NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: AGORAPHOBIC NOSEBLEED, EXMORTUS, FUCK THE FACTS, MAGRUDERGRIND

Jan 092016

Happy Saturday and infernal hails to one and all. Yesterday, those who care about such things will have noticed that I didn’t post any year-end lists nor did I post a new installment of our 2015 Most Infectious Song list. This doesn’t mean that those year-end series have reached an end. I just got diverted by my fucking day job before I could get them done. I’m shocked, simply shocked, that some people expect me to work for what I’m paid.

We actually are nearing the end of our 2015 LISTMANIA series. I have in hand three lists from current or former members of our staff. I will post those on Monday and Tuesday. I might receive a couple more between now or then from people who told me they planned to send them in. Either way, we’ll finally finish the year-end list extravaganza by the middle of next week. As for the Most Infectious Song roll-out, I’ll catch up on Friday’s omission later today today and then resume the roll-out on Monday.

I’ve also got a lot of new music and videos I plan to throw at you this weekend, beginning with this post and continuing with one tomorrow. This post includes one new song and three new videos, all of which appeared yesterday — and thanks to DGR for alerting me to them. Because my fucking day job is compelling me to work even today, I don’t have time to introduce these with my usual garbled verbiage (please hold your applause). Somehow, you’ll have to figure out what these sound and look like on your own. Continue reading »

IRRELEVANT LISTENING — VOLUME I

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 10 Responses »

Jan 082016

(TheMadIsraeli prepared this round-up of music from yesteryear that’s been keeping him company lately.)

The scarcity of my writing last year stemmed partially from a desire to go back and listen to shit I liked or loved from past years, whatever it was, and fuck being musically relevant. This is something I hadn’t done in a long time, and I have to admit that doing this just about saved me from burning out on music altogether. This music blogging thing, it can become genuinely tiresome in the race to try and keep up with what’s worth noting. Listening to albums that may or may not be worth the time you just spent listening to them, to find out whether they are or not, can take a lot out of you sometimes.

I decided it’d be cool to write a piece here and there where I give some commentary on those older albums I’ve listening to, hence the title “Irrelevant Listening”. Maybe this could be a monthly thing, but as much as I intend to get back on the horse in regards to everything else, I’d hate to try and schedule this in any way. However, I have been noticing a pattern where I tend to change my “irrelevant listening” playlist every month or so.

So here are the records that had my attention this past December. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: KEN SORCERON (ABIGAIL WILLIAMS)

Interviews No Responses »

Jan 082016

(Andy Synn posed some questions to Ken Sorceron, vocalist/guitarist for Abigail Williams, whose 2015 album The Accuser was one of our favorite 2015 albums — and here are the answers.)

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Hello Ken, how are you, and how are things in the AW camp?

I’m fine, thanks for asking. The band is good, just gearing up to go out and support Fleshgod Apocalypse in Feb.

How did the recent tour go? (Feel free to embellish with stories of drunken hijinks, drug-induced lunacy, or fine-dining experiences.)

Lots and lots of drug-induced lunacy, that’s for sure. Though it’s pretty hard for a band at our level (low) to operate like that over time, so that era has had to come to an end. Obviously drugs and alcohol will still be around, we aren’t squares or anything, just to a lesser degree from now on. The last two years were pretty insane on that front and we are somewhat lucky to be either alive or not in jail or something at this point.

As far as fine dining goes I’m a big fan of eating in the South and in the Midwest. Eating at all my favorite places around the country or world is pretty much one of the main reasons I still tour. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS: DESTRÖYER 666, INVERLOCH, PESTILENTIA, VENEFICIUM, SXUPERION, VERRÄTER, BLEAK, PERCUSSOR

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

Jan 082016

You may have already guessed from the title of the post that it includes a shitload of new music — and I still haven’t exhausted the new discoveries that I want to write about, not by a long shot.

The last few days have indeed brought a typhoon of new metal that’s intensely good. In this post I’ve collected recommended new songs that are especially dire and destructive, which is why I’ve chosen a different title than the usual “Seen and Heard”. At some point this weekend I’ll bring another post that gathers together the rest of what’s been kicking me in the teeth.

DESTRÖYER 666

I’ve been eagerly awaiting the new album (Wildfire) by these Australian marauders, and at last we now have a song to stream, fittingly titled “Live and Burn”. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: MALDEVERA , WALL OF WATER, PROFANAL & INTO DARKNESS

Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET 3 Responses »

Jan 082016

What follows are delayed reviews of three short releases that I’ve enjoyed, two of which are available for free. And by “delayed”, I mean that I started writing this post in November, put it aside, got caught up in other things — and forgot to finish it! Better late than never, I hope.

MALDEVERA

In the middle of November a Dallas band named Maldevera released a new three-song EP entitled Incarceration Plague via Bandcamp. According to Metal-Archives, this is the fourth demo they’ve released since 2012 — and this one is awesome. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2015’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 11)

MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2015 4 Responses »

Jan 072016

Our evolving list of 2015’s “most infectious songs” has been short on doom so far, but I’m addressing that deficit today with the two newest additions to the list. To see and hear what has come before, go here.

SKEPTICISM

After a seven-year wait following their last full-length, these Finnish progenitors of funeral doom returned in full force with 2015’s Ordeal — a truly magnificent album. My first exposure to music from the album came at last May’s Maryland Deathfest, where Skepticism appeared in broad daylight at the Edison Lot and proceeded to stagger and mesmerize the crowd with the tragic strains of their sound notwithstanding all the brightness in the sky. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2015: YEAR-END LISTS FROM MEMBERS OF NE OBLIVISCARIS

LISTMANIA 2015 5 Responses »

Jan 072016

Those of you who follow Australia’s Ne Obliviscaris on Facebook may have seen that three members of the band shared their year-end lists of favorite 2015 releases. But for those who missed them, we’re re-publishing them here. And we’re doing this on the heels of the band’s announcement that in addition to their North American appearances on the previously announced Inquisitional Torture tour headlined by Cradle of Filth, they will also be performing four 90-minute sets as headliners. Here’s where that will happen:

Feb 4@ The Side Bar, Tallahassee, FL (AA)
Feb 6@ O’Scheckey’s, Columbus, OH (AA)
Feb 7@ 5th Quarter Lounge, Indianapolis, IN (21+)
Feb 8@ Fubar, St.Louis, MO (AA)

To see the schedule for the Inquisitional Torture tour, go here. And now here are those lists: Continue reading »

RIPPER: A PREMIERE OF “MAGNETIC SOLAR STORMS” AND A REVIEW OF “EXPERIMENT OF EXISTENCE”

Album Reviews, Premieres 5 Responses »

Jan 072016

Today we bring you the premiere of a song named “Magnetic Solar Storms” from the second full-length by the Chilean band Ripper. You can stream it at the end of this post. But first, we welcome back guest writer Allen Griffin, who provides this review of the album from which it comes: Experiment of Existence.

The thrash revival of the past several years seems to have been spawned almost exclusively by a focus on the Bay Area scene, to the exclusion of almost everything else that was going on in the past. Perhaps predictably, this thrash resurgence has often neglected some of the darker and more brutal roots of the sub-genre’s origins. Thankfully, the latest album from Chilean death/thrashers Ripper is set to fix the imbalance.

Titled Experiments of Existence, this release in many ways appears to channel the savagery of groups like Possessed, Dark Angel, and particularly Pleasure to Kill-era Kreator. Yet, one thing that quickly becomes apparent to the listener is the precision of execution. One hesitates to use the term “technical” for all the baggage that comes along with it, but this difficult material is performed flawlessly. The aggression, though, is never compromised. This is neither Watchtower nor Voivod, just a death/thrash hybrid performed at the highest standard. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SUSPIRAL — “POISONOUS ESSENCE”

Premieres 19 Responses »

Jan 072016

You are about to have a mind-altering experience. It will last almost 13 minutes. In that time, you may feel as if Suspiral have torn apart the membranes that separate our mundane world from dimensions both terrifying and mystical, disorienting and transcendental. It’s a masterful piece of very dark music. Its name is “Poisonous Essence”.

The song is the first of three long tracks that make up the debut album of this Spanish band. It bears the fitting title Delve Into The Mysteries Of Transcendence, and it will be released by I, Voidhanger Records on March 1, 2016.

Many listeners, including myself, approach songs of this length with a certain wariness. You wonder if the time is necessary to accomplish the band’s goal, and whether the time will be well-spent or instead prove to be an exercise in self-indulgence. In this case, the music is so immersive, so richly textured, and so well-constructed that you forget the passing of the minutes. You enter a kind of dream state — but one that’s far from tranquil. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BHAVACHAKRA — “SYBARITIC APPARITIONS”

Premieres 11 Responses »

Jan 072016

(Austin Weber introduces our premiere of an amazing song from the debut album by Bhavachakra.)

Back in 2014 here at NCS, I covered a little-known new progressive death metal act called Infinite Earths based out of Orlando, Florida. The album they released at the time that I covered them was called Spirals From Spacetime, and the whole record was written by band member Kenneth Michael Reda. Sometime after that release, Kenneth left the group and informed me he was working on a brand new black-metal-focused project called Bhavachakra. He recently shared with me the first song he was about to release, and upon hearing it I got really excited and asked if we could premiere it on short notice.

So, here we are today to give you a sneak peek at the group’s upcoming self-titled record via the song “Sybaritic Apparitions”. Continue reading »

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