SHADES OF BLACK: KVAEN, VIEDŹMINY PAKUTY, LIMBES, MRAKOMOR, NEBETEMN, UPON THE ALTAR

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 092024
 

After an extended period of relative quiet my fucking day job has reared its ugly head and is howling at me again. So, this column is my way of howling back, albeit much more briefly than I would like because that beast still has one of my ankles shackled, though that’s better than both ankles and both wrists.

KVAEN (Sweden)

Last week Kvaen released the second song and video to pave the way toward their third album The Formless Fires. I believe my compatriot Sir Andrew Synn (the knighting was not well-publicized because he declined to bend a knee) is likely to review the album, so I’ll just focus on this newest song, “The Ancient Gods“. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: HULL OF LIGHT, ZEIT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 312024
 


Hull of Light

As you may know, the core cadre of NCS slaves (including me) spent chunks of May attending metal festivals in Seattle and Baltimore. In my case, this disrupted my usual efforts to pull together roundups of recommended new music. The backlog of missed opportunities is now gargantuan, leaving me confused about how in the world to pick things for this Saturday’s SEEN AND HEARD column.

Somehow between now and then I’ll figure out what to do, but I decided to get a modest head-start today by writing about two fairly recent EPs. I had thought I might get this done before becoming immersed in festival revels, but alas, I didn’t. Rather than just abandon the idea, however, I’m returning to it now. Continue reading »

DRIPPING DECAY: “RIPPING REMAINS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 242024
 

(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 »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THE TROOPS OF DOOM, SOL DE SANGRE, WEREWOLVES, COLDCELL, NIHILO, LACABRA, KYBALION, BALWEZO WESTIJIZ, KŌYA, WHARFLURCH, AMORPHIS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
May 182024
 


Troops of Doom – photo by Cissa Flores

I wasn’t able to serve up a Saturday roundup last weekend due to working on Seattle’s Northwest Terror Fest, and it’s highly unlikely I’ll get one done next Saturday since I’ll be at Maryland Deathfest (if you’re there and spot someone who looks like a heavily tatted escapee from a nursing home, come say hi). So that makes this one kind of important, if only for me.

There’s gobs of new music to choose from, many more gobs than usual since I missed a week. And by the way, I’m using “gob” here as a word meaning “a large amount” and not its other meaning, i.e., “a lump or clot of a slimy or viscous substance”, though I have included a song off an album named Shittier/Slimier.

Ready, set, go! Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TLÖN — “THROUGH NEBULOUS SCARS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 172024
 

In May 1940 the great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges, widely credited as a founder of “magical realism” in literature, published a story named “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius“. In that mind-bending tale Borges was himself a protagonist. The plot concerns events going back as far as the early 17th century and culminates in a postscript, set in 1947. As summarized in The Font of All Human Knowledge:

“Told in a first-person narrative, the story focuses on the author’s discovery of the mysterious and possibly fictional country of Uqbar and its legend of Tlön, a mythical world whose inhabitants believe a form of subjective idealism, denying the reality of objects and nouns, as well as Orbis Tertius, the secret organization that created both fictional locations”.

That story inspired both the name of the new Scottish band Tlön and the lyrical themes of their debut EP Through Nebulous Scars — an astonishing mind-bender of its own that we’re helping spring upon an unsuspecting world today. Continue reading »

WASTEWALKER: “TRAPPED BETWEEN REALMS OF SUFFERING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 172024
 

(In April of this year Sacramento-based Wastewalker released a new EP dedicated to their late guitarist Nate Graham, and long-time Wastewalker follower DGR delves into it in the following review.)

Sacramento’s tech-death group Wastewalker have been put through the wringer lately. The band, finally somewhat ascendant after the release of a solid sophomore album in Vengeance Of The Lowborn, suffered from the tragic passing of guitarist Nate Graham in mid-2023. While the band were never short on talent, the group were put in a hard place on multiple fronts, yet in that time somehow managed to soldier on. The band returned in early April of 2024 with a three-song EP entitled Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering – their first as a four-piece act.

Wastewalker have been a slow burn, launching out of the gate with Funeral Winds back in 2016 and then growing into their sound from there. Funeral Winds had an air of expulsion to it, like the band had to get a ton out of their system and exorcise a cadre of demons before they could truly evolve into what is Wastewalker. Funeral Winds felt like it was moving in twenty different directions all at once, overstuffed with ideas – and sometimes even lyrically – and interesting on the front that there was a lot of promise there; Wastewalker just had to hone in on what was really working within those bounds. Continue reading »

RIVERS OF NIHIL: “CRIMINALS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 152024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by Pennsylvania-based Rivers of Nihil, which is out now on Metal Blade Records.)

Strangely enough, writing about Rivers Of Nihil‘s newest EP Criminals feels like a little bit of a ‘gimme’. The three songs on Criminals – none of which is a cover of the titular Katatonia song – were all ostensibly recorded during the same experimental session for the band, one which saw the newly restructured lineup of the group getting together to see just what they could do and where they might be headed post-The Work.

They were then slowly drip-fed to listeners over the course of a little under a year, so listeners will have an immediate familiarity with prog-rock minded “The Sub-Orbital Blues” and the slightly more recent stomper in “Hellbirds”, which means the big draw for most people will be the unveiling of “Criminals” as a song, as well as the ability to take in all three in one go, providing an intriguing glimpse at Rivers Of Nihil‘s current headspace and lyrical inspirations, as well as peek through a smudged lense of where their future paths may take them. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: AGRICULTURE / ARTIFICIAL LANGUAGE / BA’AL / MALEVICH / REJECTER / VOGEL

 Exceptions to the Rule, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 142024
 

(In this column Andy Synn focuses on short-form releases that emerged in recent months.)

It seems like every year I make a promise – to myself, if no-one else – to stay more on top of covering all the various EPs and short-form releases that come out… and every year I fail miserably.

Well, here’s my chance to make up for that by digging back into the last six months and selecting a handful of heavy/harsh/heartfelt releases for you all to check out.

Continue reading »

HOLY GRINDER: “10 DESECRATIONS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 092024
 

(We present Christopher Luedtke‘s review of a new release from the Canadian noise grinders Holy Grinder, which is set for release tomorrow.)

The fourth full-length from Toronto, Ontario’s Holy Grinder is an ugly, mangled, heavy, spattering of noise, grind, sludge, and chaos packed into thirteen minutes. Though one lucky person is gonna get all that on cassette in a vat of piss. See their Instagram for further details, but that’s beside the point for the rest of us.

Holy Grinder has been at it for the better part of eight years and has a fair few releases under their belts since their 2016 inception. They have done splits with the likes of Christian Lovers, Agathocles, Sete Star Sept, Fetus Deletus, and more in addition to singles. Now almost four years to the day after Divine Extinction, the band is unleashing their latest full-length, 10 Desecrations. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): JUST ONE FIX — “SUBMIT OR DEATH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 062024
 

The phraseology of “diving into” a record is intended to capture the idea of an auditory experience in which your mind is quickly surrounded by the music.

Sometimes you want to get out of the stream and towel off as quickly as possible, left cold or, worse yet, finding the waters skin-temperature and drab. Or you might get pulled deep by heavy undercurrents, making it difficult to get even your head to the surface.

Or you might experience the thrill of discovering that the waters are shark-infested, and a leg that was once attached to you has just been chewed off, leaving the waters red and frothing as the horde of other predators begin joining the feast.

That’s the kind of dive you should prepare for in Submit Or Death, the EP from New Zealand’s Just One Fix that we’re premiering today in advance of its May 10 release. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries