SEEN AND HEARD: ELEMENTAL NIGHTMARES I (WILDERNESSKING, OAK PANTHEON, KESS’KHTAK, LIBER NECRIS); DECAPITATED; WINTERSUN AND NUCLEAR BLAST

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Aug 022014
 

 

To pick up where my last post left off, the aircraft that I boarded yesterday in Seattle did in fact land in Denver, where I and my personal security detail spent the evening drinking beer, eating pizza, and air-guitaring at the Black Sky Brewery in preparation for the sonic holocaust that will begin today (otherwise know as the Denver Black Sky fest).

Because time is short (or more accurately, the time not spent drinking, eating, jawing, and sleeping), this little round-up will be less fulsome than I would like — but still worthwhile, I hope.

ELEMENTAL NIGHTMARES — I

We’ve been writing about the Elemental Nightmares project since early days, and it is now a reality. Today Elemental Nightmares released the first of seven 10″ vinyl splits for digital download; the physical copies will start shipping on August 7 or 8.

The first split includes songs by Wildernessking (South Africa), Oak Pantheon (Minnesota), Kess’khtak (Switzerland) Liber Necris (UK), and it features that stunning artwork you see at the top of this post (all of the individual pieces of art for the seven splits, when placed next to each other, will eventually flow together to form one large piece of art). The work was created by Düsseldorf artist Alexander Leybovich (whose web site is here). Continue reading »

KRIEG: “ORDER OF THE SOLITARY ROAD”

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Aug 012014
 

I’m about to get really high. I’m guessing 35,000 feet once the plane takes off and reaches cruising altitude. I’m hoping it will land in Denver instead of disappearing. There seems to be a lot of that these days. If it doesn’t land, I’ll miss Denver Black Sky and this post will be my epitaph.

I intended to include more than just one song in this post, but one is all I’ve got time for before I have to run the TSA gauntlet at Sea-Tac Airport. So I’m going with Krieg.

KRIEG

Krieg’s new album is named Transient. It’s coming out September 2 on Candlelight. I haven’t heard it yet, but some of the people at Decibel have, and they say it’s “killer”. They say it’s Krieg taking their music to its “next logical place” — “further down the rat hole of desperation, frustration, and monochromatic hate.”

They said that by way of introducing their premiere of the first song from the album, “Order of the Solitary Road”. I don’t know about the rest of the album yet, but yessir, this song is killer. Continue reading »

THEN AND NOW: NUM SKULL AND RIPPER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 012014
 

I’m indulging my rarely indulged taste for thrash in this post — rare, because usually thrash doesn’t taste very good to me, except when it’s as vicious as a starving wolverine. Often, death/thrash qualifies very well, and that’s what we have here. One of these bands (the second one) I’ve been sitting on a while without writing about them, and the other I discovered only yesterday. In my addled mind, they seem to make a natural pairing, even though the songs are separated by decades.

NUM SKULL

Thanks to a tip from NCS supporter Utmu, I learned yesterday that on September 16, 2014, Relapse Records plans to reissue on vinyl, CD, and digital the 1988 debut album of a band named Num Skull. The album’s name is Ritually Abused.

I had never heard of Num Skull. Metal-Archives says they were from Winthrop Harbor, Illinois, and that their last album was released in 1996. The first review of Ritually Abused that I read on MA began this way:

“This record is perfect and then some. A proper score would be 103.” And it continues as follows (written by someone who says he heard the band practicing in a two-car garage when he was 12 or 13 years old and had no idea what was going on): Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PRIMORDIUM — “THE INCURSION”

 Premieres  4 Responses »
Aug 012014
 

 

Today we’re helping to premiere the first song from the debut EP by an Indianapolis band named Primordium. Entitled Aeonian Obsolescence, the EP is coming your way this September via Lacerated Enemy Records. We would have been interested in hearing it even if it didn’t come packaged with the distinctive artwork of Mark Cooper on the cover, but that art… speared us right through the chest. And the song we’re premiering — “The Incursion” — speared us right through the head.

Primordium unabashedly plant their flag in the camp of technical death metal bands such as Spawn of Possession and Deeds of Flesh, delivering an accelerated flurry of jabbing, swarming riffs, machine-precise bursts of hyper-speed drumming, and blasts of gruff, percussive vocals. The music conjures images of an alien insectile horde dislodged from their hive in a fury, but the swirling guitar harmonies and soloing that surface in the song exude an unexpected warmth — “The Incursion” is catchy as well as head-spinning and lacerating. Continue reading »

TOURISM: VOICES FROM THE DARK 2014 — BELPHEGOR, ROTTING CHRIST, BEHEADED, SVART CROWN

 Metal News  6 Responses »
Jul 312014
 

 

Well, well, here’s some just-announced tour news that gave me a thrill: This fall Belphegor will be headlining the Voices From the Dark 2014 tour in North America and will be accompanied by Rotting Christ (Greece), Beheaded (Malta), and Svart Crown (France). That is one insanely solid line-up.

The schedule is after the jump… and that’s all I have to say about this. Continue reading »

NEGATIVE AMBITION

 Mosh Pit  16 Responses »
Jul 312014
 

Eno (photo by Richard Burbridge)

 

Yesterday I read two articles that jarred a few thoughts loose in my head. One was a feature () by Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker about the musician Brian Eno and one was a Q&A (here) between Kim Kelly and Bölzer’s guitarist/vocalist Okoi “KzR” Jones that appeared at Stereogum.

Eno is credited with coining the phrase “ambient music”. He first became visible through his membership in the band Roxy Music and his subsequent solo albums of pop and rock songs that made extensive use of synthesizers. He produced Devo’s debut album, produced and performed on three albums by Talking Heads, produced seven albums for U2, wrote music and performed on three David Bowie albums, collaborated with King Crimson’s Robert Fripp on multiple records, and worked as a producer and/or performer with many other musicians too numerous to mention. On top of that he is a visual artist, and he has continued experimenting in the creation of music to the present day.

When he spoke to Sascha Frere-Jones in 2013, Eno said:

“I think negative ambition is a big part of what motivates artists. It’s the thing you’re pushing against. When I was a kid, my negative ambition was that I didn’t want to get a job.”

Listening to Eno’s music and reading about the evolution of his life as an artist, you get the sense that his “negative ambition” extended beyond not wanting to get a conventional job. As Sasha-Jones wrote of his art, “Eno fights against received wisdom and habit”. Even in his work as a producer, “Eno often works with highly skilled musicians and then asks them to play against their own virtuosity”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (Part 2): SWALLOWED AND WOLFPACK 44 (and THE STONE)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Jul 312014
 

I’ve collected in this two-part post seven very good new songs from four bands that I heard for the first time yesterday. All the songs are from forthcoming albums, and as the title of the post suggests, most (but not all) of them incorporate elements of black metal into the music in varying degrees, and they are all shrouded in darkness. The cover art for each album is also really good. The bands are presented in alphabetical order (Part 1 can be found here) — except for a last-minute addition at the end.

SWALLOWED

I found out about this Finnish band more than two years ago when I listened to (and wrote about) their self-titled 2010 EP (still available here). It’s been a long wait for their debut album, but it finally seems to be on its way. The name is Lunarterial and it’s projected for release on October 14, 2014, through Dark Descent Records and Me Saco Un Ojo. The cover art is the work of Swiss artist Peter Birkhäuser. The new song I heard yesterday is a track from the album called “Arterial Mists of Doom”.

This disorienting song’s huge, slow, nearly atonal chords vibrate with grotesque levels of distortion — and then erupt when you least expect it into ghastly pyroclastic flows moving at blinding speed. The visceral drumbeats and cymbal ticks seem to have a mind of their own, and their unpredictability is also part of what makes the song so arresting. The vocals match up with the doomed, blasted, destructive aura of the music — they’re maniacal, agonizing, horrifying. It appears that Swallowed have made a soundtrack for your nightmares… Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (Part 1): MONDVOLLAND AND NACHTMYSTIUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Jul 312014
 

 

I’ve collected in this two-part post seven very good new songs from four bands that I heard for the first time yesterday. All the songs are from forthcoming albums, and as the title of the post suggests, most (but not all) of them incorporate elements of black metal into the music in varying degrees, and they are all shrouded in darkness. The cover art for each album is also really good. The bands are presented in alphabetical order (Part 2 will come next):

MONDVOLLAND

It was a sad day this past June when I learned that the Dutch band Mondvollond had decided to call it quits. Way back in January 2012 I lavished praise on Pestvogel, the band’s free, three-song EP that was my jumping on point. The title track in particular got its hooks in me, so much so that I included it in our list of 2012′s Most Infectiuous Extreme Metal Songs.

The knowledge that the band would be releasing a second album made the news of their dissolution somewhat easier to bear. The new album’s name is Kwade Vaart and it features wonderful cover art by Bob Mollema, who also created the great cover art for Pestvogel.

Two of the songs from the new album can be heard now, and they’re just as unusual and powerful as I would have expected. “Wanneer De Hemel Bloedt” begins slowly, with shimmering guitar notes, a booming bass, and clean vocals, and then rapidly escalates into a storm of tremolo-vibrating chords, thundering bass and drums, and caustic howls, with a piercing guitar melody. It’s an intense song, but no more so than the one that follows. Continue reading »

TOWERS OF FLESH: “VEILED CONCEPTION” AND “ANTITHETICAL CONJURATION”

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Jul 302014
 

 

Towers of Flesh are a UK-based blackened death metal band whose members consist of drummer/guitarist Anil Carrier (Binah, Theoktony, Necrotize, Purify the Horror, and more), guitarist/bassist Tom Hinksman (Hellsworn, Necrotize, Theoktony), and vocalist Jack Welch (Funeral Throne). They released a 2010 debut album through Dissected Records named The Perpetual Paradox, and yesterday I saw an announcement that they’ve now signed with Candlelight Records for release of their second album Antithetical Conjurations.

Less than an hour ago the band launched a YouTube stream of the new album’s first advance track, “Veiled Conception”, which you’ll be able to hear at the end of this post — and hear it you should. It begins like an electrified hornet swarm driven into a fury by the sound of machine guns, and then begins to boom and stomp, grind and dissect, jackhammer and jab, swirl and swarm, all the while enshrouding itself with an eerie, alien guitar melody and the hoarse howls of some equally otherworldly creature.

Not long after hearing the song, I discovered that Candlelight has established a Bandcamp page for the album where a second song can also be streamed. That one is the title track, which immediately precedes “Veiled Conception” in the running order. It’s an introductory instrumental piece marked by tumbling drums and a grim, bleak melody that functions as a fitting prelude to the menacing atmospherics of “Veiled Conception”. I’m including a stream of that track below as well. Continue reading »

GOD DETHRONED ARE REUNITING

 Metal News  4 Responses »
Jul 302014
 

 

I had planned to save this news item for our next “Seen and Heard” post, but the more I thought about it the more I thought it deserved to stand alone: God Dethroned are reuniting. Last November I speculated that this would happen based on a sequence of posts on the band’s Facebook page, and now it has come to pass.

In January 2012, the band played a farewell performance at the 70000 Tons of Metal cruise, and today the band’s frontman Henri Sattler announced that they will be returning to the stage at the January 2015 edition of 70000 Tons of Metal. From the band’s last line-up, only Sattler and drummer Michiel van der Plicht will remain, to be joined by guest musicians whose identities haven’t yet been announced. But Sattler also made clear that this will not be a one-off performance — additional shows are being planned in 2015.

Sattler’s statement didn’t explicitly address whether the reunion will consist of more than new live shows, but we can only hope that a new album will be coming, too.

Here’s Sattler’s statement in full, followed by a bit of God Dethroned music. For more info about the new 70000 Tons of Metal cruise, go here. Continue reading »

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