SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: AT THE GATES, KATAKLYSM, LIGHT THIS CITY, WOMBBATH

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Mar 312018
 

 

A few of my NCS comrades have been nudging me to do a round-up that includes the latest songs revealed by At the Gates, Kataklysm, and Light This City. I didn’t have time to do this yesterday when I got that nudging, but decided to do it today even though Andy’s latest Waxing Lyrical post would have given me an excuse to check out from NCS writing for the day. And since I decided to pull those three songs together, I added one pick of my own.

AT THE GATES

I suppose you’d have to be living under a rock not to know that At the Gates have a new album headed our way. For you under-rock dwellers, To Drink From the Night Itself will be released by Century Media on May 18th. Yesterday brought another single from the album, packaged with a wonderful video created by Costin Chioreanu of Twilight 13 Media. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ANTICOSMOS — “WATERS OF DISSOLUTION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Mar 302018
 

 

Like the vast majority of all grand estates and even medium-sized garden plots on the landscape of the internet, most sites that offer writings about metal are captives of the culture of clickbait. They are honey traps for lazy flitting bees, offering precious little intellectual sustenance of any lasting value, or even much fleeting value. They mainly just make the frenetic buzzing of their visitors grow louder, but no more coherent.

But there are exceptions. The extraordinarily ambitious essay by R.M. Temin published by Toilet Ov Hell a few days ago is one of those. For most of its considerable length, it is a history of transgressive music, mainly focused on metal. It takes Black Sabbath as its starting point (after first drawing connections to the Beat Generation and “hippie counterculture”) and charts the course straight through to the present. Its overarching theme has to do with the connections between metal and politics, and ultimately about the rise and persistence of far-right politics within certain sectors of extreme music. It’s title is: “Rock Against Anything: How Metal Became So Fucking Reactionary and What To Do About It“. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): NIGHTGRAVE, GYRE OF INCANDESCENTS, TRAUTONIST, ELÄNDE, NORNAHETTA

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Mar 252018
 

 

The second part of this Sunday’s SHADES OF BLACK post, which I began here, includes a lot of music — four complete releases. The last of them isn’t as “hot off the presses” as most of what I choose for these columns. But you’ll understand why I picked it when you get there.

NIGHTGRAVE

If the name Nightgrave is familiar, it might be because I’ve written some very positive impressions in this column about both Nightgrave’s last album Echo (2017) and the one before that, Futures, (also 2017). Not one to let much grass grow under his feet, Nightgrave’s creator (Sushant Rawat, aka Nium, from New Delhi, India) has already released another album. This one, entitled Nascent, appeared on February 14. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): ALTAR OF PERVERSION, NIGREDO, HÄXENZIJRKELL, MORTUUS UMBRA

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Mar 252018
 

 

One benefit of Andy Synn’s new Waxing Lyrical series as a regular Saturday post at NCS is that it has freed me to do other things, since I no longer feel compelled to concoct something of my own on Saturdays. Most “normal” people might take advantage of the opportunity to indulge in slothfulness. It seems that my own “abnormality” instead leads to two-part SHADES OF BLACK posts on Sunday.

ALTAR OF PERVERSION

The most recent interview posted at the on-line edition of Bardo Methodology was an especially thought-provoking one, a discussion by proprietor Niklas Göransson with Calus, one of the two men behind the Italian black metal band Altar of Perversion. The on-line version of the interview is only an excerpt from a much longer and even more in-depth conversation in the print edition of Bardo Methodology #3, which I will be anxious to read when my copy arrives in the mail.

What I read on-line revived some of my own lines of thought about the intellectual and emotional inspirations and underpinnings of black metal, which I might finally decide to write about in the near future. But it also contains a fascinating segment on the audio frequency of 432 Hertz (referred to as “Pythagorean tuning” when applied to the tuning of musical instruments) and its connections to nature, as well as its numerical synchronicities with a host of ancient writings and esoteric teachings. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): COSMIC CHURCH, UNREQVITED, SCHRAT, VONLAUS, BOIS

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Mar 182018
 

 

Continuing on from Part 1 of this Sunday’s column, I’ve chosen new music from five black metal bands. One is a recently released EP and the rest of the songs are from albums scheduled for release in the coming months. If you missed Part 1, it’s here.

COSMIC CHURCH

The Finnish one-man band Cosmic Church has released two albums and many shorter releases since the first demo in 2006, but has now decided to end its life with one final album, entitled Täyttymys. A single called “Armolahja” was digitally released on March 15th as a preview of the album, which will appear on CD and vinyl at some unknown future date via the Finnish black metal label Kuunpalvelus. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): GUÐVEIKI, TRNA, UADA, RAAT

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Mar 182018
 

 

Three weeks have passed since the last of these columns, mainly because of my vacation to Iceland, so I decided to double up today. I’m also still experiencing postpartum depression from the severance of myself from Iceland. To treat the condition, I chose to include some new music from Icelandic black metal bands, one in this Part of the column and another in Part 2. Other parts of the world are also included, before the flood of Icelandic black metal covers them like the deluge of Genesis and reduces the globe to a state of watery chaos.

GUÐVEIKI

Mystískaos is a record label (or perhaps more accurately, a creative collective) formed through the collaboration of American musician Alex Poole (Skáphe, Chaos Moon, Entheogen) and Icelandic musician H.V Lyngdal (Wormlust, Ljáin, Martröð). Its list of releases principally consists of the projects of those two creators, but includes participation by other people within their circles, and now also includes a partnership with Fallen Empire. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ONIRISM, HECATE, MISANTHROPIC RAGE, ENDE, KOSTNATĚNÍ

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Feb 252018
 

 

I stared at my long list of recent black metal releases that I found appealing. My eyes drifted further down the list to all the releases and advance tracks from weeks past that I had wanted to say something about, but hadn’t. That daunted feeling that crept into my head like a bad old friend, it locked up my brain. To unlock it, I tried to allow instinct to take over, and speared these five names based on the thought that the flow of the music would provide some interesting twists and turns as you move through them.

ONIRISM

Upon encountering this one-man French band’s second EP, Sun, last year, I tried to sum up my reaction in these words: “Onirism isn’t the first band to combine utterly enthralling and transcendently beautiful sounds with the kind of savagery that makes you want to hide under your bed, but holy hell, they do it well.”

Later in the year I revisited Onirism through our premiere of a track from the band’s split with Pure Wrath, and left enthralled again. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: WIEGEDOOD, ATRA VETOSUS, JUBAL, AGRONA, LUSTRE, KALMANKANTAJA, BLUTVIAL

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Feb 182018
 


Wiegedood – photo by Stefaan Temmerman

 

Saturdays and Sunday mornings have become challenging times for me in the thinking I allocate to these SHADES OF BLACK posts. Having listened off and on to a lot of new black metal during the preceding week, I think I’ve figured out by mid-day Saturday what to include, and then, by coincidence or cunning, a whole bunch of new stuff lands in my lap.

Yesterday was a prime example. Having narrowed my choices, they suddenly ballooned again, thanks to late-breaking recommendations from friends and readers, and e-mails from bands and labels. The flood of communications into our chaotic command center usually dwindles dramatically on Saturdays, but those that persist tend to focus on music from the black realms, and I tend to pay attention to them more quickly because everything else has kind of cleared out.

What to do? Well, one thing I did was to expand the volume of music in today’s post. And given my renewed resolution to cut down on the number of premieres I agree to write during the week, another option will be to collect more new music in a blackened vein for a week-day edition of this series.

WIEGEDOOD

I do my best not to read comments about music on the internet (or comments about almost anything else) unless they were written by friends or respected musicians, or unless they appear at NCS. I can guess that if I made an exception to that resolution in the case of Wiegedood’s new song and video, the majority of them would be juvenilia about penises. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ECLOSS, SVNEATR, MORMÂNT DE SNAGOV, SVPREMACIST

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Feb 112018
 

 

As I explained in Part 1 of today’s long column, this collection begins with three substantial works of atmospheric black metal largely devoted to “long-form” compositions, and then makes some sharp stylistic turns. The first item in this Part 2 is the third of those opening pieces and becomes a bridge to the veering course in the final trio.

ECLOSS

Ecloss is a one-man project based in Paris. The Ecloss debut album, Diluvienne, was released on January 26 and consists of three long songs. The shortest of those, at about 9 minutes, is the opener “Mensonges De Profane“, which is what convinced me (without argument) to plunge into the even more substantial works that follow it. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): MIDNARTIIS, WINDSWEPT

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Feb 112018
 

 

Welcome to the regular Sunday edition of this column, which follows the irregular one I posted yesterday after failing to complete it earlier as planned. I’ve divided it into two parts because there’s quite a lot of music in today’s post, with six bands and four complete releases in addition to advance tracks from two others that are on the way.

On top of that, the first three of the complete releases include “long-form” songs. All of them are examples of emotionally powerful atmospheric black metal. But after those three I decided to make a sharp stylistic turn (actually, several sharp turns).

P.S.: I’m rarely cool, calm, and collected when writing about music; I only write about what I like and tend to let the words reflect the excitement… and I really like what you’re about to hear.

MIDNARTIIS

Two years ago I reviewed and premiered a wonderful album named Waves of Degradation by the Texas folk-influenced atmospheric black metal band Krigsgrav. It was the band’s fourth album but my first serious exposure to their music, and it was a hell of a discovery.

Krigsgrav are far along in their work on a new album, but their former bassist Wes Radvansky, who seems to have parted ways with the band since the last Krigsgrav album, has his own solo project, the name of which is Midnartiis. Continue reading »

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