REMNANTS OF 2013 (PART 3)

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
May 152014
 

(Austin Weber puts the spotlight on a big load of 2013 (and 2012) releases that he feels were overlooked.  This is Part 3 of a four-part piece; we’ll have the final part tomorrow.)

AEONS OF ECLIPSE

How I missed out on this killer death/black metal band from my home state of Kentucky is beyond me. As I found out, Aeons Of Eclipse is unfortunately now broken up, and The Parasite was released after they broke up, but it’s a damn fine statement.

The Parasite walks a fine line between old school influence and modern complexity without devolving into lead guitar overload all the time. Aeons of Eclipse find a solid balance between dark, furious riffing, smooth fitting melodies, and brutality without boring you. This is one of those highly consistent from start to finish albums that beg to be bought and replayed while headbanging relentlessly.

http://aeonsofeclipse.bandcamp.com/ Continue reading »

REMNANTS OF 2013 (PART 2)

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  5 Responses »
May 142014
 

(Austin Weber puts the spotlight on a big load of 2013 releases that he feels were overlooked.  This is Part 2 of a four-part piece; we’ll have the other parts on each of the remaining days this week.)

REDEEMING TORMENT

The French seem to have a stranglehold on killer brutal complex death metal bands, a diverse but somewhat familiar regional style if you will, with various shades. Approaching the more brutal side of things are Redeeming Torment. This brutetechtesticular raging group rarely relent on their 2013 EP, The Dominion, but their penchant for thundering grooves gives the music a strong sense of dynamics, and they are adept at delivering a wall of thick, feverish sound that sticks with you.

The band are offering The Dominion for free, as I saw from a link they posted on their Facebook page: Continue reading »

REMNANTS OF 2013 (PART 1)

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
May 132014
 

(Austin Weber puts the spotlight on a big load of 2013 releases that he feels were overlooked.  This is Part 1 of a four-part piece; we’ll have the other parts on each of the remaining days this week.)

At a certain point, from time to time, trying to cover a lot of different bands in a single article can feel like a chore — a chore similar to an ugly child left in the ICU, one whom I have finally found the time to visit and finally snuff out! But I hope the emotional reaction you have is different from how it felt to complete another mammoth article. [Editor’s intrusion: I’ve divided this piece into four parts in an effort to make the readers’ emotional reaction more pleasurable.]

Much like last year, when I compiled a Remnants of 2012 post, I once again found some music I felt the metal scene greatly overlooked. Unfortunately, I’m overloaded in my life right now, so I don’t have time to write as much as I would like about each of these releases. A few of them are also from 2012, deal with it. And a few aren’t metal, deal with that too. Enjoy! Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: VINTERBRIS, BINAH, TENGGER CAVALRY

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  15 Responses »
May 122014
 


Vinterbris — drawing by Kim Holm

A lot of music and videos reached my ears and eyes over the weekend and today, and I’ve been collecting the best of what I heard in a series of posts. I guess I could have called all of them “Seen and Heard”, but I labeled the first one today “Videography”, and the next one (to be posted tomorrow) will be “Shades of Black”. Here are the next three goodies:

VINTERBRIS

I first came across this band from Bergen (Norway) last month after discovering that the very talented Norwegian artist Kim Holm had created the cover art for their forthcoming new album, Solace. I found an advance song named “Fathoms”, liked it a lot, and featured it here. (You can listen to another one at Pitchfork, where Kim Kelly spotlighted it.)

Today Vinterbris unveiled a wonderful music video for another new song, “Dysphoria”, which fittingly features Kim Holm’s creation of artwork for the songs on the album. As the band have explained, nothing in this video is sped up or otherwise altered. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: HUMAN BODIES

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
May 082014
 

I have poor impulse control.  Many people with poor impulse control die young. In my case, over many years, impulsive decisions have worked out to be good decisions. I know this is nothing more than being lucky in my dice rolls with an uncaring universe, but the experience hasn’t exactly motivated me to stop being impulsive.

Take last night for example. I have many partially written NCS pieces that are beginning to grow moss because they’ve been neglected for so long, not to mention a variety of interviews and reviews I told various people I would do but have not yet started. But did I make headway on any of those things-to-do? No I did not.

Instead, I impulsively checked out a link to a song posted on Facebook by someone whose taste has proven to be congruent with my own. And that song turned into five, and now I’m writing this — because it all worked out, yet again.

I think the soil of my mind had already been furrowed and fertilized and made ready for the seeds sewn by Human Bodies after listening to a song by the band Dripback whose album Andy Synn reviewed for us yesterday. Which is to say, I was already hammered by pissed-off music and was in the mood to receive more. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SERPENTS LAIR — “DEMO MMXIV”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  9 Responses »
May 042014
 

 

Serpents Lair are from Sjælland, Denmark.  The members have not disclosed their identities or musical pedigrees. Two shrouded figures appear in a photo on their Facebook page, so I assume there are only two people in the band, but that’s merely an educated guess. Beyond that, all I know is that on May 2 they released a two-song demo on Bandcamp, and I’m tremendously impressed by it.

I’m perfectly happy with black metal that just tears, rips, and froths the waters like a school of piranha on a fresh carcass, and Serpents Lair certainly do that — and do it with a ravenous appetite. But the music is so much more than that.

Ominous, dissonant melodies heave and swell through the music like storm tides, even when the band are racing, and that creates a potent, sinister atmosphere. But they don’t always race. The music also falls into slow, menacing processionals, with big ominous chords that reverberate like bells of doom and rhythms that methodically strike like hammer blows. There is almost as much an air of bitterness and anguish in this music as there is righteous fury. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: THE ARCANE ORDER — “PROMO 2014”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
May 042014
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the brand new two-song promo from The Arcane Order.)

You guys may remember that a ways back I did a week-long series on quality, under-the-radar melodic death metal bands via reviews of select albums.  One of the bands I wrote about was Denmark’s The Arcane Order, a group for whom I really haven’t adequately expressed my enthusiasm on this site.  These guys are melodic death metal of the most imperial strain — bombastic, titanic, with blackened ice and symphonic typhoon wind.

The Arcane Order have been MIA for some time now.  Their last album, In the Wake of Collisions, came out way back in 2008.  I’ve followed them eagerly nonetheless, especially when they started talk of writing a new album last year and have since actually begun working on a new record.  To whet peoples appetites, I suppose, the band decided to debut two new songs just to let people know how things are coming along. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ORNAMENTAL HEADPIECE — “MASKS OF ASH”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
May 012014
 

I chuckled when I first saw the name of this band, and then chuckled more volubly when I saw the cover of their debut EP, Masks of Ash. That is indeed one hell of an ornamental headpiece. Someday maybe I’ll find out how they picked their name, but of course what really counts now is the music, and Masks of Ash is awfully good.

The band’s membership is somewhat obscure, though it includes Damian Master (aka Deathless Maranatha of A Pregnant Light and Dukula Menelek of Aksumite), as well as one or more people from a band named Citizen and another from Detroit named Freedom. For me, Master’s presence made the EP immediately worth checking out — and I was hurried along in doing so by NCS supporter Utmu.

The four-song offering only lasts about 11 minutes total, but it’s a compelling 11-minute ride. The dominant style is black metal — on the raw, blasting, lo-fi end of the spectrum — but there are other ingredients in the mix as well. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HOLOCAUSTO CANIBAL, MARTY FRIEDMAN, POTERGEIST

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Apr 242014
 

For the second day in a row, I was disconnected from the internet for almost the entirety of Wednesday, with very little time to listen to music or write about it — and the same thing is going to happen today. But I did manage to find a few new things last night and this morning that I wanted to recommend. And here they are…

HOLOCAUSTO CANIBAL

This Portuguese band have been around for 17 years, but this is their first appearance at NCS. They have a new EP entitled Larvas coming our way in May via The Czech Republic’s Bizarre Leprous Productions. It includes 13 tracks and more than 30 minutes of destruction. Four of the songs are new, six of them are live recordings from the band’s performance at the Obscene Extreme Festival in 2013, and the remainder are remixes by other artists of tracks from the band’s last album Gorefilia. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ROCKET PROPELLED CHAINSAWS — “KILL THE DEMO”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  11 Responses »
Apr 152014
 

Metal is such a diverse genre of music that you would need an enormous number of axes to diagram the spectra of its manifold characteristics (I’m using “axes” as the plural of “axis”, not that electrified thing you use to shred up a storm of notes or the implements you use to cleave the skulls of your enemies). On one of these axes I imagine two extremes at either end:

At one end there’s deeply somber, glacially paced atmospheric music, with few if any riffs and a pall of gloom and grief hanging heavy like a fog. On the other end — well, that’s where you’ll find Rocket Propelled Chainsaws: the place where you party ’til you vomit and mosh ’til everyone’s on their way to the emergency room with sirens screaming.

I found out about this band because it includes guitarist Sean Corkum, who’s also in a band I’ve written before named Eldritch Flamethrower. Obviously, either Sean hangs out with people who’ve got a gift for coming up with awesome band names or he’s got the gift. Either way, Eldritch Flamethrower and Rocket Propelled Chainsaws are mighty fine names. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries