AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DARKNESS EVERYWHERE — “THE SEVENTH CIRCLE”

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Feb 222022
 

 

The Bay Area melodic death metal band Darkness Everywhere bring proven talent to the table, harnessing the skills of vocalist/guitarist/drummer Ben Murray (Light This City, Wilderness Dream), guitarist Cameron Stucky (Crepuscle), and renowned producer/engineer Zack Ohren on bass. What’s more, their debut EP also includes guest vocal performances by Laura Nichol (Light This City), John Henry (Darkest Hour), and Xavier from Upon Stone.

The band’s chosen name provides a clue to their vision, but the EP’s title, The Seventh Circle, is an even more vivid signal. There they point to Dante’s Seventh Layer Of Hell, where acts of violence in life are punished in death through endless torture and agony. Souls are immersed in rivers of boiling blood and fire, imprisoned in gnarled trees where harpies feed, and abandoned on scorching plains.

Darkness Everywhere take us to this hot and unhappy place through the paths of seven tracks, each of which has a fittingly hellish theme, and we’ll lead you through each of them ion our premiere of the EP today in advance of its release on February 25th. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KAMPFAR, SVRM, BÂ’A, SVARTSOT, THE SUN’S JOURNEY THROUGH THE NIGHT, SAQRARUNA, INTUS MORTEM, BEELZEJUD, ARCHVILE KING

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Feb 202022
 

 

My day job has left me alone this weekend so I decided to make hay while the sun shines. Yesterday’s round-up included the music of eight bands and this one includes the music of nine.

There is indeed quite a lot of music in this week’s black(ish) metal column, but even I haven’t heard all of it. The releases I haven’t heard in their entirety are included in Part 2 below, where I’ve revived the strategy I used in the old Miscellany columns (and if those don’t ring a bell I’ll explain when we get there).

PART ONE

KAMPFAR (Norway)

I’m beginning with “Lausdans Under Stjernene“, a new single released by Indie Recordings on February 16th by a band who are approaching their 30th anniversary but show no signs of slowing down or playing it safe. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEATH ON FIRE — “THE DYING LIGHT”

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Feb 182022
 

 

Following up on their excellent 2021 EP Six Foot Box (for which we happily hosted a premiere), the Indiana-based metal band Death On Fire are today releasing a new two-track vinyl single as a prelude to their forthcoming album Burial Hymns.

Both songs provide a vivid reminder of Death On Fire‘s viscerally potent but intriguing musical amalgams, which often include stylistic traits from death metal, thrash, the blues, hard rock, and more. What we have for you now, presented through a lyric video, is a premiere of the title track from the new release, “The Dying Light“. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: NAPALM DEATH — “RESENTMENT IS ALWAYS SEISMIC – A FINAL THROW OF THROES”

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Feb 162022
 


photo by Gobinder Jhitta

 

(DGR wrote the following review of a new EP by Napalm Death that was released on February 11th by Century Media Records.)

Once again, I find myself at the altar of reviewing a Napalm Death release since it’s one of the things that has commanded much of my listening time. They’re good at hijacking my attention like that.

Considering the scramble that seems to be happening for bands to release ‘something, anything‘ in the last few years as touring continues to take a hit from the ongoing pandemic, EPs have become an increasingly bizarre proposition. They’ve always been fairly nebulous throughout the years, often a collecting pool for stuff that didn’t make an album after recording sessions or previews of whatever bundle of ideas might be currently rattling around in an artist’s head while they try to figure out where to take their project next.

Right now, EPs have expanded that nebulous sensibility to being these increasingly huge catch-alls of anything and everything – which can make for some incredibly all-over-the-map listening sessions thematically. In the case of Napalm Death‘s newest release, Resentment Is Always Seismic – A Final Throw Of Throes, that weird thematic sensibility is just a continuation of what the band have been doing over the past couple of decades, because outside of their obvious ‘pillar of grindcore’ status the band have always been willing to indulge an ambitious and strangely artistic side – so much so that they have added whole eras of ‘weird death metal’ to the hybrid of current industrial dirge and hardcore punk repeatedly beating the shit out of each other that the band currently love to play with when they’re not dishing out their usual genre staples. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): WĘDRUJĄCY WIATR, KLANEN, THE HOWLING WIND, SAPIENTIA DIABOLI, DREAD MAW

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Feb 062022
 

 

If you tuned in to Part 1 of this column earlier today you know that I had compiled an absurd amount of music to write about. In Part 1 I cut down the number of advance tracks I wanted to highlight from 9 to 6. That left 4 new albums, 3 new EPs, and 1 new split still on the proverbial table, and a vanishing amount of time to write about any of them today. I made some difficult choices, and am only able to provide short sketches of the ones I picked, but at the end of this post I’ll give you links to the ones I painfully omitted.

WĘDRUJĄCY WIATR (Poland)

Wędrujący Wiatr don’t move in a hurry. Six years have passed since their last album, O turniach, jeziorach i nocnych szlakach, and there was a three-year interval between that one and their debut full-length, Tam, gdzie miesiąc opłakuje świt. Their past music was so strikingly good that we don’t really need constant reminders of the band’s existence, but still, six years is a long time — which made the appearance of a new album last week even more thrilling. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THEOMACHIA — “THE THEOSOPHIST”

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Feb 022022
 

We are pleased to introduce you to an unusual black metal project from Rome. Born from the mind of instrumentalist/vocalist F.M., who is joined in the project by lyricist and visual artist I.G.Tataru, Theomachia crafts an idiosyncratic and mercurial style of music defined as “gnostic black metal”. As revealed through a debut EP named The Theosophist, it draws inspiration from such prominent Norwegian bands as Emperor and Ulver (as well as Sisters of Mercy), but undeniably marches to the beat of its own mad and mysterious drummer.

In its lyrical themes, The Theosophist poetically visits vast and daunting questions, building upon elements of Greek philosophy that range from Socrates to Neoplatonism. In its sounds, which change constantly within each of the EP’s three songs, it is both ceremonial and violent, haunting and harrowing, dismal and dazzling. It juxtaposes sharp and riveting contrasts, in the vocals as well as the instrumentation and melodies. The music is head-spinning and unsettling, and exerts a strange but strong grip on a listener’s attention.

On February 4th The Theosophist will be released on cassette tape by Xenoglossy Productions and on CD by Onism Productions, but you can explore it in full today through our premiere. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ABYSMAL DAWN — “NIGHTMARE FRONTIER”

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Feb 012022
 

 

(On February 4th Season of Mist will release a new EP by Abysmal Dawn, and today we present DGR‘s review of the record, accompanied by a full stream that premiered today.)

Nightmare Frontier, the newest release from death metal crew Abysmal Dawn via Season of Mist, is an odd duck. Like many single releases that have been expanded into smaller EPs over the past few years as groups dig through their archives for value add-ons, Nightmare Frontier is a thematic grab bag that, thanks to its second song, makes a wide journey across the band’s career.

Containing one new song in the form of “A Nightmare Slain”, Nightmare Frontier then reinforces its first track with a new take on one of the group’s earliest songs, “Blacken The Sky”, and then further adds to it with two covers from surprising corners for the band with “Behind Space” and “Bewitched” – one interesting choice and one massively iconic song – for a total of a little over nineteen minutes worth of music.

Now granted, were this release just the single and the badass cover art by Pär Olofsson, you’d have a solid recommendation off the bat. But the other fifteen some-odd minutes of music make this one an oddball journey at the least. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KRALLICE, ANIMA HERETICAE, CHTHONIC CULT, “THRALL OF THE WINTER MOON” SPLIT, ENDLYSET

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Jan 312022
 

You may have seen that I prepared a long installment of our Most Infectious Song list yesterday. That effort cut into the time available for me to finish the column you’re now embarking upon, especially because I had to leave the house by mid-morning to keep another commitment. So, I’m a day late with this.

What you’ll find here is a recently released complete album, a new video from a previously released EP, a new advance track, a new split, and an album released almost two months ago that I just discovered. There’s more death metal in the mix than usual for this column, but it would be fair to call those entries blackened death metal.

Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART I): KVAEN, CHAOS PERVERSION, BAALZAGOTH, CAILLEACH CALLING, TONGUES, YSYRY MOLLVÜN

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jan 232022
 

 

After exhausting myself yesterday preparing a 12-song round-up of new music and videos I thought I’d take it easy with NCS today, not completely abandoning the SHADES OF BLACK column but limiting it to about three songs. But after I started working my way through a list of possible choices I succumbed to compulsion. How could I leave this one off, or that one, or that one over there?

At the end of that agony I had 13 pieces of music I wanted to convey, most of them advance tracks from forthcoming records but with two EPs and an album in the mix. I arranged them as best I could and then chopped them into two parts. Here’s Part I (please apologize to your wallet for me).

KVAEN (Sweden)

In December I premiered a play-through video for the title track to Kvaen‘s fine new album, The Great Below. A few days ago a second song emerged, along with a lyric video. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ECRYPTUS — “KYR’AM BESKAR”

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Jan 122022
 

The breathtakingly savage death metal band Ecryptus introduce themselves as “an elite group of assassins from Korriban, now based in Atlanta, Georgia. We dispense galactic death metal inspired by the Dark Side and brutal tales of the Canon Arcane.”

For those who may not be as steeped in the lore of Star Wars as the marauders in Ecryptus, one internet source discloses that Korriban “was the original homeworld of the Sith species and a sacred planet for the Sith Order, housing the tombs for many ancient and powerful Dark Lords of the Sith, and containing immense dark side power.”

And for those who may not speak Mandalorian, the title of Ecryptus‘ new EP — Kyr’am Beskar — means (what else?) “Death Metal” in the tongue of far-flung Mandalore. Continue reading »

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