SEEN AND HEARD: BLASPHERIAN, CLOUDKICKER, DISSVARTH, EASTFRISIAN TERROR, FEN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

After a two-week hiatus from listening to new songs, watching new videos, and preparing these round-ups, I’m easing back into the gig. I didn’t finish as many reviews during the hiatus as I had hoped, and so I still won’t prepare these round-ups as frequently as before, until I make more headway on some reviews I desperately want to finish. With luck, Leperkahn will continue to pitch in as he did during my break. Speaking of which, how about a big round of applause for Leperkahn?

The good new metal continues to come in a flood: The following offerings are all new things I saw and heard just over the last 24 hours. The bands are presented in alphabetical order. The music is all over the map, both stylistically and geographically.

BLASPHERIAN

Iron Bonehead Productions has announced plans to release a new 7″ EP by Houston’s Blaspherian by the end of November. Its name is Upon the Throne… Of Eternal Blasphemous Death. The last time I wrote about Blaspherian (here) was more than three years ago, just before the release of their debut album. The fantastic cover art for the album had caught my eye, and the art for this new EP is certainly eye-catching, too. Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 6

 Free Shit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 122014
 

 

(In this 6th installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory forays through the underground. Previous installments are linked at the end of this post.)

DUNGORTHEB

Let’s start off this installment with the technical death metal band Dungortheb, a French group from the world of Lord Of The Rings that I’ve been a fan of for years. Somehow, in spite of being a massive fan of their first two albums, Intended To… and Waiting For Silence, I failed to realize they had a new record out until recently, when I was checking out the roster for Great Dane Records on Metal-Archives. Seeing their name on the roster inevitably led me to click on the Dungortheb page on M-A where I saw the new album. Luckily I was not too far behind, as this latest release, Extracting Souls, just dropped on August 30th of this year.

Not only is it a continuation of their heavily lead-focused, melodically entrenched, often mid-paced death metal style, but it’s quite an evolution as well. Extracting Souls sees an influx of Death– and Coroner-style thrash influences seep into their sound, giving their latest a Gory Blister-type headbangable take on technical death metal. Continue reading »

DOOM AND DEATH RITUALS: FAMISHGOD, STORMVOLD, NANGILIMA

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

So here’s how this collection of songs came together:

I saw a Facebook post yesterday about a new band named Famishgod. It’s the creation of some people who know what they’re doing. I listened to their first single on Soundcloud. If you don’t stop after you listen to a song on Soundcloud, it moves you right into another one… and then another one… and I went with it. And voilà!

FAMISHGOD

Dave Rotten has loaned his inhuman voice to many projects, his best-known one being the long-running death battalion Avulsed. What I saw on Facebook yesterday was an announcement that he has now partnered with a Spanish musician named Funedëim (Svipdagr, Morkulv) to create a new entity under the brand of FamishGod. With Funedëim on guitars and bass, FamishGod have recorded an album entitled Devourers of Light divided into seven tracks, each of which lyrically forms a chapter in a a conceptual story, with cover art and additional artwork created by Tommi Grönqvist from Finland’s Desecresy.

Along with this announcement came the premiere of the album’s title track and first chapter, “Devourers of Light”. Rotten’s vocals are monstrously deep and horrific, the kind to which words like “cavernous” and “abyssal” really don’t do justice. And the radioactive riffs and massive bass hammers are monsters in their own right, spreading a thick miasma of putrefying doom that moves from funereal dirge to methodically skull-clobbering assault, with a malignant lead guitar melody eventually uncoiling in its midst like a serpent. Great intro to the song as well. Continue reading »

RICHES FROM LONDON AWAIT!

 IQ Subtraction  13 Responses »
Oct 112014
 

 

Hope springs eternal!

It’s been ages since I’ve been the recipient of a philanthropic e-mail offer from Africa, promising stupefying sums of cash, bags of gold dust, bars of bullion, and other forms of riches, in return for just a bit of personal information. No matter how many times I responded in good faith, none of those motherfuckers ever made good. And then they just stopped e-mailing me altogether.

I had pretty much given up, and stopped thinking about all the things I would do with the money, like paying Fleshgod Apocalypse to come live on my island and play for me whenever I want; construct the Grolsch beer fountain; re-open the wormhole vortex; hire personal groomers for the loris horde; and start paying money to get some decent writers for the site.

And then… and then I got an e-mail a couple days ago from a gentleman in London with a very enticing proposition. And I wrote him back, in-line with his message to me, as follows (I’m soooo excited!): Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: STARKILL — “VIRUS OF THE MIND”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

Eighteen months after the release of their debut album Fires of Life, Chicago’s Starkill have come roaring back with their second album Virus of the Mind, scheduled for release next week by Century Media, and today we’re giving you a chance to hear it from start to finish.

Speaking of starts, the fast-paced orchestral introduction to the album’s first song, “Be Dead or Die”, is about as blood-pumping a start to an album as you’re likely to hear this year. And the adrenaline rush doesn’t let up. Whether the band are ripping like razors or vaulting into the stratosphere with soaring choruses, they keep the energy in the red zone. Continue reading »

CREPUSCLE: “DRACONIAN WINTER”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 102014
 

 

(DGR reviews the 2014 debut album by Crepuscle from Redwood City, California.)

There are styles of heavy metal that I think, through no lack of trying on America’s part, are always going to be distinctly European. Folk metal and its various offshoots, alongside the hybrid genres of pagan melo-death (I’m still not sure that means anything but have seen numerous tours under that banner) and the sort of symphonic battle hymns that the combinations of the aforementioned genres, are all styles of music that European bands, and particularly the usual Scandinavian suspects, seem to have on lock down.

There have been some valiant attempts in the U.S., of course, as firing a shotgun into a wall is bound to hit something, and there have been a ton of bands over the years who have been inspired by groups such as Wintersun, Ensiferum, the viking metal explosion (itself a thorny briar patch of bands not easily defined), and their folksier brethren — but those bands have usually suffered from one of two problems: an inability to find a crowd here in the States and therefore no staying power, or a tendency to display a light shade of mimicry.

It has usually been all too clear that the musicians in these bands were massive fans of their influences, but they were never able to get out of their shadow creatively, leaving them feeling like the B-team to a better product that sadly, rarely seems to tour over here. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE: MANES — “BE ALL END ALL”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  4 Responses »
Oct 102014
 

 

Prepare yourselves for a big departure from our normal fare as we present a full-album stream of Be All End All, the new release by Norway’s Manes.

You would be hard-pressed to find a band who have led as many diverse musical lives at Manes. At the time of the band’s genesis in about 1992, and through the release of their 1999 debut album Under Ein Blodraud Maane, they were a black metal band. And then there was a hiatus — until the second album Vilosophe was released in 2003. It sounded nothing like what the band had been creating prior to the break, and it defied categorization. More releases followed, including a third album (2007’s How the World Came To An End), and then another hiatus followed.

Now the band have, in effect, begun a third life with Be All End All, which will soon be released by Debemur Morti. This follows a two-song single named Vntrve released at the end of the summer (reviewed here), and it’s the first full-length from the band in seven years. Continue reading »

MATT HARVEY (EXHUMED): THOUGHTS AFTER READING “EXTREMITY RETAINED”

 Mosh Pit  31 Responses »
Oct 092014
 

EDITOR’S PREFACE:  Thanks to a recommendation from my friend MaxR at Metal Bandcamp, I discovered an article written by veteran musician Matt Harvey of California’s Exhumed that he posted at the Exhumed blog (here) in late August. It consists of reflections about the evolution of death metal, as he has witnessed it, over the more than two decades he has spent in the scene.

I thought the article was really well-written and very thought-provoking, and it occurred to me (and to Max) that it was something more people ought to see. I also suspected that it would generate some interesting discussion among readers of our site. So, I contacted Matt Harvey and asked for his permission to re-publish his article here, and he graciously agreed.

I’ve re-posted the article exactly as it appeared on the Exhumed blog, with the same graphics, links, and music clips. Perhaps needless to say, I hope people will make the time to read this in its entirety and to add your thoughts in the Comments. I don’t expect everyone will agree with all of Matt’s observations and opinions, but I think you’ll find it informative and interesting, regardless. Here you go: Continue reading »

RECALCITRANT ROUNDUP: THE DEATH OF DEARTH, PART II, INSTALLMENT 5

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Oct 092014
 

(In this 5th installment of a multi-part piece, Austin Weber continues rolling out recommended releases from his latest exploratory  forays through the underground. The first installment is here, the second here, the third here, and the fourth here.)

KATAPLEXIS

Let’s start today’s edition with a bang, the kind of loud and ear-shattering ruckus you might associate with a mortar shelling or rapid machine-gun fire flying out of an unnecessarily huge extended clip. The time has come for the death-grind fun-free happy hour, cue Kataplexis.

This Canadian wrecking crew are relentlessly crushing, suffocating, and pummeling in approach. They offer a fair bit of contrast not readily present in most deathgrind, vacillating between short, purely grind-blasted death bursts and longer grindcore-fed chaotic death metal numbers. All of which pairs nicely with the occasional black metal poisonous riffs in their veins, coursing a darker shade of rot into the proceedings. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SHAPE OF DESPAIR — “CLOUDS IN A SHAPE OF DESPAIR”

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 082014
 

 

(Comrade Aleks returns to our site with this interview of Jarno Salomaa, guitarist and keyboardist for the Finnish band Shape of Despair.)

Shape of Despair is an example of solid, quiet, perfect funeral doom. They have a sense of taste and a sense of proportion, but the band’s last full-length release saw the light of day ten years ago. It’s true – since 2004, Shape Of Despair have only one EP and a split-EP, but now the time has come and they’re ready to return and crush our spirit with a new dirge.

As for me… there’s one more reason to do this interview, for the band will play in Moscow in January 2015, and that’s why we got in touch with Jarno Salomaa (guitars, keyboards). He’s here to tell us about the future release of Shape Of Despair, his international all-star doom-project Clouds, and a few more things. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries