SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): EUCHARIST, VUKARI, LIGHT BEING

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Oct 242021
 

This turned into a much bigger round-up of black lights than I had anticipated. It started off shorter, but the predicted “bomb cyclone” in the Puget Sound turned into a big fat nothing yesterday, my wife laughed and went off to pal around with a friend, and I had a chunk of time to myself, with the cats peacefully sleeping. And so I expanded this to include three full albums and an EP, in addition to a couple of exciting advance tracks and a debut demo.

To make this large collection more digestible, I’ve divided it into two parts. I’m confident Part 2 will be ready later today, even though at this point it’s only partially written.

Even with the extra time I found yesterday, I’ve still kept my commentary somewhat brief on the longer releases, though I find all of them thrilling and hope you will too. Same goes for the other songs in this collection. Most of the world is a rotten mess, but musicians are still pulling out the stops. Maybe someday people will look back on these days as a covid Renaissance. We’re a miserable species, but we’re indefatigable.

EUCHARIST (Sweden)

Having been one of those rare people who came to extreme metal late in life, I’m not someone who experienced the foundational genre movements of the ’90s first-hand. And so it was only by reading that I came to understand the role of Eucharist. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HEMELBESTORMER, ARKENFROST, OTARGOS, VISEGARD, SVARDENVYRD

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Oct 172021
 


Hemelbestormer 2021 – photo by Istvan Bruggen

Greetings earthlings. It is reportedly the 42nd anniversary of the publication of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy — not the 40th, not the 50th, but the only anniversary that matters, and you know why, don’t you?

Today we resume hitchhiking through the galaxy of black and blackened metal, with occasional detours. Please follow along, and don’t forget to bring your towel. (I may have a second installment of SHADES OF BLACK for you later today, but am not positive, and so I haven’t called this Part 1.)

HEMELBESTORMER (Belgium)

I must confess that the anniversary of Hitchhiker’s Guide may have had something to do with why I chose the first three songs in today’s collection, though this opening trio of tracks isn’t nearly as light-hearted as that book. Moreover, thoughts of traveling through the dangers of space also had something to do with why I decided to open with a long a track that’s much more post-metal than it is a spawn of the black arts. I also just think the song and video are so damned captivating that I didn’t want to delay putting them before you. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: CROCELL, HEATHEN DEITY, BØG

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Oct 102021
 


Crocell

 

Last Thursday I seized on the chance to insert SHADES OF BLACK into the work-week with a trio of EPs as a way of trying to clear out a backlog of reviews that had been percolating in my head. I’ve decided to do the same thing today. Rather than include the usual scattering of advance tracks from forthcoming releases I’m focusing entirely on albums and EPs that are already out in the world.

Having said that, I have to confess that these reviews may not qualify as thorough reviews in the minds of some people. They’re more like brief previews and recommendations, leading all you horses to water and hoping you’ll drink.

CROCELL (Denmark)

The name Crocell has stuck in my head on the strength of their past releases (five albums over the course of a decade), despite the absence of anything new for the last 3 1/2 years. If you’ve been haunting NCS for a while, you’ve seen how often we’ve written about them. And so I didn’t waste much time reacting to the news that the band had released a pair of EPs, Funeral Bliss and Baptized in Bullets, on the same day near the end of September. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET (SHADES OF BLACK EDITION): SØRGELIG, IKU-TURSO, MISANTHROPÆ

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  6 Responses »
Oct 072021
 

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Time is always fleeting, but I kidnapped enough of it to write some brief reviews and heart-felt recommendations for three very recent short releases that have captivated me (maybe especially because more often than not I’m angry and depressed these days). The SHADES OF BLACK reference in the post title is intended to provide the clue that this is all black metal, but no two of these releases sound alike.

SØRGELIG (Greece)

One of the commenters on the Bandcamp page for Sørgelig‘s new EP Slaves of Tomorrow did a very nice job in capturing part of what makes the band, and this EP, so special:

“I love Sorgelig’s utterly ruthless and nihilistic, yet also surprisingly humane and hopeful, take on primal black metal. Yes, we all live ‘in the prison of dead dreams,’ but we *can* dream, we can rage, we can spit in the eyes of our masters and call *them* the slaves. We can burn this blighted hell of a failing so-called civilization to the ground and build something better”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HAIDUK, KANAHN, ANIMA HERETICAE

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Oct 032021
 

 

This week’s SHADES OF BLACK is going to be a bit shorter than usual. For better or worse, I spent a fair amount of time pulling together the two Overflowing Streams roundups that I posted earlier today, and wasn’t able to get to everything I wanted to write about for this column. Still, it’s a fair share of music, with streams and reviews of two new albums and one new EP. I’ll add that all of these selections include black metal as only one of several genre ingredients.

HAIDUK (Canada)

Haiduk‘s fourth album Diabolica (released on September 21st) consists of 11 tracks, all but two of them less than three minutes in length. Both individually and collectively, they deliver such full-bore intensity they may suck the wind from your lungs. You can imagine being caught in the midst of a gale-driven firestorm, or desperately hanging onto the wing of a jet aircraft that’s blazing straight up into the skies. The dense, swarming riffs and maniacal leads are themselves a superheated blaze of head-spinning, mind-mutilating sound. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: OFERMOD, PROFECI, SORGUINAZIA, HELLIGE, TRUUS, FLESIA, LAMP OF MURMUUR

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
Sep 192021
 

 

I got a spike of excitement from a couple of of Bandcamp alerts, only to feel letdown after clicking them. One was for a new Cantique Lepreux release, but none of the songs are streaming there yet. The other was for a new Wormlust release, but there’s no page for it yet, or maybe there was and it got pulled. But it’s just as well, because I already had more to write about for this week’s column than time to write about them.

What you’ll find below are six advance tracks from forthcoming releases and then a pair of full releases that surfaced from the same band within the last couple of days.

OFERMOD (Sweden)

Ofermod wasted no time returning with a new album, just a year after 2020’s Pentagrammaton (which was itself a double album). The new one is entitled Mysterium Iniquitatis, and it  sees the original lineup joined together once again – Belfagor on guitar and vocalist Nebiros (Malign, Mephorash) – with session bass by Magnus “Devo” Andersson (ex-Marduk) and session drums by Calle Larsson. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: DIABLATION, DUSK CULT, EOS, HEGEMON, LANGENNEET, LIGHT OF THE MORNING STAR, NON SERVIAM, VELKA, WITHERING SOUL

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Sep 122021
 


After completing the humongous two-part roundup of new songs and videos that I posted earlier today I nearly gave up on the idea of making this regular Sunday column. Just not much gas left in the tank, and the first Seahawks football game of the season is already under way. But I know some people come here on Sundays for this column, and I don’t want to completely disappoint.

So, I did here what I did with those previous roundups — skimping on the artwork and links, and abbreviating my own commentary, in the hope that mainly tossing out the music is better than nothing at all. And so, with apologies to the bands and to people who actually enjoy the usual format, here we go… presented alphabetically by band name.

DIABLATION (France)

This first song is a frightening yet entrancing one. It reveals eerie, preternatural keyboards that seem to ring from fracturing heavens, and combines those with viscerally powerful rhythms, terrorizing vocal battalions, and racing storms of searing riffage and rampantly hurtling bass and drums. The effect is nightmarish yet intoxicating, menacingly magisterial and marauding. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: NUR RUN, NIFROST, ADOPERTA TENEBRIS, SATURNIAN MIST, SOREM, GLYPH, LURID, DEATHFUCKER

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Sep 052021
 

 

You want to know how the sausage gets made? Okay, I see one hand at the back of the room and that’s all I need even though the rest of you are recoiling.

When I woke up at 4:30 a.m. this morning I had about half a dozen candidates I was considering for this column based on previous listening. But I didn’t stop with that. After feeding the cats, caffeinating myself, and smoking a couple cigarettes, I collected links to more than 20 other possibilities, some of them from tabs I’d opened on my computer during the past week and some I found from crawling through arrivals in the NCS email in-box over the last few days, which I hadn’t perused carefully until yesterday afternoon.

I then copied all those links into the NCS WordPress editor and opened them again at a computer in our house that has shitty wi-fi. The one with a decent internet connection is in the “family room” where the TV is, and my wife was in there catching up on the news (she wakes up ridiculously early too). Even with headphones on, I can’t listen to metal in that room when she’s there. I have to crank up the volume, and her ears are so sensitive that she can hear the sound leaking through the headphones. It annoys her because she can’t stand extreme metal. I strongly prefer that she not be annoyed. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: DEADSPACE, SVARTULVEN, ASCENDED DEAD, ATOMICIDE, TSALAL, GRAVATUS, RAZÖRSCHRIECK

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Aug 292021
 

 

Time to blacken the christian Sabbath again, as is our want. I decided to be lazy yesterday rather than compile the usual Saturday round-up of new songs and videos, but I did devote some time to browsing blackened metal, including some music that’s been out in the world (but not in my head) for many months, and you’ll find the results below.

I would say there’s a more disturbing and depressive feel to these choices than might usually be the case. I’m not in therapy so I don’t know for sure if this is a reflection of changes in my usually sunny mood, though I wouldn’t be surprised if that were true. It might just be that the first song took me down that path, and everything else simply fell into place.

DEADSPACE (multinational)

We lamented the split-up of Deadspace when that was announced last year, but celebrated their final album, A Portrait of Sacrificial Scars, as the band’s best work of all. Happily, however, Deadspace have reunited, though I somehow overlooked that announcement, first disclosed in March, until yesterday. I also overlooked that in June the band released a video for a new song named “Moksha“. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LIGHT OF THE MORNING STAR, BEASTIAL MAJESTY, THUNRAZ, CULT OF EIBON, SUN DESCENDS BLACK, NUUMMITE

 Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Aug 222021
 

 

I’m going to dispense with an introduction to today’s column, other than to say that what I’ve chosen is going to give you a strange trip from beginning to end.

LIGHT OF THE MORNING STAR (UK)

I was quite taken by both of this band’s first two releases, a 2016 EP named Cemetery Glow, and a 2017 debut full-length named Nocta, both of which were released by Iron Bonehead. Now there’s another album headed our way, via the band’s new label Debemur Morti Productions. DMP describes the new one in these words:

“Potently blending cinematic Deathrock, ghoulish Doom, heavy Post-Punk and atmospheric Black Metal, Charnel Noir is a hook-ridden exploration of the necromantic Undead which captures the restraint, tension and dark romanticism present in the great canonical Gothic works”. Continue reading »

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