Nov 172023
 

(DGR finally caught up with reviewing the new album by Stortregn, and one reason you can guess at is that it’s probably going to appear again on his NCS year-end list. That’s our bet at least.)

You probably noticed this before I did, but a glance at the calendar in this clusterfuck of a year showed that it had suddenly because November. Traditionally – and there are a few traditions that even us heretics in this corner of the interweb observe – November is something of a ‘panic month’, wherein not only do you have your new releases, but you also have people – like our own Austin Weber recently – who are desperately trying to play catch-up with albums that have come out throughout the year.

This writer does the same of course and with similar purpose, because there are albums that for one reason or another didn’t get covered or ones that we’ve discovered while burying our nose in the tree roots and sniffing around the dirt, or the more personal one: to introduce people to an album now so that when it starts popping up within people’s year-end collections they won’t suddenly be taken aback by a release that has had fuck-all coverage on a site now praising it as one of the best of the year.

It’s a compulsion to complete a narrative arc, and I have that sense that Stortregn‘s Finitude may actually dark-horse its way into a few people’s year-end collectives. A bigger part of that story may be how it will likely find a place somewhere in the year-end celebration we throw around here, because Finitude is a very fine distillation of the tech-death genre as a whole, and the one that these Swiss madmen have created here is one that will surprise people – even when you can recognize many of its component parts. Continue reading »

Nov 162023
 

“Foetal Juice! Foetal Juice! Foetal Juice!”

OK, so some of you were born too late to get that warped reference to a certain excellent 1988 movie. The choice of name isn’t the only thing humorously warped about this UK death metal band, who make sure you know where they’re from in the spelling. Their outrageously vulgar song-naming traditions are even more over the top.

In fact, it’s likely that their putrid plays-on-words will be one of the first things that come to mind for anyone who’s encountered their previous releases. And make no mistake, they haven’t cleaned up their act on their new album Grotesque, whose title rigorously adheres to principles of truth in advertising.

But anyone who’s encountered their previous releases, and especially 2020’s Gluttony album, also know that Foetal Juice have a helluva lot more going on in their music than gruesome and raunchy humor. They could be reciting treatises on generally accepted accounting principles and the songs would still blast your head open like a cantaloupe on the receiving end of a shotgun.

And as you’re about to find out, there’ still more going on in Grotesque than we’ve already hinted at. Yes, it’s gross and traumatizing, and rabidly vicious, but it’s also galvanizing in the way of a big precision-made turbine. Continue reading »

Nov 162023
 

Released in the summer of 2021, Brahmastra was the debut album of Altars of the Moon. It first turned some heads because of the identities of the people who made it: Nathan Verschoor (Uada), Jeff Wilson (Chrome Waves, Deeper Graves, ex-Nachmystium), and Heath Rave (Lotus Thrones, ex-Wolvhammer). It probably turned heads again when it became evident that the music was several big steps away from what might have been expected given the nature of the participants’ main musical endeavors.

Like other collaborations, this one was born in lockdown times, one of covid’s precious few silver linings. As a plague child, some might have expected it would quickly perish, a one-and-done union of talents. But time doesn’t heal all wounds, nor does it always still restless minds or silence voices. As it turns out, Altars of the Moon had something more to say.

And so now we’re on the verge of Disorder Recordings releasing a second Altars of the Moon album, this one named The Colossus and The Widow. The three collaborators came together again by long distance — Rave on vocals, Verschoor on guitars and synths, and Wilson on bass, guitar, and synth — but this time they were joined by another notable name, Alan Cassidy (The Black Dahila Murder), on drums. In addition, the new record features guest appearances on saxophone by Bruce Lamont (Yakuza) and on trumpet by Mac Gollehon (Duran Duran, David Bowie).

We’re now putting the results before you in full, preceded by our own thoughts as usual but also by these from Heath Rave: Continue reading »

Nov 162023
 

(Andy Synn offers his humble thoughts on the first new Sadus album in seventeen years)

Some bands, as I’m sure you’re aware, are so seminal that fragments of their musical DNA still litter the genetic code of pretty much all their descendants, no matter how far removed.

For example, no matter how “extreme” or “avant-garde” or “genre non-conforming” you might be, there’s always going to be some Black Sabbath or Judas Priest or Motorhead in your music, in the same way that we all, deep-down, still have bits and pieces of our earliest ancestors swimming around in our primordial protoplasm.

But it’s not just the biggest and most notable (or notorious) names who leave their mark upon us. And chances are that if you’ve ever been a fan of the proggier side of Thrash or the more technical end of Death Metal then you’ve probably absorbed some Sadus into your system, even if you didn’t know it at the time.

And now, seventeen(!) years since we last heard from them – a time in which a whole generation of Metal fans may well have grown up having never even heard of them – Sadus have returned to retake their place in a Metal scene whose seeds they undoubtedly played at least some small part in sowing.

Continue reading »

Nov 152023
 

(What we have for you here is DGR‘s take on a new EP by the German band Sucking Leech, released in mid-October of this year and still ruining everything in its path.)

There’s a certain amount of filth to be expected from grind as a genre. For as much as we love the ultra-precise, teeth-shredding, and super-fast world wherein songs appear as musical flashpoints before exploding and then disappearing just as quickly, there is always a somewhat grosser side to that world. One wherein the slop of the music is part of the appeal and the plug-and-play aspect is taken quite literally, with recordings sounding like the band legitimately just plugged in their gear, only turned on the volume nob, and then proceeded to go to town for twelve or thirteen minutes bathed entirely in distortion and reverb.

It’s noisy and abrasive but that is also the point; you’re coming to it because the idea of the drums sounding like they’re falling out the back of a moving truck is enjoyable. The bands that comprise that world of grind aren’t just flinging their instruments around, and obviously the music can remain fairly conventional to the grind world, but it’s the barely contained and heavily constrained chaos that keeps things interesting.

It’s why Sucking Leech‘s Errordynamic EP in mid-October caught our eyes. Sounding like a cross-bred catastrophe of Napalm Death, Rotten Sound, and Pig Destroyer mid-fistfight, Sucking Leech don’t stray tremendously far from that chaotic and maddening world of grind, but for a four-piece manage to sound monstrous all the same. Continue reading »

Nov 142023
 

(Our old friend Austin Weber again returns to NCS, and this time he’s introducing our premiere of a new album by the technical/brutal death metal band Neurectomy.)

In the immortal words of Twin Peaks: “That gum you like is going to come back in style.

Outside of the overwhelming and well-warranted love Archspire has garnered in the scene, technical brutal death metal that both leans into and focuses on extreme shredding, chaotic tempo shifts, and is just all-in on not giving a damn about being “listenable” has largely gone out of style.

And again, I know/love Archspire, and technically, Archspire is still sort of doing this, as is Origin, but overall this type of sound is sort of a now-lost sub-genre within technical brutal death metal. For a while there, it was a very active style thanks to Viraemia, Beneath The Massacre, Anomalous, Brain Drill, and countless others. Continue reading »

Nov 142023
 

Four years after their debut album Redistribution Of Flesh, Portland’s ingeniously named Rank and Vile will detonate a new album named Worship on November 17th, with the pin pulled by Modern Grievance Records.

It really is an explosive weapon, this album, one that discharges a blast front of violent deathgrind but also inflicts bunker-busting grooves and is equally well-calculated to stir up electrified pits of sweat-soaked humanity in the pit.

The album is also well-timed, because its high-octane fuel is politically charged rage and its method is punishment. It is, first and foremost, a musical catharsis, a weaponized reaction that (in words from the label’s PR materials) “takes shots at flabby politicians, hypocritical religious fanatics, and fence-sitting sycophants”. Theocrats, autocrats, and plutocrats may not get the justice they deserve in the outer world, but they sure as hell get it in the inner world of this record. Continue reading »

Nov 142023
 

(Andy Synn offers his two cents on the new album from Texan troubadours Hinayana)

Common consensus would have it that 2023 has been a great year for Death Metal.

And while my thoughts on that assertion are somewhat… complicated… I will say this – if you’re talking about the gloomier, doomier, and more moodily melodic side of Death Metal then you’re definitely right, as the last twelve months has seen a number of illustrious releases from the likes of Aetherian, Fires In The Distance, Foretoken, and more (with a few more to come) which have, when taken together, led to a low-key resurgence of the more epic and euphonic side of the spectrum.

And now we have the new album from Hinayana to add to that list.

Continue reading »

Nov 132023
 

(This is DGR‘s review of the latest record by the Argentinian melodic death metal band Plaguestorm, out now on the Noble Demon label.)

Heavy metal fantasy draft is always fun and the proliferation of projects with the ability to do so has increased tremendously in recent years. No doubt a combination of musicians using the internet to find each other and the more likely possibility of constantly being trapped inside, you’re now seeing a ton of projects wherein musicians from all over the world are combined into one thing via session work and constant guest appearances.

We have musicians now who’re quickly approaching a point in history where they may have more guest/session appearances and releases to their name than they’ve got material with the band they’re most famous for being in. This has also been a pretty big movement within melodeath circles as we’re now multiple generations removed from the classics and old guard and well into an era of bands that were inspired by the keyboard/groove metal happy early-aughts of the genre that were built around big riffs/big choruses with just enough of ye-olde Gotenburg two-step to keep things ‘dangerous’. Continue reading »

Nov 122023
 


Caio Lemos

Welcome to another Sunday edition of this column dedicated to black arts. It’s not as extensive as I’d hoped this time, because after finishing yesterday’s very large “Seen and Heard” round-up of new songs and videos I had to do some paying work, took a two-hour nap (I did wake up at 4 a.m. yesterday), and then drank way too much wine last night with my spouse.

Also the Seahawks are playing right after lunch today and I want to watch, even though I have serious doubts whether they’ll win. Also I have to figure out how to change the battery in the key fob for my car, and the dishes aren’t going to wash themselves.

See, I do have a very exciting life outside of NCS. Continue reading »