘ collection The Yellow Sign, H.P. Lovecraft added Hastur the Unspeakable to his pantheon of the Great Old Ones in his tale “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the half-brother of Cthulhu, and possibly the Magnum Innominandum, Hastur was a vast monstrosity of hideous power drawn from nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions. And that terrible thing seems to have been an inspiration for the Irish musical duo who chose for themselves the name Hasturian Vigil.

However, these two — multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Cxaathesz and drummer Shygthoth — were not content to set their music solely within Lovecraftian spheres. For their debut album Unveiling the Brac’thal they created a mythos of their own, Yith-Melle, inspired not only by Lovecraft but also by Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Yeats, all the better to “embrace their fascination for cosmic dread, deranged pantheons, and unspeakable curses”.

So says the materials accompanying the album which we have received from the publicist for Invictus Productions, which will release Unveiling the Brac’thal on February 2nd. We also have these prefatory words from Hasturian Vigil: Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: THE INFERNAL SEA / MOUNTAIN CALLER / YERSIN

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Jan 302024

(Andy Synn presents another terrific triptych of recent releases from the UK)

We’re only a month into the new year and the UK contingent has already put out several strong releases (including a couple that I’m holding on to for the next edition of this particular series).

All signs, therefore, indicate that this is going to be another healthy year for my home-grown scene, so let’s start as we mean to go on, shall we, with three more examples of “The Best of British”!

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: CAVE SERMON, SALQIU

Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 1 Response »

Jan 272024

After three weeks away from home working my day job I’m finally back. It was a stressful and often bizarre experience, made worse by the absence of my spouse and cats, and worse still because I had no time to listen to music, much less write about it.

That may sound weird. There’s always time to listen to music, isn’t there? In my case, it just didn’t fit what I was doing, too much of a distraction instead of a companion. Especially when it comes to metal, my brain’s not wired to combine even less raucous variants of music with trying to concentrate hard on something else. So I was forced to take a very long hiatus, the longest one in the 14+ years I’ve spent in devotion to NCS.

Andy and DGR stepped up and kept the site from going dark, and a few other writers continued sending things in too. But we’ve still got a backlog of un-published material to bring to the surface, mainly a big slug of interviews from Comrade Aleks. Other backlogs will never be fixed. Continue reading »

SPECTRAL VOICE: “SPARAGMOS”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Jan 252024

(We present the following review by Todd Manning of the sophomore album by Colorado-based Spectral Voice)

Spectral Voice is composed of three-quarters of the members of Blood Incantation and is equally as formidable a death metal unit.

But if Blood Incantation have their vision firmly fixed on the stars above, Spectral Voice lurks in the subterranean shadows.

If their 2017 debut Eroded Corridors of Unbeing didn’t place them at the pinnacle of the Death-Doom genre, their latest, Sparagmos, should do the trick.

Due out on February 9th courtesy of Dark Descent Records, it is certainly a shoo-in for year-end lists. Continue reading »

KNOLL – AS SPOKEN

Album Reviews No Responses »

Jan 242024

(Andy Synn reviews the new album from Knoll, out this Friday)

Riding the hype wave is a lot like surfing, when you think about it.

Sure, you look cool when you’re doing it, and as long as you stay ahead of it you’re all good, but the moment you fall behind the curve… that’s when it overtakes you and drags you down.

And while the prolific (and pretty damn impressive) output of unorthodox American noise-mongers Knoll has, so far at least, helped them ride that wave a long way from their humble beginnings – going from a practically unknown name in 2019 to one that’s been on almost everybody’s lips going into 2024 – it’s basically inevitable that, some day, maybe even some day soon, they’re going to crash out and go under.

But that day is not today.

COGNIZANCE – PHANTAZEIN

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Jan 222024

(DGR reviews the new album from Cognizance, out 26 January on Willowtip Records)

It wasn’t too long ago we were joking about how Cognizance were one of the better bands when it comes to the “riff-avalanche” style of album – the type of disc that generally picks one particular tempo and sticks to it, leaving the band room to just rattle off part-after-part-after-part atop the listener until, by the end of it, they’ve basically been buried underneath a pile of stuff.

It’s a difficult balance to strike because you can easily get lost in your own creativity and create big, overwhelming works that, by their very nature, are hard to maintain any interest in since everything is so ephemeral and fleeting.

And while Cognizance have remained a sleek and ultra-precise machine for over a decade since the release of their first full length – after having subsisted on a series of singles and EPs – they’ve also slowly hammered and forged their sound into something as fiercely creative and memorably groove-ridden as it is terrifyingly technically-proficient.

Their previous album, Upheaval, picked up where Malignant Dominion left off, and I’ll give you three guesses as to where Phantazein picks up as a starting point a little under two and a half years later.

INFANT ISLAND – OBSIDIAN WREATH

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Jan 192024

(Andy Synn takes a trip to Infant Island on their new album, Obsidian Wreath)

What’s in a name, they say?

Well, when it comes to genre-names the answer can be… quite a lot, as it happens.

Case in point, depending on what tags I apply to Obsidian Wreath – call it “Screamo”, call it “Blackgaze”, call it “Post-Metal” – your reactions, and your expectations, might be wildly different.

The truth, of course, is that it’s actually a little bit of all these things, equally indebted to the likes of Pg. 99 and Envy as it is latter-day Panopticon and early Deafheaven, with the end result being… well, you’ll just have to read on to find out, won’t you?

VITRIOL – SUFFER & BECOME

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Jan 182024

(DGR sets out to discover what Vitriol have become on their second album, out next week)

It’s been four years and change since the release of Vitriol‘s stunning full length To Bathe From The Throat Of Cowardice and, save for an EP of re-done/re-approached earlier material from an embryonic form of the band released during the plague years, we haven’t really heard much from them since.

And while there have been other groups in the meantime that have attempted (and sometimes succeeded) to play at the same relentless firestorm level, what makes Vitriol in particular work is the perceived integrity and passion in their music.

You get a sense listening to them that they mean every word that they say and will only stop when whichever vocalist is on the mic runs out of a) space for words or b) breath to utter said words.

But constantly maintaining that level of intensity will, inevitably, burn anybody out… which brings us firmly back around to Vitriol‘s second full length release, because it’s not humanly feasible for a group to exist at that level of intensity all over again… is it?

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