NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS PREMIERE: HEAVYDEATH — “DEAD TREES”

Aug 132015

Heavydeath is a trio of experienced Swedish musicians (guitarist/vocalist Nicklas Rudolfsson, bassist Johan Bäckman, and drummer Daniel Moilanen) who have been involved in many other projects (including Necrocurse and Runemagick). With session drummer Oldfor Suns standing in for Danel Moilanen, who has been performing with Katatonia as their live drummer, Heavydeath have recorded a new EP entitled Dark Phoenix Rising that will be released by Caligari Records on August 25, 2015, and today we’ve got for you the premiere of the EP’s opening track, “Dead Trees“.

I’ve had this song running through my head virtually non-stop since first hearing it. When other music tries to enter the picture, “Dead Trees” just bulldozes it out of the way and stomps it to smithereens for good measure. The song’s central riff is massive — and massively catchy. It hammers and vibrates and occasionally spirals up into the sky from the dank pit where it spends most of its time. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ROTTING CHRIST, HATE ETERNAL, CRYPTIC HYMN

Aug 132015

I’ve been distracted over the last couple of days by a combination of demands by my fucking day job and time spent with some old friends who decided to escape the furnace that is a Texas summer by visiting Seattle. On top of that, Facebook eliminated my personal profile because it wasn’t under my real legal name, which deep-sixed my friend connections to hundreds of musicians and record labels, whose FB statuses were a constant source of new-music discoveries for me. Put all that together, and the result is that I’m way behind in discovering and writing about new music streams. I’m hoping to re-group in the next day or two, but for now, here are some quick items (the last of which comes to us courtesy of Grant Skelton).

ROTTING CHRIST

As we previously reported, Season of Mist is releasing a double-live album by the almighty Rotting Christ on August 21. Entitled Lucifer Over Athens, it was recorded in Athens in December 2013, and it’s the band’s first-ever live album.

Yesterday, SoM premiered a full stream of the new album, which you can check out below. It’s available for pre-order at this location. Continue reading »

HOPE DRONE: “CLOAK OF ASH”

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

Aug 132015

(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Australia’s Hope Drone.)

It’s not often that I am able to pontificate on the future here at NCS and actually be correct — I’m more likely in the running to be one of the kings of talking out of my ass about what may be coming to us soon (I hear tell that the batting average amongst our other writers is just as good, though, with the exception of our lovely esteemed editor whom I have been informed is correct 100% of the time and never, ever wrong), but overall I’ve found that this is work best left to the TV pundits and people who can actually make a play at knowing what they’re talking about.

I’m admittedly enthusiastic about the style of music that I love and review, but truthfully, and in my case especially, I’m a bit on the dumb side. However, that isn’t to say that I don’t have the occasional blink of brilliance. Sometimes, there will be a band and a moment for that band where you hear them and you immediately get the sense that,”Yeah, that is going to get them signed”. These times seem so obvious that it is like being hit by a fish thrown at you in an open field; you saw it coming, but you still got gills in the face.

In the case of Brisbane’s Hope Drone, it wasn’t just one moment, it was actually a series of moments. Eleven of them, to be exact. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NACHTTERROR

Interviews 1 Response »

Aug 122015

(Comrade Aleks interviews Erik from the Canadian band Nachtterror, for whom we had the pleasure of recently premiering a song from their new split with Altars of Grief.)

So we’ve reached the second part of the split-album Of Ash And Dying Light as I get in touch with the mastermind of Nachtterror, another band from Regina, Canada, who took part in this record alongside Altars of Grief.

Both bands show their best, creating a dark, mournful, and harsh atmosphere, but if Altars of Grief (with whom we did an interview a few weeks ago) are good in the doom/black genre, Nachtterror prefer symphonic black stuff. Let’s go further into the reign of ash and dying light with Erik.

******

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE RITUAL AURA — “ERASED IN THE PURGE”

Premieres 3 Responses »

Aug 122015

(Austin Weber introduces our premiere of a new video and song from a forthcoming debut album by The Ritual Aura.)

We’ve covered The Ritual Aura before at NCS (here), and this Australian death squad are in impeccable form once again on the song/lyric video that we are premiering today called “Erased In The Purge”. In the time since we last wrote about them, they’ve signed to Lacerated Enemy Records and are nearing the release of their debut album, Laniakea, on August 27th.

If you think you know what you are in store for, “Erased In The Purge” has a few tricks up its sleeve beyond its primary mission of whipping you into a psychotic frothing frenzy. It’s so hellbent on destruction that it’s possible it was conceived specifically to be a sonic call to arms. If any nation around the globe with warmongering tendencies were smart, they’d make this their national fucking anthem. It’s that lethal. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FUNERAL THRONE — “HYPNOTIC COILS”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Aug 122015

Last year, the British black metal band Funeral Throne released their second album, Threshold, through Exitium Productions in a very limited cassette edition. Now, Germany’s Blut & Eisen Productions will give the album a wider distribution on CD (and eventually vinyl), with an international release date of September 15, 2015. Today we bring you the premiere of Threshold’s fourth track, “Hypnotic Coils”.

Funeral Throne devoted five years of effort to the creation of Threshold and have explained that the songs commemorate specific times and experiences along a path of spiritual and musical growth. They also sought to avoid technical tricks of the trade such as drum triggering and re-amping of guitars in an effort to produce an authentic sound that would complement their effort to capture the “rebellion and truth” at the heart of “all true heavy metal”. Continue reading »

FEAR FACTORY: “GENEXUS”

Album Reviews 14 Responses »

Aug 122015

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Fear Factory.)

I’m a pretty standard Fear Factory fan. Soul of a New Machine, Demanufacture, and Obsolete are the best albums; Digimortal was a nu-metal sellout with some keeper tracks; and everything Dino-less is awful.

Mechanize was a monster comeback record, seeing Burton Bell and Dino Cazares return with fucking Gene Hoglan, and it rivaled their early material while bringing in the more thrash and melodic edge of Dino’s other band Divine Heresy.

The band’s last record, The Industrialist (which ONLY involved Bell and Cazares, according to the only album credits I can find) was good, but I didn’t find it living up to the momentum Mechanize had. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MARE COGNITUM — “PULSES IN EXTRACONSCIOUS LUCIDITY”

Premieres 7 Responses »

Aug 112015

Last year I, Voidhanger Records released Phobos Monolith, the third album by the one-man California project known as Mare Cognitum, and now that very tasteful label has decided to reissue the band’s second album, An Extraconscious Lucidity, in remastered form and with cover art and layout by Max Loeffler. Originally released only as a digital download and as a limited CD-r, the album includes six tracks of atmospheric black metal — and we are now premiering the closing one, “Pulses in Extraconscious Lucidity”.

The song is absolutely electric — I can’t think of a better word for it. Even when the song slows in the final third of its significant length, it’s a gripping piece of music. Continue reading »

MATRON THORN: “THE RITUAL NARCOTIC”

Album Reviews 9 Responses »

Aug 112015

Most albums, including many that each of us would count among our personal favorites, are simply collections of individual songs. Each song may be a blast to hear, and they may stay in your head for years, but hearing all of them together doesn’t amount to much more than multiplying the time spent enjoying something you like.

Other albums, however, are greater than the sum of their parts. The individual songs may stand up well in isolation; you may get something important out of listening to specific tracks even when you’ve just stuck them on a playlist. But when you listen to all of them together, from the beginning of the album to the end, they have an emotional impact that exceeds the effect of any of them standing alone, and the reasons go deeper than simply the extended amount of time you’ve spent listening to a band you enjoy. Matron Thorn’s The Ritual Narcotic is definitely one of those albums.

The Ritual Narcotic is the first album to appear under the name Matron Thorn, but it isn’t Thorn’s first solo (or near-solo) work. He has produced more than two dozen releases under a variety of other project names, including Benighted In Sodom, (and FYI, Thorn has just begun uploading all of the Benighted In Sodom releases to Bandcamp). But perhaps his best-known work has been as the composer and sole instrumentalist of the remarkable Ævangelist. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HERCYN — “OF RUIN”

Premieres 5 Responses »

Aug 112015

Following a debut demo in 2013 (Magda), an acoustic version of the demo in 2014, and a 2014 split release with Brooklyn’s Thera Roya (All This Suffering Is Not Enough), New Jersey’s Hercyn have completed work on their debut album. Entitled Dust and Ages, it’s set for release on September 11, and today we bring you the premiere of its first advance track, “Of Ruin“.

It’s a long song, topping 11 minutes, and it holds attention from start to finish, running the gamut from lilting folk-influenced acoustic melody to cascades of layered guitars, rippling bass notes, thundering percussion, and knife-edged vocal abrasion. The eye-opening performance of the rhythm section alone grabs you by the neck and never loosens its grip, while the slashing riffs and striking lead guitar melodies prove equally galvanizing. Continue reading »

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