SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): CARPE NOCTEM AND ÁRSTÍÐIR LÍFSINS — “ALDRNARI”

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Apr 192020
 

 

Earlier today I promised a second installment in this weekly column, and this is it, though it focuses on only a single release — but it’s a big one, album-length in size and featuring the work of two bands who have always made a big and very favorable impression: Carpe Noctem and Árstíðir lífsins.

The name of this new split is Aldrnari and it’s set for release by Ván Records on April 24th. It features cover art by Artem Grigoryev and is said to explore “themes of death and war, fire and life”. Each band contributed one song to the split, each of them more than 22 minutes in length, and both are now up for listening on YouTube. We’ll briefly consider them one at a time. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): IMPIETY, AKATECHISM, SLIDHR, EAVE, GOLDEN LIGHT, HEILUNG

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Apr 192020
 

 

You may have noticed that I didn’t post anything yesterday, a rare missed Saturday opportunity. I participated in three virtual happy hours on Friday afternoon and evening and somehow didn’t understand that I wasn’t required to drink straight through all of them. Saturday taught me that lesson, brutally.

I’ll try to make up for lost time today with two installments of this usual Sunday column.

IMPIETY

Versus All Gods is the ninth full-length by this famous Singapore band, and the first one since 2012’s Revenge & Conquer. In those seven years two new guitarists joined the line-up, and something happened to the song-writing as well — something that seemed to convey rejuvenation, a return to the thermonuclear energies that fueled earlier releases, coupled with the mastery that comes with experience, sort of like a barbarian horde that has learned through decades of successful conquest how to decimate even more powerfully and brutally. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ANAMNESI, HORNWOOD FELL, IXAXAAR NEXIA, FUNERAL RITES

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Apr 122020
 


Emanuele Prandoni, the man behind Anamnesi

 

After writing this morning’s premiere feature for a song by From the Vastland (which I urge you to hear if you haven’t), I succumbed to a plague. No, not that plague, a plague of laziness. By the time I roused myself out of the stupor, hours had passed. To keep this post from appearing too late in the day, I did some painful cutting back of what I had planned to include. But what’s left here is very, very good.

ANAMNESI

“S’Enna e S’arca“, the second single from a new album by the Italian band Anamnesi, is a magnificent song and a multi-faceted one. Its anchor point is a combination of deep drilling riffs and high swirling ones, the combination creating a feeling of cold cruelty and fevered anguish over heavy drum thunder, slashing cymbals, and scintillating fills. The song includes bestial vocals and a variety of sharp rhythmic breaks that introduce booming and jolting sensations. The music is perpetually accented by riveting drumwork and by morphing guitar emanations that seem increasingly bleak and haunting, but with sounds that also resemble birdsong at one point.

The sharpest break comes near the middle, when the music transforms into mystical keyboard ambience before the drum and bass mount a methodical and magisterial skull-pounding assault, and those glimmering and gouging riffs return. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ALASTHOR, BLIGHT, BOREAL, BURIAL, SKOGNATT, SLAGMARK

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Apr 052020
 

 

I nearly called this SHADES OF BLACK-PART 1, because I have a few albums I want to recommend and briefly review, in addition to the individual tracks and EPs I’ve collected here. I’m going to try to do that, but in looking at other things that are already in the works I’m not sure I can push myself to do it quickly. So we’ll see, but in the meantime I hope you’ll enjoy what follows. I believe that each of these six bands are making their first appearance at NCS.

ALASTHOR

The Belgian duo Alasthor claim inspiration from such bands as Marduk, Arkhon infaustus, Dissection, Gorgoroth, Funeral Mist, Nargaroth, and Mgla, and for their lyrical themes they draw upon studies and practices of the Left Hand Path. Their newest release, Mahapralaya, is a four-track offering that was revealed on March 24th. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: BALMOG, IRAE, SØRGELIG, LEBENSSUCHT, SYMBIOTIC GROWTH

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Mar 292020
 

 

After all the listening and writing I’ve done this weekend, honestly I’m out of gas. So let’s just go right to it….

BALMOG

We begin with a track that roams far and wide over its significant length. In the band’s own words, “18 minutes of oppression and mysticism”, but there’s more than that. The music is eerie and crushing, dissonant and disturbed, wailing and delirious, vicious and violent, spectral and sepulchral, swaggering and priapic, bombastic and bruising, grand and glorious — and also home to some head-hooking riffs and spectacular soloing. The vocals are wide-ranging as well, more often than not frighteningly insane, but also spine-tingling when they soar. In its cadences, it stomps, rocks, races, crawls, and drifts away into a rhythm-less ether. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ISKALDE MORKET, COLDWORLD, OMNIKINETIC, CRUSTY OLD TOAD

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Mar 232020
 

 

Here’s the second part of this week’s column, which I began here yesterday. As usual, I’ve been unable to write about everything I wanted to write about and have had to be (relatively) brief, but that’s because I have a couple of album reviews to finish writing — they will accompany premiere streams today, both of which will be worth your time.

All of the music you’ll find below was created by one-person bands — one from the UK, one from Germany, and two from Portland, Oregon. In these days of the virus, when most people follow the edicts of social distancing, we may come to increasingly rely on such one-person projects for new music. Not all of that will be as good as what you’re about to discover.

ISKALDE MORKET

This is the UK project I mentioned; its creator lives in Norwich. The album, Metaphysics of Mass Murder, was released on March 17th. The band’s thumbnail description of the music on Bandcamp is “Apex Dissonance. Labyrinthine Technical Black Metal”, and that happens to be not only evocative but also accurate — though it doesn’t go quite far enough. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): PRISON OF MIRRORS, YALDABAOTH, DEPARTURE CHANDELIER, REVENGE

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Mar 222020
 

 

Maybe it’s because I’ve become a virus shut-in, but I’m finding even more than the usual quantity of new black metal that is appealing, and even a greater desire to spread it around. I’ve consumed a lot of time over the last 24 hours with those two Overflowing Streams round-ups (here and here), and want to at least make a start on today’s SHADES OF BLACK before I have to do something else (and surely there’s something else I have to do besides blog, though I can’t think what it is). So, I’ve divided it into two Parts. Depending on whether I think of something else I should be doing, it may arrive later today or be deferred until Monday.

PRISON OF MIRRORS

I first encountered this Italian band in 2017, following he release of their second EP, Unstinted, Delirious, Convulsive Oaths, whose sound I described as the feeling of being pursued by wolves in the dead of night: “Across all the changes in tempo, the atmosphere is pitch-black and ice-cold, and traces of dissonance in the hopeless melodies heighten the sense of frightening peril at your heels and sinister, supernatural forces at work on your mind. And the vocals are as ugly as a sin you’ll never purge”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: WITCHTHRONE, ALKYMIST, IMPERIAL SAVAGERY, SCOLOPENDRA, PONTE DEL DIAVOLO, DEKIRA

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Mar 152020
 

 

I think I overdid it yesterday. Putting together those two Overflowing Streams posts mentally wore me out. So I didn’t get a head start on this SOB post yesterday, and wound up figuring out what to do with it this morning. One consequence of the delay is that I decided to avoid writing about complete new releases, which is more demanding (even though it might not seem that way when you read my ramblings). Instead, I picked eight new individual tracks (some of them with videos) from six bands.

I’ll forewarn you that I veered a bit off course for this column and included songs that aren’t strictly black metal, but to my ears are close cousins. If you want stuff that’s more in the main line, you’ll find some in those Overflowing Streams columns.

WITCHTHRONE

The first item I selected is a new video for a new song by the Hungarian band Witchthrone, whose music has both post-metal and black-metal elements. Entitled “Shallow“, the song is one of four on their self-titled debut EP, which is set for release on March 20th. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: APOGNOSIS, HRÆ , VENOMOUS SKELETON, ADAESTUO, SCHWERMUT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  10 Responses »
Mar 082020
 

 

For this week’s edition of the column I decided to include five complete releases, four albums and an EP, all but one of them released since late January. But my time is short, and so, with apologies to the bands, the only way I’ve been able to manage this is to pursue a strategy of picking only one song per release to focus on, accompanied by just the most general overview of everything else. With luck, this will be enough to seduce people into exploring each release in greater depth, despite the relative shallowness of my own words.

APOGNOSIS

The Greek black metal band Adaestuo is one of two in today’s feature whose past work I was familiar with, and that past work — a self-titled demo in 2016, the Phase 6 debut album that same year, and the Cult of Human Sacrifices EP in 2018 — has been remarkably impressive. The new release is an album entitled Dominion In Polarity. It came out last September, and I really should have written something about it before now, because it’s tremendous. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ABYSSFIRE, BÂ’A, GAVRANOVI, AT THE ALTAR OF THE HORNED GOD, ERRANT, SVARTKONST, AUTOMB

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
Mar 012020
 

 

For this column I originally picked six tracks from forthcoming albums or EPs. I thoroughly enjoyed all these songs, and they have the added benefit of being very different from each other, with highly variable (and sometimes only tenuous) connections to the traditions of black metal (the column is called SHARES OF BLACK for a reason).

At the last minute, however, I also added one new album. I discovered it upon waking up this morning, thanks to a message from Rennie (starkweather). It was an explosive way to wake up, but man, it did wake me the fuck up. So I’m starting this column with it. I also hope I’ll have time to write a few words about some additional full-length releases I want to recommend from the blackened realms. But I have a lot on my plate at the moment, so I’m not daring enough to call this Part 1. Fingers crossed that I’ll get a companion to this column finished at some point during the coming week.

ABYSSFIRE

Yesterday, on Leap Day, the Russian death/black band Abyssfire vomited forth their blasphemous debut album, adorned with hellish artwork by Nether Temple Design. I have listened to it once, so far, and the music is completely in keeping with the album’s title: The Raging Hearts of Hell. Continue reading »

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