NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE, ZHRINE, DEMONSTEALER, ZOMBIE LAKE, TENDAGRUTA

Feb 022016

I’ve been gorging myself in newly released (or newly discovered) songs and a few EPs over the last 24 hours. If music were food, I’d be this guy by now — just one more bit of song and I’d explode. To make matters worse (i.e., better), I liked a large percentage of what I saw and heard. So that I can begin getting some of the music up on the site, I’ve divided the collection into multiple parts. More might come today, but definitely tomorrow.

By the way, if you’d like to hear full-album streams of the new Urgehal and Obscura albums, go here and here, respectively.

FLESHGOD APOCALYPSE

Fleshgod Apocalypse have been teasing about a new video, and we’ve been speculating internally about which song from their new album (King, reviewed here) would provide the subject matter. Now we know, because today FA premiered their new video for “Cold As Perfection”. Before you watch it, here’s a statement about the video by drummer Francesco Paoli, who also directed the clip along with filmmaker and photographer Salvatore Perrone. The video, by the way, is NSFW. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: THE SPIRIT CABINET (SNAKE MCRUFFKIN)

Interviews No Responses »

Feb 022016

(Comrade Aleks is back, and brings with him a snake, or rather an interview with Snake McRuffkin, vocalist of the Dutch band The Spirit Cabinet, whose members come from other well-respected extreme bands and whose debut album appeared last August.)

Can you imagine that could happen if you gathered in one rehearsal place a guitarist from a black/thrash band (Zwartketterij), a drummer from a doom metal band (Hooded Priest), a bass player from a black metal band (Cirith Gorgor), and a vocalist from another black metal band (Urfaust)? Okay, here’s the answer – bloody impressive heavy doom metal with influences from all the above-mentioned bands and damned good dark lyrics on spiritualistic topics.

The Spirit Cabinet consists of four members – Erich Vilsmeier, Cromwell Fleedwood, Johnny Hällström, and Snake McRuffkin — who came to an understanding of what they wanted, and their first full-length record Hystero Epileptic Possessed was born in a pretty natural way just a year after they gathered for the first time.

It saw the light with the help of Ván Records, and I feel myself inspired and enlightened enough to bring the Word of The Spirit Cabinet further to those who thirst for knowledge and some mental pabulum. During a midnight séance Snake McRuffkin shared his experience of playing in this band. Continue reading »

LEPERKAHN’S PERFECTLY ON-TIME BEST OF 2015 LIST

LISTMANIA 2015 9 Responses »

Feb 022016

(The word “procrastination” is one with which I am intimately familiar — it’s like a close personal friend. And therefore, I could hardly say no to posting this one further year-end list from our friend Leperkahn despite the fact that we wrapped up our 2015 Listmania series in mid-January, and despite his ugly and uncalled-for reminder that I still haven’t finished the 2015 Most Infectious Song list….)

Hey guys. As you might have guessed, that headline is completely satirical, since I meant to write some version of this in early December more or less, and it’s now currently the front-end of February. My only saving grace is that Islander hasn’t finished his rollout of his Most Infectious Songs list either.

I obviously wrote much less here in 2015 than in years past – I blame that partially on school and other time-fillers, but it mostly has to do with my truly award-worthy levels of procrastination, with a pinch of laziness adding a complementary garnish. That said, I still listened to a ton of great music, and lurked with mostly banal comments on probably 70% of NCS’s posts, indicating my continued existence and enjoyment of the fare here.

I’m going to try and focus on some releases that I don’t think got as extensively covered here either throughout the year or during the Listmania blitz, but inevitably that won’t happen. That said, here’s an incomplete list of some of the ones off the top of my head that I wholeheartedly agree with: Continue reading »

MECHINA: “PROGENITOR”

Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule 5 Responses »

Feb 022016

(DGR weighs in on the new album by Chicago’s Mechina, as you knew he would.)

The January 1st album release has become a comedic undertone to my writing as of late. It’s never one that I have advanced warning for, nor is it one that I am ever truly adequately prepared for. Instead, it just serves as a reminder of the relentless march of time and the constant – and reassuring – pressures of being a writer for this site. It’s strange, but I have found comfort in this sense, the idea that I am already late and that I have fucked up.

Without that pressure, life seems aimless, and so, as it has been for the past handful of years, I have Mechina to thank for the fact that I am once again dragging ass on a review. The sun has risen in the east and set in the west, the sky is still blue, and all is right with the world – because as I take longer and longer to write out this review out, each moment means that I am later than I was before. Always the hare in Alice In Wonderland, and in that way continuing exactly how I felt last year and the year before.

It’s that consistency that one needs as a reminder that while the year has ticked up one notch, things haven’t really changed and the world is a mess. God forbid any actual events happen. This ladies and gentlemen, is how I start my year. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 68: SEVEN SISTERS OF SLEEP

Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT 3 Responses »

Feb 012016

photo by Forrest Locke

(For this 68th edition of The Synn Report, Andy takes as his subject the discography of SoCal’s Seven Sisters of Sleep — including their brand new album due for release by Relapse on February 5.)

Recommended for fans of: Eyehategod, Acid Bath, Soilent Green

After traversing the parched, sun-beaten wastelands of Texas in last month’s edition of The Synn Report, this time we’re travelling West to the city of angels, Los Angeles, to catch up with inveterate noise-mongers Seven Sisters of Sleep.

For those unfamiliar with the band, here’s a warning. This is some nasty, unrepentantly nihilistic stuff, straddling the blood-crusted nexus point between filthy Sludge, groaning Doom, buzzing Drone, seething Hardcore, and grim Old School Death Metal… with more than a few splashes of venomous Grind thrown in for good measure. Suffice it to say, this is definitely not music for the faint of heart.

By the same token though, it never feels like the band have just mashed-up all these sounds into one big, messy Extreme Metal sundae. Rather their sound comes across like a distillation of each of these styles down to their shared essence, filtered and refined to produce pure Extreme Metal moonshine, that’s just as likely to make you bang your head and scream your guts out as it is to make you go blind… and scream your guts out.

Though the band have a fair few splits and EPs to their name, I’ve elected to stick just to the full-length albums for this edition of The Synn Report, in particular their about-to-be-released third album Ezekiel’s Hags. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WITCH OF THE WASTE — “I BET YOU’RE WONDERING WHAT I’M DOING WITH THIS HERE GAS CAN”

Premieres 1 Response »

Feb 012016

(Austin Weber introduces our premiere of a video from Vancouver, BC’s Witch of the Waste.)

After covering the latest Witch Of The Waste here at NCS last year, and then also placing it on my year-end list, I’d hope most of our audience is already aware of these brilliant Canadian noisemongerers by now. But if you aren’t, we are exclusively premiering a video for the closing song off last year’s fantastic EP, Made Of Teeth. So if you missed both of my prior posts about these guys, now is the time to tune in and turn it up loud.

To briefly summarize my initial assessment of Made Of Teeth, I’ll quote from my 2015 write-up on it here at NCS: “Like a modern spin on the chaotic metallic hardcore wave of old, Witch Of The Waste come across similar to phenomenal acts such as Burnt By The Sun, Dillinger, As The Sun Sets, and Ed Gein. Neither completely a metal or hardcore record, Made of Teeth straddles the line in a spazzy way that’s always interesting and unique. In addition Made Out Of Teeth also injects some grim and smashing black metal elements into their brand of sonic life-ending napalm.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TORMENTIUM — “FALLEN (IN DEFIANCE)”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Feb 012016

Tormentium have been poisoning the Pacific Northwest for more than a decade, cascading Cascadia with their own preternatural darkness through a sequence of demos, splits with Infernus and Cult of Unholy Shadows, an EP (Cursed Beyond Flesh), and live assaults. On March 25, Exile Music(k) will bring us the band’s debut album Bound To the Depths, and today we bring you the premiere of a song from the album named “Fallen (In Defiance)“.

The band have explained that Bound To The Depths “is a large body of work with a loose subjective theme: where the ‘depths’ represents something different in each piece… your inner demons, desires, convictions, and damnations. The lyrics are mainly story-like narratives, reflecting these themes through characters, and ultimately reflecting metaphorically through the listener. The album as a whole flows like a story as well, guiding the listener through the aether of darkness to events of rage, insanity, and sacrifice.” Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ENTROPIA — “UFONAUT”

Album Reviews, Premieres 6 Responses »

Feb 012016

In the last days of the last year I came across a new song named “Mandala” from a new album by Poland’s Entropia. As I wrote at the time, it’s heavy, high-energy music that defies easy genre classification, with pneumatic grooves, twisted riffs, otherworldly guitar arpeggios, and quirky electronica capable of pushing you past your comparatively drab surroundings and into this band’s inventive vision. And as you’re about to find out, the same could be said of the entire mind-bending album.

The name of the record is Ufonaut. It follows the band’s 2013 debut album Vesper, and it will be released by Arachnophobia Records on February 15. It’s a cocktail of adrenaline, paving tar, and mescaline, consumed in an asylum — and it’s a completely electrifying concoction from the first gulp to the last. Continue reading »

FUATH: “I”

Album Reviews 9 Responses »

Feb 012016

(We welcome Jay Lawrence to the pages of our putrid blog. He is a self-described long-time metal nerd from Philadelphia with a specific penchant for black metal. He likes both cats and dogs, couldn’t care less about the Eagles or Phillies, and doesn’t want to hear about your experiences with cheesesteaks. He shares with us his review of the wonderful new album by Scotland’s Fuath.)

Look at that cover artwork. Could anything be more fitting for a winter release?

I suppose I’ll begin by telling you what you’ll all be able to find out when this band and album eventually get added to Metal Archives: Fuath is a Scots Gaelic word meaning hatred, which is an interesting choice in my opinion, but more on that later. Fuath is also the latest endeavor from the Scotsman Andy Marshall, well-known previously within our community for his work with Saor, formerly Àrsaidh, — direct, if far more mature descendants of Andy’s early project, Askival, and all of those projects being black metal of an epic, Celtic folk-influenced nature. This is not true of Fuath, which certainly explains an entirely new brand being created under which to release this album. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LVTHN, DRAMA, PERDITION WINDS, IMPERCEPTUM, MERV’, VIOLET COLD, TRAUTONIST

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET 8 Responses »

Jan 312016

This is a rather super-sized edition of Shades of Black, collecting new and recently discovered music in a blackened vein. But believe me, this could have been much bigger still, because I’m sitting on a ton of other releases I’d like to include. I’ll put them in the fridge so they don’t spoil and defrost them later (though of course they’ll never completely de-frost).

LVTHN

I’ve thoroughly enjoyed all of this Belgian band’s previous releases, and have managed to write about most of them (collected behind this link). And before I get to a brand new LVTHN song, I’ll mention that the band have recently made their 2014 compilation release The Grand Uncreation available for “name your price” download on Bandcamp (here). Continue reading »

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