SEEN AND HEARD ON A BANDCAMP BLACK FRIDAY: HOST, GOATBURNER, ÚZKOST, FORMLESS ARCHITECT, SLEGEST, ONHOU, TCHORNOBOG, ABYSSAL

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Nov 252022
 


Host

When you combine a Black Friday with a Bandcamp Friday the result is a goddamned typhoon of new music and videos, with bands and labels not only launching sales but trying to take further advantage of the situation with new releases, some of them out today and some now up for pre-order.

Correction: As Nic pointed out in a comment on the post following this one, Black Friday was NOT in fact a Bandcamp Friday, and now I’ve forgotten why I thought it was. On the plus side, I get to do something like this again on December 2nd!

I can’t say I’ve waded through all of it to make your shopping experience easier (I’m only one bedraggled human and speed-cloning is a generation or two away), but I did make my way through some of it, and have these recommendations for you.

I also did try to provide some genre scatter in the choices, knowing that not everyone loves everything, and to provide a range of radar elevations among the bands. As vivid proof of that, I’m leading off with… Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: AZAGHAL, FORTÍÐ, GAROTA, SKÁLD, UNHOLY VAMPYRIC SLAUGHTER SECT, VIOLET COLD

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Nov 202022
 

My head is clearer today than it was yesterday morning, but this column, although not exactly short, is still shorter than I’d like due to a planned mid-morning rendezvous with friends. Because time is racing away, I’ll cut this introduction off at the knees and just forewarn you that the word of the day is “whiplash”.

AZAGHAL (Finland)

As these blasphemous and terrorizing Fiuns approach the quarter-century mark in their career they’ve readied a new album named Alttarimme on Luista Tehty (“our altar is made of bone”), and the first advance song from it is the one I’ve chosen as a beginning today. It turns out to be a multi-faceted piece of music, and one that passes almost too quickly. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: BOB MALMSTRÖM — “SEGLA MED SATAN”

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Nov 172022
 

There’s something admirable in standing fast against powerful headwinds, even when the position may cause some to cringe.

Bob Malmström staked out their position long ago as the true originators and crowned kings of “borgarcore”, and they have taken delight since 2010 in jabbing their fingers into the eyes of standard “against the system” punk mentality by celebrating the benefits of Dom Perignon, lap dances by pretty girls, fast cars that can be run by you instead of over you, and favorable swings in the stock markets. Maintaining that position in recent years has gotten tougher, but these Swedish-speaking Finns haven’t backed down. In the context of their new EP Segla med Satan they write:

It’s 2022 and everything is going to hell. The stock market is tanking, the waves are full of poisonous algae porridge and in the east a mad tyrant force-feeds his brain virus to the people like a Frenchman force-feeds geese. The world is on the brink of an abyss…. Salvation is not what anyone expected, nor asked for, but it gives you the Zen to ski down the slopes of the Alps waving your middle fingers to the poor. We’re ready to rock the gold teeth out of your mouths.

Punk is for poor losers. Folk metal is for stupid losers. Bättre folk metal is for rich geniuses! Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OMNIFARIAM — “THE SUMMONING”

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Nov 152022
 

Time flies when you’re having fun. Time also probably flies when you blindly stumble into the path of a rushing freight train.

What brought that morbid thought to mind? Well, you can guess from the title of this feature. It’s the obliterating new EP The Summoning by the Puerto Rican death metal band Omnifaiam, and in particular the EP’s powerhouse opening song “Deceivers of the Bleak“. Continue reading »

CHESTCRUSH: “APECHTHEIA”

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Nov 142022
 

(A new three-track ChestCrush EP has been out in the world for about a week, time enough for DGR to feel comfortable giving it the following review, for those who might have overlooked it.)

ChestCrush is a project we arrived at late in the year 2021. The international group’s first full length Vdelgymia was one that had hovered on the periphery for some time that year, and whenever we got the chance to share it with people, we would bring it up. It’s how the song “Grudge” wound up being spun during one of our Gimme Metal invasions, and we even argued for the brutally rock-headed “Different Shepherds, Same Sheep” as one of the most infectious songs of last year before that list performed its duties and was sent out on an ice floe.

Given that ChestCrush have resolved themselves into a year-over-year churn at the moment, it seems like you can’t discuss the group’s latest EP Apechtheia without lookng at its older sibling, because these are two very distinct releases from one another, not just in terms of musical content but also in terms of lineup: Apechtheia marks the first time that main musician Evangelos Vasilakos has united with Australian drummer Robin Stone and Texas-based death metal vocalist Topias Jokipii. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: …AND OCEANS, STRYCHNOS, IN THE WOODS…, AYYUR, FREEDOM OF FEAR, PARASITARIO, PEGZILLA

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Oct 292022
 


…And Oceans

I mentioned last Sunday (and again on Monday) that I wasn’t feeling well, as an explanation for why I didn’t get very much done for NCS last weekend. I also mentioned that I spent that weekend in southern California at a gathering of co-workers from different cities. Within days of everyone getting back home, a half-dozen people reported testing positive for covid, all of whom were fully vaccinated.

I had tested before going on that trip, took another test while I was there, and tested again five days after my last close contact with those people — all the tests were negative. But I’m still feeling sub-par, still congested, sniffling, and lethargic, for the second week in a row.

I don’t know what the hell I have, but there’s obviously a lot of respiratory virus blooming in the country besides covid, with different strains of cold and flu making a triumphant comeback after a couple of years of masking and quarantine restrictions left them lonely. You can take your own lessons from this, but I’d advise you to be careful.

It might be my hopeful imagination, but I think I’m marginally better today than before, or at least feeling well enough to go exploring new music and videos again. Here’s some of what I found (I ticked off a lot of genre boxes with this compilation, plus a couple of elliptical band names): Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: LIGHTLORN, HELIANTHUS

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Oct 282022
 

Because it’s getting late in the day I’ll spare you the usual intro comments. Because it’s late in the day, I’ve also made fewer musical selections than usual. Tomorrow I’ll do better.

LIGHTLORN (Sweden)

Today this Swedish duo have released their debut EP These Nameless Worlds. I’ve already raved about the EP’s first two songs when they were released, “Unmapped Constellations” (here) and “Through the Cold Black Yonder“ (here). Now we have the other two. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): S.I.D. — “CITY OF CHEMISTRY”

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Oct 132022
 

With their new EP City of Chemistry, the Italian death-doom-sludge band S.I.D. have created a devastating experience, the musical equivalent of crusher, crematorium, and crypt, designed to channel the suffocation of hope and the domination of agony.

The music is a match for the concept of the EP. It was principally inspired by the book Veleni di Stato by the Italian author and journalist Gianluca Di Feo, which condemned the production and use of chemical weapons during the second World War. The music makes a harrowing journey through the horrors of war, with a focus on the places where chemical instruments of death were developed and produced, concealed by warmongering powers.

At a time when war is again ravaging souls in many places, the EP stands as both a reminder and a denunciation, and it serves as a second chapter by the band, following their 2019 debut album Architects of Armageddon. Elaborating on these themes, the band explain: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): XANATHAR — “GOLD, BLACK AND CRIMSON”

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Oct 102022
 

 

If you haven’t yet tumbled to the marvelous talents of the Italian one-man band Xanathar, today is a good day to do that. Prior to today Xanathar had released two EPs (Darkmoon and The Towers), both of them emerging last year, but today there’s a third one and it’s an eye-opener too.

What made the two previous EPs such great experiences was Xanathar‘s skill in interweaving classic ’80s doom and epic heavy metal with raw black metal and dungeon synth. It was quite evident from those releases that Xanathar really loves all those divergent stylistic influences. But just because you love a bunch of disparate kinds of music doesn’t mean they’ll work together well if you try to mash ’em up or even stand them side-by-side. Making it work requires a lot more than affection.

Xanathar made it work in those first two outings, so much so that I included a song named “The Test of Fate” on my list of 2021’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. And as you’ll discover through our premiere stream today, it works again on Gold, Black and Crimson. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SKAPHOS, AKRAIA, SACRILEGION, AARA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Oct 082022
 

Last weekend I was able to compile and write about a typhoon of new songs and videos, but this weekend will be different. The Seattle Mariners baseball club made the major league playoffs for the first time in 21 years, and won the first game of their first playoff series yesterday in Toronto. The second game is this afternoon, and I’ll be glued to the TV watching that with friends.

Afterward will be a dinner party in Seattle that will likely go late, and that won’t bode well for Sunday morning work on Shades of Black whenever I get back to my island home. Also ominous is the fact that I’ve got to do shit for my fucking day job tomorrow, which makes tomorrow’s usual column even more unlikely. So don’t be surprised if I have to skip it this week.

I’ve got to make my way to Seattle pretty soon for that ballgame, so I’ll have to make the following collection short, but hopefully sweet. I wish I could have done more, and really wish I could have done it yesterday when there was an extra incentive for fans to spend money on Bandcamp, but my job hammered me then too. So it goes. Continue reading »

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