ESSENTIAL ENTRIES: APRIL 2015

 Album Reviews  10 Responses »
May 132015
 

(In this post Dan Barkasi continues his monthly series recommending music from the previous month.)

Welcome back to Essential Entries. April has already passed, and it’s hard to believe. It feels like we – at least those unlucky enough to live in areas that deal with winter – were just freezing ourselves stiff, and now the temperatures are in the 80s. Thank goodness. Winter is awful. Thankfully, good music is the antithesis of such, and we’re loaded this month.

Also, my apologies for getting this up a bit late. Yours truly was out of town for over two weeks, and that resulted in a ton of catch-up listening in order to do this right. No way will this column ever be done half-heartedly!

With that out of the way, let’s get to the tunes.

 

Abyss – Heretical Anatomy

Gritty Canadian death metal. Abyss proves that it’s not all maple syrup and politeness up there. Equal parts catchy and punishing, this proves to be a great debut full-length. Continue reading »

INTERVIEW OF DAWN OF AZAZEL (RIGEL WALSHE)

 Interviews  1 Response »
May 132015
 

 

(New Zealand-based metal writer and broadcaster Craig Hayes brings us this interview with Rigel Walshe of New Zealand’s  Dawn of Azazel, whose phenomenal comeback album was released on April 28.)

A couple of weeks ago, long-running New Zealand death metal titan Dawn of Azazel released The Tides of Damocles, the band’s first album in six long years. Formed in 1999, Dawn of Azazel are a crucial band in the history of New Zealand extreme metal. Their 2003 full-length debut, The Law of the Strong, is a 100% blistering and battering classic. And, over the years, Dawn of Azazelhave toured the globe, reaped acclaim from all corners of the metal underground, and received high praise in the press at home and abroad.In 2009, after the release and touring for Dawn of Azazel’s third album, Relentless, the band went into hiatus. Frontman Rigel Walshe wanted to further explore career options outside of the music sphere at the time. And it’d be fair to say the return of Dawn of Azazelin 2015 has been greeted with rapturous applause both at home and offshore.The band headed back to Mana Recording Studios last year to record, mix and master The Tides of Damocles, and there’s no question that Dawn of Azazel have returned with a ferociously aggressive, dynamic, and wholly skull-cleaving album. No Clean Singing caught up with frontman Rigel recently to talk about the band resurfacing, his reflections on his time away from the metal underground, and what the future holds for one of death metal’s premier cult bands. Continue reading »

FALSE: UNTITLED (2015)

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
May 132015
 

 

It has taken me longer to write this review than I had planned, despite the fact that I couldn’t wait to get my hands on the album. Apart from the quality of False’s untitled EP in 2011 and their split with Barghest in 2012, their live performance last summer at the Gilead Fest in Wisconsin (which included some of the material from this album) left me stunned and almost breathless. Yet in retrospect, the very qualities that made that performance by this Minneapolis black metal band so gobsmacking were the ones that delayed this review:

The album is so unremittingly intense, so overwhelmingly powerful, so emotionally draining, that it has taken time to absorb it — and I’ve had to leave more than the usual amount of time between listens, just to clear my head and recover from each listening experience.

Searing intensity is the signal feature of False’s full-length debut (also untitled). And because it includes an hour’s worth of music spread over only five long tracks, that’s a lot of intensity. Much of the time, the music is warlike and tumultuous, the kind of senses-filling cyclone of sound that repeatedly conjures images of nature in the throes of a vicious deluge. Listening is like being cast into a storm-tossed craft on a heaving sea — with a battle between gods raging in the black skies overhead. Continue reading »

CREATIVITY, REJECTION, AND PERSEVERENCE

 Mosh Pit  11 Responses »
May 132015
 


Leonid Pasternak — “Throes Of Creation”

(We welcome back guest writer Grant Skelton with these thoughts on… exactly what the title of the post says.)

I received a recent email whose contents I’ve been mulling over for the last several days. The email came from a metal musician but, as is often the case with me, we ventured onto a rabbit trail of a conversation. It turned out that the musician and I shared a similar interest in H.P. Lovecraft. That fact alone is not surprising, because Lovecraft’s fiction has provided metal bands with lyrical fodder for decades. (Side note: If you happen not to be familiar with Lovecraft, Amazon has a $0.99 Kindle ebook with over 150 of his short stories. See the link at the end of this article). When I mentioned that I was a fiction writer trying to publish a first novel, the musician compared that to the process of writing, recording, and releasing an album.

The first phase, he said, was the creative phase. It is fun and rewarding, but it is also hard work. The second phase, which I anticipate can be enjoyable if you’re a business-minded person with a lot of grit in your bones, is the uphill battle of getting your product out there. Or as he put it, a “whole gauntlet of navigating the various gatekeepers and industry contacts.” Continue reading »

AZAVATAR: “AZAVATAR”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 132015
 

 

(Wil Cifer turned in some thoughts  about the debut album by the German band AZAVATAR.)

On a whim while clicking through my in-box I came across AZAVATAR’s debut album and decided to give it a spin and was surprised at the quality of songwriting that followed. This German band boasts vocals that are grim and scraping, closer to a croak than not. They are eager to blast beat you into submission if given the chance. I am glad these guys are not on the Deathspell Omega bandwagon, as that seems to be the case with every other band in my in-box. The drums do get a little overzealous toward the end of the opening song (“KVLT“) as the riffs grow more restless, but it’s not a total prog-out. This album is brought to you by the letter K as “KVRSE” comes after “KVLT“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: HYPOTHERMIA — “SVARTKONST”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 122015
 

 

Sweden’s Hypothermia began as a two-man collaboration more than a decade ago, but has now expanded into a three-person force consisting of vocalist/guitarist Kim Carlsson (Kall, ex-Lifelover), drummer Richard Abrams (Sitra Ahra), and guitarist Hans Cools (Kilte, Trancelike Void). The band’s fifth album, Svartkonst, which features a guest appearance by violinist E.B., will be released on May 15 in Europe and May 19 in North America by Agonia Records, and we will now give you a chance to hear the album in its entirety.

Each of the five songs on Svartkonst stands quite well on its own, each one with its own personality and pallet of emotional colors, but the album is more than a collection of individual songs. The overall effect of hearing it from beginning to end is greater than the sum of the individual parts. It builds an enveloping atmosphere that induces introspection, memory, imaginings of places not visited, and maybe even of lives not yet lived. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISTANT SUN — “KILL THE FREMEN”

 Premieres  5 Responses »
May 122015
 

 

Is that an awesome album cover or what? It’s by W. Smerdulak (Arkona) and it adorns the forthcoming debut album by Russia’s Distant Sun. To give you a taste of what it holds in store, we deliver the premiere of a song named “Kill the Fremen”.

Distant Sun claim a lot of influences, including Annihilator, Iced Earth, Blind Guardian, and Rage, and their music tends to be a fusion of melodic European power metal and American speed metal and thrash. You’ll get a sense of that from this new song.

The speed-metal riffs are kings on “Kill the Fremen”, but the jolting, galloping, hard-jabbing riffs that are their partners are damned strong, too. Listening to this song is like sticking electrodes right into your ear canals and spinning the power dial up into the red zone. But the band also switch up the tempo and throw in an off-speed melodic segment that enhances the song’s dynamism, which is further embellished by the mix of snarls and clean song in the vocal department. And what’s not to like about a yell-along refrain of “KILL! KILL!”? Continue reading »

HIGH ON FIRE: NEW ALBUM, NEW SONG, NEW TOUR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
May 122015
 

Lots of news about High On Fire and new HoF music today.

First, we received a reminder that the band’s new album, Luminiferous, will be released on June 16 via eOne Music. It was recorded at Salem, Massachusetts’ GodCity Studios with producer Kurt Ballou. You can see the artwork above,

Second, the group premiered a new song from the album named “The Black Plot” via Rolling Stone — and I’ll have a bit more to say about it in a minute.

Third, the band announced a headlining U.S. tour that begins on July 30 in San Diego and finishes in New Orleans on August 23. Along for the ride will be Pallbearer, Lucifer, and Venomous Maximus. Here are the dates: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: VANUM, HADIT, DRUZHINA, NIDRA

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 122015
 

 

From my wanderings through the interhole and the NCS mailbox yesterday I came across four diverse new songs that grabbed me. So I thought I would put you in their clutches as well.

VANUM

I paused in my wanderings to hear this new song from Vanum based on the disclosure that the band consists of K. Morgan of Ash Borer and M. Rekevics of Fell Voices, Vorde, and Vilkacis. All those bands are quite good in my estimation, and so I was curious to hear what the union of these talents had produced. Profound Lore must have been intrigued, too, because they’re releasing Vanum’s debut album Realm of Sacrifice in June (digital and CD), with vinyl coming later via Psychic Violence. Continue reading »

NOISEM: “BLOSSOMING DECAY”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
May 122015
 

 

(Our pal Leperkahn took a break from his studies and wrote this review of the new second full-length by Baltimore’s Noisem.)

Hi guys. As some of y’all who’ve lurked around this cult for a while might know, my writing output has plummeted considerably more or less since I started up my time here at The University of Chicago. Put briefly, UChicago surely earns the unofficial slogan “If I wanted an A, I would’ve gone to Harvard”, and taking four paper-based classes doesn’t leave oodles of time to wax ecstatic about the wax I’ve been literally of metaphorically spinning.

That said, when I have a moment (or pretend to have a moment, to the chagrin of future me), I still like to pop in here and give my two cents about stuff I’ve been digging that might not have been properly reviewed here yet. Also, in the case of Noisem, I’ve got a streak and reputation to keep up here – I’ve reviewed everything they’ve done for NCS except for the split 7” they put out with Occultist, and even that was mentioned in my review of their Consumed 7”. Thus, I’m here once again, and for good reason – if you thought Agony Defined or any of the material released from these guys since then has been good, just wait until you dig into Blossoming Decay. Hell, even if AD wasn’t your cup of tea, give this one another shot – it’s a whole different beast from its predecessor(s). Continue reading »

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