AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SACROCURSE – “SUPREME TERROR”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jan 142021
 

 

The EP by Sacrocurse that we’re premiering in full today is a streamlined nuclear missile, a four-track attack that’s just shy of 17 minutes in total. The length seems just about perfect — just long enough to feed a ravenous hunger for incendiary chaos, but stopping short of the point when a listener might go into a seizure, gasping for air, overcome by the speed, the madness, and the eviscerating ferocity of this audio apocalypse.

Supreme Terror is a well-chosen name for the EP, because it is indeed supremely terrorizing. But it won’t take long for you to appreciate that despite the violence and lack of sanity in the music, the technical skill of the performances is jaw-dropping, and the songs aren’t just howling storms. There is structure and dynamism within these outbursts, and more clarity in the production than you might expect from what is fundamentally an exercise in black/death warfare. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD FOR A CHRISTMAS DAY (PART 2): CASAVIEJA, KNIVES, I AM A PREACHER, SKY PIG, HUMAN SERPENT

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 262020
 

 

Time has become ill-defined for me as for everyone else this year, but I do realize that it’s not still Christmas Day. I just couldn’t get Part 2 of this round-up finished in time to post it yesterday before having a virtual get-together with close family members. Probably just as well, because stacking this much new music on top of what was in Part 1 might have drowned you, especially on top of another installment of DGR’s mountainous year-end list, which (by the way) ended today without caving in the site’s foundations, though that was a risk that left me in a cold sweat all week.

For Part 2 I’m starting with an album and then moving onto a couple of EPs and a couple of singles.

CASAVIEJA (Guatemala)

When Rennie (starkweather) first urged me to listen to this band a week ago, their new second album had just come out. He said they were from “South of the Border, South of Heaven”, but I didn’t realize until later that they hail from Guatemala. Without intending to be condescending, that’s not a nation that spawns typhoon waves of extreme metal bands, a fact that just made me more eager to hear them. Continue reading »

CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR: “PATIENTLY WAITING FOR WONDERFUL THINGS”

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Dec 222020
 

 

(We welcome NCS guest contributor James Parry-Smith , who brings us his review of the new album by Corrupt Moral Altar, which was released in late November by APF Records.)

In a year as irreversibly horrendous as 2020 has been for most of us, a short, sharp injection of white-hot anger and riff-heavy grindcore is exactly what is needed to spruce up the terrible day you may very well be having. Liverpudlian group Corrupt Moral Altar have previous experience in the aforementioned areas, with a pair of EPs and full-lengths to their name over the past decade that have established them as one of the UK’s preeminent grind bands and, with a penchant for delving blithely into sludge metal realms and the battering distortion that characterises such a sound, one of the most interesting to boot.

With 2014’s Mechanical Tides and 2017’s Eunoia both allowing space for the band to stray off the beaten, grinding track and fully explore their collective creative vision, their EPs are by no means one-dimensional in comparison – something that is as clear on latest release Patiently Waiting for Wonderful Things as it has ever been. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: HOLY DEATH

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Nov 272020
 

 

(We present Andy Synn‘s combined reviews of the three EPs released this year by the Nevada band Holy Death.)

Today’s edition of “Short But Sweet” is a little different.

Rather than covering three EPs by three different bands, instead we’re going to be taking a look at three different EPs by the same band, Las Vegas-based Death/Doom disciples Holy Death, whose debut EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, came out back in February, and was followed soon after by June’s Celestial Throne ov Grief.

Then, right at the end of last month, they dropped Deus Mortis, which is around about the time I jumped on the bandwagon… which brings us right up to date.

Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: CELL PRESS — “CELL PRESS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Nov 262020
 

 

We’re premiering the self-titled debut EP of the Montreal band Cell Press on the eve of its release. If we could see your faces when you listen to it, there would be a great temptation to write nothing about the music and just watch your expressions change as all the surprises hit you like battering rams, expressions that might range from joy to panic to spine-tingling fear, and perhaps revulsion too. But since we can’t see you, on we go….

By way of background, Cell Press are a relatively new outfit, coming together only last year, though their members have played in a myriad of punk, metal, and hardcore bands such as The Great Sabatini, Biipiigwan, I Hate Sally, The Chariot, Animal Ethics, Architect, Swarm Of Spheres, and Angles. They took their name from the 2001 Russian prison documentary The Mark Of Cain. If you know that movie, the choice will make some sense when you hear the songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NADER SADEK’S “THE SERAPEUM: BLACK OSIRIS” (AND A REVIEW OF “THE SERAPEUM” EP)

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Nov 242020
 

 

The Serapeum is a remarkable new EP created by the Egyptian metal artist Nader Sadek and a star-strewn coterie of talented friends. To celebrate its imminent release, we’re presenting a second video for a song from the EP, which joins another one that we premiered earlier.

We’ve already devoted a lot of attention to this EP, including a wide-ranging interview by DJ Jet of Nader Sadek and two of his collaborators on The Serapeum. But for those who might have missed that, this new EP grew out of a collaboration in Egypt among Nader, Karl Sanders (Nile), Derek Roddy (Serpents Rise), and Mahmud Gecekusu (Perversion).

And if those names weren’t already enough to seize your attention, the music also includes contributions by bassists Ben “Barby” Claus (Gorod) and Dominic “Forest” Lapointe (Augury) and vocalists Morean (Dark Fortress) and Shaun LaCanne (Putrid Pile), as well as Alex Zubair (Nephelium) creating eastern harmonies and drones, and Nancy Mounir adding theremin hauntings to the mix. Moreover, Sadek himself recorded the vocals inside the inner chamber of Dahshur’s “Red Pyramid” (the pyramid of Snefru). Continue reading »

COGNIZANT: “COGNIZANT”

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Nov 202020
 

 

(We present Todd Manning‘s review of the 2016 self-titled debut EP of Texas-based Cognizant, which was given a proper CD release by Selfmadegod Records on November 13th.)

When it comes to Grindcore, there’s always been a split, with some bands falling on the Metal side of the fence while others are more firmly rooted in Hardcore, though even more have staked out their territory somewhere smack in the middle. In the case of Dallas-based five-piece Cognizant, they easily emerge from the fetid swamp of Death Metal and their debut self-titled record, re-released courtesy of Selfmadegod Records, shows why they have become a force to be reckoned with.

In 1997, Floridians Assück dropped one of the best Grind records of all time with Misery Index, and they too were heavily indebted to Death Metal (in their case it was the almighty Suffocation). Cognizant looks to Gorguts for much of their Death Metal influence, and this leads their particular brand of blasting a much more complex and abstract edge. But do not mistake this abstractness for a lack of impact, because this is a paint-peeling assault from start to finish. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ALUSTRIUM / DÖ / FUMING MOUTH

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Nov 182020
 


Alustrium

 

(Andy Synn prepared the following reviews of three recent and very impressive EPs.)

It’s pretty common knowledge that, for the most part at least, I’m more of an “album guy” than an “EP guy”. There’s just something about the extra effort, the extra level of commitment, involved in creating an album that makes it feel more real and more substantial in my mind (although I’m sure that’s not always true).

That being said, I can’t deny that there are certain times when an EP is exactly what I’m looking for from a band, something explicitly designed to deliver a short, sharp shock of (ideally) all their best ideas and elements in one concise, captivating package.

Which is exactly what I have here for you today, three EPs – from three tonally and stylistically very different artists – all of which are pretty much brand new (one of them, in fact, is so new that it isn’t actually released until Friday) that find each band putting out some of their best material yet while also dropping a few hints as to where they might take things next. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BESTIALIS — “RITUS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 132020
 

 

Just yesterday I was confessing that one of the reasons I’m so open to hosting premieres every day is a selfish motivation — because it affords the opportunity to discover new music from new bands that I might otherwise miss (and that you might miss too!). Sometimes those opportunities bring thrilling surprises, and today it has happened again through the discovery of a fascinating German black metal band named Bestialis.

What you are about to hear, on the day of its release by Vendetta Records, is the debut recording of this group, an EP named Ritus. The formidable success of the EP will be less surprising if you understand that Bestialis is the result of of a long-term artistic and spiritual conspiracy between two artists — vocalist Lastaurus and guitarist Absorber — who have been making music for 20 years; both of them are part of northwestern Germany’s Culthe Collectiv/Culthe Fest (Münster).

What they’ve achieved is both conceptually and musically tantalizing. In their lyrical focus, Bestialis focus on a concept “whose basic premise is to understand humans as – primarily and in the most positive way – animal beings, and thus, at its essence, to explore, proclaim and worship the bestia or beast in man.”. Ritus thus offers an introduction to this concept and puts into its narrative tales of prehistoric bull cults and Persian mythology (such as the Epic of Gilgamesh, provided in the band’s own reinterpretation). Continue reading »

NCS PREMIERES FOR USTKARA GHOST’S “CONSUMING THE ABYSS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 052020
 

 

What do you think would happen if two such doom maestros as Daniel Neagoe (Clouds, Aeonian Sorrow) and Shaun Macgowan (My Dying Bride) were to join forces in a new musical project? Well, you need not engage in too much speculation, because that is in fact what they have done, and we have the results for you right now.

Under the name Ustkara Ghost they have completed work on a debut album named Consuming The Abyss that’s being released today, and to help spread the word we present a full stream of the album, as well as the debut of a lyric video for its longest and most multi-faceted song. Continue reading »

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