AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HOLY DEATH — “NECK WOUND SESSION”

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Jun 142023
 

We’ve been fans of the underground California death/doom band Holy Death ever since coming across their second EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, soon after its release in February 2020. We’ve followed them closely ever since, like a pack of hounds chasing after a car, witness the fact that we’ve written about them on seven separate occasions over these three years.

And so my heart sank last September when I read a statement by the band’s vocalist/guitarist Torie John that jut a few days after the band released their 2022 Moral Terror EPs he was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer, and that it had spread from his thyroid to his lymph nodes.

Torie also explained that the cancer could be treated with surgery, and that it was curable. At the time of that first announcement, he was still searching for a surgeon and hospital to perform a complete thyroidectomy and removal of lymph nodes. Ultimately, the search was successful, and the extensive surgery on his neck was scheduled to take place last November.

What did he do to prepare for the surgery? Of course, he and his bandmates spent November 5, 2022, recording a new release with Raul “Riff” Cuellar at his Riff Audio studio in Burbank. Naturally, they named the record Neck Wound Session. Continue reading »

DYSEASE: “ERA OF DECAY”

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Jun 132023
 

(In the following review DGR catches up with one more release from the now-vanished spring of 2023, and this time it’s a debut EP by the German band Dysease.)

Sometimes genre-tags for a band can be amusing, mostly when it comes to the times where the ‘progressive death metal’ tag is applied. Such is the case with Germany’s Dysease – whose name lights up the dopamine centers of the brain over here because we love a good smashing-rocks-against-each-other level pun – and their debut EP Era Of Decay.

Released in the middle of March, the Dysease EP arrived in the hallowed NCS burnt-out corner office sometime in April, but as you’ve noticed, one of the more common refrains around here is how the day job tends to take everything from us. However; that doesn’t mean we’re willing to fully let something go, and in the case of Era Of Decay the constant return to the idea of being ‘progressive death metal’ was enough to keep one wondering what exactly was happening within the EP. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: UNDERGANG, SPECTRAL VOICE, INVOCATIO, SPELLSWORD, ETERNAL ROT

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Jun 102023
 

Tough choices to make today, but that’s every Saturday morning, even when I manage to round up some recent selections the day before (which I did this week). Knowing that I’ve got a third chance to make recommendations tomorrow (via Shades of Black) makes it slightly easier, though I didn’t shove off all the black metal into tomorrow.

There’s no real theme to today’s choices, other than the tennis-ball-in-the-tumble-dryer theme that I also used yesterday. Prepare to get bounced around again. (I did decide to book-end the collection with horrors.)

UNDERGANG (Denmark) / SPECTRAL VOICE (U.S.)

I’m drawn to new Undergang releases like a fly to honey, though in their case the better analogy may be flies drawn to a steaming pile of fresh viscera. Even sweeter, the latest Undergang release is a split with Colorado’s Spectral Voice. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GRAND CADAVER, JØTNARR, FEN, ACID MAGUS, ENTERRÉ VIVANT, KARRAS

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Jun 092023
 

I was supposed to premiere and review an EP today. Despite knowing better, the label and band decided to publish the stream and circulate it to fans without waiting on us. Not the first time something like that has happened around here, but I no longer ignore it when people care so little about our unpaid efforts to help. Time is better spent in other ways, and so rather than finish that premiere write-up I decided to pull together this round-up of new songs and videos that mostly surfaced just this week.

I’ve not put much thought into some clever way of arranging the flow of them, in part because there are so many stylistic twists and turns in what I chose. Just think of yourself as a tennis ball thrown into a dryer with a lot of other tennis balls and start tumbling.

GRAND CADAVER (Sweden)

This week Grand Cadaver released a third single from their new album Deities Of Deathlike Sleep. They sum up the album as “Swedish Fucking Death Metal, the way we love it”, and the lack of pretension extends to the name of the newest song: “Vortex of Blood“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): I, DESTROYER — “COLD, DEAD HANDS”

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Jun 072023
 

The story of New England-based I, Destroyer is an unusual one, perhaps best summed up as a tale of indomitable perseverance in the shadows of the underground. As we write this, the band are on the eve of their 20th anniversary, and yet (with a new lineup in place) are only now about to release their first official EP as a label release.

Those two decades did see the production of four I, Destroyer demos, but they were self-released and usually passed along by hand to friends, fans, and other bands. Moreover, although those four demos collectively included 21 songs, they totaled only about 38 minutes of music. The new EP — Cold, Dead Hands — is nearly 25 minutes all by itself, spread across 6 tracks. If you do the math, you’ll figure out that these songs on average are longer than anything the band have done before.

These songs are also dynamic and expertly executed assaults. And make no mistake, they are indeed vicious assaults, relentlessly pulse-pounding attacks of black thrash and speed metal, but with enough changes in momentum and mood (and plenty of technically eye-popping performances) to keep listeners perched on the edge of their seats. It’s raw and nasty, fetid as well as ferocious, both feral and freaked-out — a wild ride from beginning to end.

And so, it’s with fiendish pleasure that we present a full stream of Cold, Dead Hands today in advance of its June 9th co-release by Eternal Death and Born for Burning. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DRAGDOWN — “ANTISOCIAL”

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Jun 062023
 

(Here’s DGR’s review of a little-known EP from March that made a favorable impression on him.)

Another one for the short but sweet pile to break things up a bit and from a part of the world we don’t get to travel to too often.

Dragdown are – for lack of a better term – a melodeath group hailing from Japan, hybridizing a few different styles together but mostly hewing close to the groove-focused and galloping offshoots of the melodeath scene and even cramming some metalcore guitar chug into the auditory violence. Dragdown are big fans of the super-aggressive verse and clean-sung chorus approach but have an interesting tact for it in that they don’t really ‘lighten up’ for the glory-chorus segments. Dragdown clearly like the part where the drummer takes a ‘can’t stop, won’t stop’ approach to things.

The group’s newest EP Antisocial arrived in the middle of March and found itself collected up in the great NCS content maw, and wow, has this one taken a while to get around to. It’s hovered in the background for a bit but Antisocial isn’t the easiest EP to get a hold of, and since there was a brief musical lull we now have the time to dive into it. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: BLUT AUS NORD, SVARTKONST, DEVISER, BLOOD STAINED DUSK, VERLETZEN, LANZERRATH

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Jun 042023
 

I won’t repeat everything I wrote here yesterday about why I’ve fallen behind in my usual attempts to keep up with newly released music (you’re welcome). Suffice to say, for this column I followed the same blunt-instrument, cutting-the-Gordian-knot strategy as I did yesterday.

BUT AUS NORD (France)

At the risk of being accused of clickbaiting, or at least bait-and-switch, I’m starting with a piece of welcome news — but it isn’t accompanied by music.

The news is that on August 25th Debemur Morti Productions will release the second part of Blut Aus Nord‘s Disharmonium album series — Disharmonium – Nahab — accompanied by the chilling cover art of Polish artist Maciej Kamuda. That’s an earlier date than a previously announced calendar spot in September. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: OMNIUM GATHERUM — “SLASHER”

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May 302023
 

(What you will find below is NCS writer DGR‘s review of a new EP by Finland’s Omnium Gatherum, which will be released on June 2nd by Century Media Records.)

There’s always a fair share of carny/used-car-salesman when it comes to catching someone’s eye with a new release, and especially when it comes to an EP, so if you had told us ages ago that Finland’s Omnium Gatherum were going to put out an EP that included a cover of the song “Maniac”, we probably would have assumed that’s what was going on. However, in 2021 Omnium Gatherum would put out Origin, which was a release so bathed in musical neon and earworm synth lines that it makes perfect sense for them to cover a song like “Maniac” – if anything it’s perfectly in line with what the band are up to these days.

That forthcoming EP, Slasher, consists of the new title song, the aforementioned attention grabber of a cover, and then two songs that were taken from the Origin recording sessions, roughly translating to the simple conclusion that if you loved Origin, you’re going to like Slasher because it is quite simply more Origin.

If you’ve enjoyed Omnium Gatherum throughout the years, and especially as they’ve embraced their campier side post-The Burning Cold, you’re also going to dig hard into the Slasher EP because even with an eighteen-minute run time, Omnium Gatherum still find a way to create some absolutely lush music with plenty of hair-blowing-in-the-wind-esque guitar and keyboard soloing to justify its time with you. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ORPHEUS OMEGA — “PORTRAITS”

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May 292023
 

(In the following review DGR catches up with the latest release by the Australian band Orpheus Omega, an EP that surfaced last month.)

Even though we’ve often dwelled within the realms of the dark and heavy – our site background having been a giant pile of skulls for over a decade now – we’re not above and beyond traipsing into the ligher side of metal from time to time. We’ve featured a-plenty of clean singing over the years, usually when used effectively and not just as ‘product’ to provide a radio-worth chorus, and yes, there are a few of us in this burnt-out shell of a building that like them some good ol’ fashioned melodeath keyboard cheese.

When a band buys wholly into that sort of bullshit, it’s difficult to not cheer along, and Australia’s Orpheus Omega have proudly flown that flag for some years now, fully ensconced in the ‘no, this is what we make’ mentality with full admiration for the era of early-aughts melodeath when the synth work became especially prominent and was a constant traveling companion of whomever decided to kick out the next guitar solo.

Orpheus Omega are just that sort of band, and while their 2019 album Wear Your Sins didn’t quite gel with us as well as we would’ve liked, 2015’s Partum Vita Mortem was a near-perfectly constructed one of those sorts of albums, with plenty of glory-flag waving and power-choruses to turn any listener into a massive dork. Obviously, time doesn’t stand still for anyone and the group have evolved since then but thas one of a handful of things that made the April release of their new EP Portraits interesting. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: VIRULENT GENESIS — “INTRODUCTION TO MISRULE”

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May 262023
 

(Not long ago DGR stumbled across the debut EP of Wyoming-based Virulent Genesis, which was released earlier this month, and it struck a nerve, leading to the review you’ll find below.)

Wyoming’s Virulent Genesis arriveD to us by way of AN internet spelunking trip, part of a collection of ‘oh, that looks interesting’ captured in the great maw that is the review backlog. We could wish to provide a much better origin story, like them crashing into our burnt-out shell of an office by way of meteor, or somehow them fixing the goddamned elevator and finding their way into the lobby, but that isn’t the case.

Sometimes, the stars align just right and you get a wild hair to write about an upstart death metal group based out of Wyoming. That’s the case here with Virulent Genesis‘ first release Introduction To Misrule. Continue reading »

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