SEEN AND HEARD: CONTRARIAN, DECEIVETH, SKINEATER

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jan 032023
 

 

This round-up of new music will be short, but of course I think it’s also sweet. I have just enough time for three recommendations before my gilded carriage of a morning turns into the rotting pumpkin of my day job.

CONTRARIAN (U.S.)

Until I looked I had forgotten how many premieres we’ve done for Contrarian‘s releases (four of them, going back to 2015). What I didn’t forget was how head-spinning their music has been, and so I jumped at the chance to listen to the first single from Contrarian‘s new album Sage of Shekhinah. The remarkable cover art by Guang Yang just sweetened the pot. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PAGAN RITES AND VULCAN TYRANT

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Dec 232022
 

This aging year will soon expire, but is still capable of birthing metal releases as if it were still young and fecund, right up to the bitter end. And so on December 30th Horror Pain Gore Death Productions will reissue a storming split of unholy (and unconventional) black thrash that features the savage talents of Pagan Rites from Sweden and Vulcan Tyrant from the Netherlands.

You have ears and we have thoughts to prepare them for the onslaught to come at the end of this feature. Continue reading »

HEADGORE: “A MEAL FIT FOR GOD”

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Dec 092022
 

(Christopher Luedtke reviews a new EP by the Vegas band HeadGore, which just dropped yesterday. Prepare to have your head gored.)

The state of music today is a frankly daunting and overwhelming landscape. In the last few years alone so many sounds have been converged, soldered, and brought together by odd arcane alchemy in very quick succession. And as this internet experiment slouches onward at lightspeed it becomes increasingly more impossible to hear it all at once, much less in individual doses. It is a thought that crosses my mind as I listen to Las Vegas, NV nocore unit HeadGore. There is a lot going on and going down, and their latest EP A MEAL FIT FOR GOD is a snapshot into the alchemy of everything.

HeadGore has been putting out bizarre iterations of grind, cybergrind, death metal, and electronic music since their 2019 split with Shitnoise Bastards. At once they are primarily a band that fits into the grind category. They do blasts, and the music is fast and noisy, but they very easily transition into the noisecore/noisegrind categories, but then will also flip a track into an electronic break or turn it into an uncomfortable, swampy melodic section. The nature of things seems to be not confining or boxing oneself in, hence nocore. And this latest release A MEAL FIT FOR GOD is the band at their most experimental yet. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: LAERE, I THE INTRUDER, WITCH RIPPER, THE SECOND FOVEA

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 082022
 

The best of intentions often fall like wheat before the scythe of life. No plan survives contact with the enemy. The best laid plans o’ mice an’ men gang aft a-gley. And other hoary maxims.

I thought I would get one of these round-ups done before now this week, but events conspired against it. I barely have time to squeeze this one in. It’s shorter than I would like — this week was filled with good new releases, of which these are only a precious few — but it will give you a lot of stylistic twists and turns. I’ll have to try to pick up the list this weekend.

LAERE (Germany)

In hunting for new music I’m often the beneficiary of recommendations from other people, and I’m beginning with Laere‘s stunning new EP because it was the subject of lots of those from internet pen-pals whose opinions I respect. And, well, I also got a Bandcamp alert about it because I bought the band’s debut EP Solve in 2020 (and wrote about it too). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: SARPA, GRÁ, JOURS PÂLES, EMPYREAN VESSEL, STELLAR DESCENT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 042022
 


Sarpa

The usual Sunday routine, waking up and not preparing for church, like some unfathomable number of people around the world do, but instead knowing that I’ll spend the next couple of hours listening and re-listening to nothing but variants of black metal, including the Satan-worshiping, Christ-hating variants.

It’s a habit I’m quite comfortable with, at least when I get a decent Saturday-night sleep and keep the Saturday-night drinking at a moderate level. The task of picking and choosing from what I’ve heard creates an inner tension I could do without, but it’s the need to choose that drives the listening. I wouldn’t be making choices if I weren’t writing this thing, and if I weren’t writing this thing I doubt I’d be spending Sunday mornings listening to black metal.

But I’d probably just be making other choices, and less pleasurable ones — wash the dishes? do a load of laundry? pay some nagging bills? heat up the leftover pizza or eat it cold? dig deeper into why 1,700 seals have been found dead on Russia’s Caspian coast?

Nah, I don’t want to make those choices. I made these instead: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: VIDMERSHIY SHMAT, OBRIJ, FROSTNATT, ENGE STORE, FUNEBRE, ULVIK, VESPERWYND, NARRENWIND, GROHOT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Nov 272022
 


Vidmershiy Shmat

My NCS time can be captured by this formula:  NCS = 24 – [FDJ + FAF + SBBS + MAE], where 24 is the number of hours in the day (a constant I haven’t figured out how to extend), FDJ is Fucking Day Job, FAF is Family and Friends, SBBS is Sleep, Bathroom Breaks, and Smoking, and MAE is Meteors and Earthquakes.

EAD (Eating and Drinking) doesn’t enter into it because I can do those things at the computer. So far, the value of MAE has been Zero. I might have made a place for DDD (Disease, Dismemberment, and Death), which would leave the calculated NCS time at Zero, but hope springs eternal!

The most consequential variable (so far) is FDJ. Unfortunately, I can’t ignore it, as I sometimes do with FAF, and it’s difficult to minimize the time required, as I sometimes do with SBBS. But during this long Thanksgiving holiday it has left me alone, and that’s why I finished two big roundups on Friday and Saturday, and now a third one here. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SKARNTYDE, SARKASM, BEAST MODE, Заводь, FOREVER AUTUMN, BENEATH MY FEET, DIE OBERHERREN, YUNCLAS

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Nov 262022
 


Skarntyde

Since yesterday was a Bandcamp Friday [actually, it wasn’t, as Nic pointed out in a comment below] I wish I could have spent more time recommending more music than I did, but at least I got a full handful of choices out there. Now my hands are full again, and when I open them these things will fly like moths to your flame, or I hope they will.

This new collection was the result of lots of surfing the effluent that continually floods the interhole, searching for nuggets that aren’t the kind you’d find in a septic tank. I found them, an octet of them (including three complete EPs), but I must confess that in the course of the sifting I fell into a strange trip. Dark moods descended, and occasionally lifted, but not entirely. I encountered nostalgia too, and found a pair of curveballs to throw at you for the finale, which is always fun, especially for those of you who have no idea about baseball.

But of course, although these trips are mainly about what pleases me, I always hope (fervently) that some or all of it will please you too. Continue reading »

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

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
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

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

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

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