AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CAVE MOTH — “PARALYTIC LOVE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 112023
 

These days the phrase “catch and kill” has connotations of schemes to buy up embarrassing news about bloated political figures and then bury it. But it’s also a phrase that leaped into our heads when listening to Cave Moth‘s new EP Paralytic Love. This time it’s us that are being caught and killed. The catching employs lures of different kinds that are damned difficult to resist. The killing occurs in equally ingenious (one might also say aberrant) ways.

The whole experience, though separated into 8 tracks, comes to an abrupt end less than 8 minutes after it begins. It seems longer, like there’s some time-dilation effect happening, maybe because it’s so packed to the gills with mad, head-spinning permutations — which become the lures. The songs rush and rampage with centrifugal force, but simultaneously bamboozle the listener’s higher faculties with the whipping whirligig of genres and sounds that feed into the chaos. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MANIACO, EASTWOOD, CHADHEL, DELYRIA, MAN AS PLAGUE, IZROD

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Apr 082023
 


Maniaco

My track record of posting new-music roundups on Bandcamp Fridays is spotty. I probably fail as often as I succeed. I know that people save up Bandcamp wish lists based on things they’ve discovered in between those Fridays, including music they’ve found through our reviews and other roundups. But those Fridays still seem like good days to spread the word about enticing new metal because lots of people are making purchase decisions right then, when Bandcamp has a moratorium on its 15% and 10% revenue grabs.

I did manage to pull together a roundup on yesterday’s Bandcamp Friday. I didn’t have much time to do it (I again blame my fucking day job), which resulted in fewer choices than I had in mind and a lot fewer words, but I hope it was better than nothing. I hope it gave those six bands a bit of a push for their forthcoming records.

Now we’re back to the in-between period. I hope some of what I picked today will wind up on new wish lists or result in immediate pick-ups. Or maybe you’ll just get pumped up listening, like I did this morning. (P.S. If you wonder why I give a damn about Bandcamp as a platform for music, scroll to the very bottom of this article.) Continue reading »

AN NCS DEMO PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): KUOLEVAN RUKOUS — “DEMO 2023”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 062023
 

We don’t know much about the background of Kuolevan Rukous. The names used by the band’s three members — Unholy Necrosis, Tuliips, and Buer Enkoimesis — are not the ones they were born with. Although a German band, they chose a Finnish name for themselves, one that translates as “The Prayer of the Dead“. And apart from the track names, we don’t have any special insights into the inspirations or conceptions behind their first demo release, which will be out on April 14th.

And so, Kuolevan Rukous are a paradigm example of an obscure group whose music must speak for itself. It turns out to be a very interesting form of speech. A trio of underground labels — Vita Detestabilis, Reaping Death Records, and Grieve Records — will release this debut demo on tape, and Vita Detestabilis previews it by telling us that Kuolevan Rukous have expressed themselves “through asphyxiating dissonances, noisy atmospheres, and using death doom as a conductor for funeral black”.

Those words created intrigue around here, and the music itself proved to be intriguing, and far, far more than that. It was not a difficult decision for us to be the bearer of the demo’s premiere today. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECRONOMICON EX MORTIS (SELF-TITLED)

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Mar 302023
 

What you’re about to experience is likely to be the most electrifying 18 minutes of your day, unless you lose control of your car, the brakes fail, and you’re surging toward a concrete pylon at Formula One speed.

Those 18 minutes of full-throttle, mind-boggling music are wrapped within the self-titled debut EP by the Chicago quintet Necronomicon Ex Mortis, which will be released tomorrow (March 31st). Their brand of death metal is so fast, so technically head-spinning, and so devilishly inventive that it allows no room for any calm contemplation. All you can do is hang on for dear life and enjoy the flame-throwing madhouse thrills while they last — and then yield to the impulse to throw yourself back in right away. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART I): INTO DARKNESS, NATTEHIMMEL, BERGRISAR

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 262023
 


Into Darkness – photo by Nicolette A. Radoi

As I began making my way through my list of new music I might want to recommend for this Sunday’s column I had one mental WOW! after another. Some actual exclamatory sounds might have escaped my mouth, but the headphones were clamped on too tight for me to tell. After realizing that I’d already found more than enough to occupy this installment I had to make myself stop listening, even with lots of things left to check out,

Maybe I didn’t stop soon enough. There’s a lot here — four advance tracks from forthcoming records, two complete EPs, and one complete albums. To make all this a little more accessiblke, I’ve divided the recommendations into two Parts. I hope you’ll find time to delve into all of it instead of feeling overwhelmed, and that you get a few WOW‘s yourself.

INTO DARKNESS (Italy)

After experiencing the weirdness of time seeming to slow down during the depths of pandemic lockdowns, it now seems that it’s speeding ahead faster than ever. That includes the release of new music, which whizzes by so fast that it almost becomes a blur. That makes it easy to overlook things, and I confess that as a result I missed the release of a new Into Darkness EP about 10 days ago. It certainly wasn’t for lack of interest, since I’ve written enthusiastically about every release by this Italian band since their first demo in 2012. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: IMMORTAL, NIGHT DEMON, VULTURE INDUSTRIES, ALL HELL, PHANTOM LUNG

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 252023
 


Demonaz – Photo by Leander Djønne

How long did I sleep last night? Hey, thanks for asking, it was 10 1/2 hours. You’d think I’d dug a mile-long ditch by myself before collapsing in exhaustion, but I did little more than sit on my ass and peck at a keyboard all day. It’s probably just a sign of how long I’d sleep every night if I didn’t have some binding commitment to keep early every morning (looking at you, NCS). I like sleeping.

Anyway, late start today, and therefore not as many picks in this roundup as I thought I’d have. I decided to pull in some bigger names, whose songs surfaced fairly early in the week, and then round things out with some hard-scrabble fighters from deeper underground.

IMMORTAL (Norway)

Dark northern armies go to battle across the ice under blood-red skies in Immortal‘s blazing and bombastic new song “War Against All“. It’s a hot-blooded scorcher, packed with both brazen and febrile fretwork, berserker screaming, and rumbling thunder in the low end. If you’ve just hibernated for 10 1/2 hours it’s as welcome and as effective as a jolt of pitch-black caffeine. Continue reading »

BLASPHEMY, PRAYERS, AND THE CALLOUSNESS THAT FOLLOWS: TRIBE OF PAZUZU, SARCOPTES, AND TONGUE SCUM

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Mar 202023
 

(Sacramento-based writer DGR pulled together the following reviews of albums that surfaced over the last 30 days.)

The tour through the world of heavy metal continues, this time covering a good portion of the planet as we carve our way from Canada through the States and land in Australia for three suitably intense and mind-scarringly mean experiences that saw recent release. We begin with names familiar to longtime NCS readers and end on someone new but a group that’ll instantly appeal to the wall-punchers as decorative artists among our readers.

Tribe Of Pazuzu – Blasphemous Prophecies

It hadn’t occurred to us around here that it had been close to three years for the Canadian crew Tribe Of Pazuzu when it came to the gap between releases, nor the fact that Blasphemous Prophecies represents the group’s official first full-length album.

For those who haven’t been wandering around these fetid halls for a while, Tribe Of Pazuzu unleashed two EPs in late 2019 and early 2020 entitled Heretical Uprising and King Of All Demons. With the year-over-year churn on those particular EPs and each of them clocking in at a stocky five songs and near-twenty minutes each, it felt like the combination of the two together – which the band would eventually release in 2021 – was their debut full-length. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BLOODJOB — “METASTASIS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Mar 082023
 

Just two days from now, on March 10th, the Italian label Lethal Scissor Records will release a new EP named Metastasis by the German band Bloodjob. True to their name, Bloodjob give us a bloody piece of work, an explosive five-track onslaught that’s foul and ferocious, bringing to bear ingredients of both brutal death metal and technically electrifying death metal, as well as the kind of grindcore zealotry that spawns visions of mosh pits gone wild.

The EP features the talents of a new rhythm section that joined the fold after the band’s 2019 debut album Sick Concept Humanity. And so the new EP includes re-recordings by the new lineup of two cuts from the band’s 2012 demo Misogynic Obsessions, as well as three new songs inspired by the band’s “dystopian view on the degenerating civilization we live in” — and we’ve got all five of the songs for you to hear today. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: CROWN OF MADNESS / TORN IN HALF / VAMPIRE SQUID

 SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Feb 272023
 

(Andy Synn presents three bite-sized morsels of brutality that you may have missed this month)

After my spectacular failure at keeping up with the various short-form releases which came out last year (ultimately having to relegate my coverage to most of the EPs, splits, etc, from 2022 to the end of year round-up instead) I made a vow to myself to stay more on top of things this year.

Obviously this hasn’t happened but… here’s three you may have missed from February that I didn’t want to wait until December to write about!

Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: KRULLUR — “DEAD LIVE!”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Feb 242023
 

The world is obviously a very big place. Most of us will only glimpse relatively tiny corners of it in a lifetime’s worth of travels. Similarly, there are vast numbers of far-flung metal bands most of us will never get to see on stage, no matter how addicted we are to their music, and studio records just don’t often come close to capturing the explosiveness of some bands’ live performances.

Houston, Texas-based Krullur is undoubtedly one of those bands a lot of people overseas, or even in the U.S., will never get to see as they destroy venues with their crazed and crushing amalgams of thrash, death metal, punk, and grindcore. But what we’ve got for you today is the next best thing, the premiere stream of a record called Dead Live! that does an astonishingly effective job of bringing listeners right into the head-exploding blast zone. Continue reading »

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