NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS INTERVIEW: APEP

Nov 262024

(As you will see from the interview below, our Comrade Aleks had a quite extensive and very interesting discussion with vocalist Christopher Fleckeisen and guitarist Oliver Pikowski from the Egyptian-themed German death metal band APEP, whose newest album was released on September 13th by War Anthem Records.)

Each metalhead should know names like Apep, Jörmungandr, Python or Typhon. Each deity personified primordial forces of Chaos in some forms and have kept the ability to inspire men of art through years, so to say. These names sound good for extreme metal bands, so the German Apep chose the rare one, the right one, which is intuitively clear for those who can connect Egyptian mythology and death metal.

Apep’s first album The Invocation of the Deathless One (2020) helped the band put down a fundament for the band’s reputation, and they returned in September 2024 in full arms presenting the sophomore album Before Whom Evil Trembles (Goddess of Carnage).

You know, doing an interview isn’t a rewarding experience each time you do it, but a proper, in-depth conversation is always worthy of efforts. And we had a really good one with Oliver Pikowski (guitars) and Christopher Fleckeisen (vocals). In the name of Sekhmet!

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): INVERTED CROSS — “ETERNAL FLAMES OF HELL”

Album Reviews, Premieres 1 Response »

Nov 252024

On their debut album Eternal Flames of Hell the Barcelona band Inverted Cross wickedly uphold a lot of age-old metal traditions: the traditions of the five-pointed star, of bullet belts and gauntlets, of goat-headed demons and blasphemous words, and of course the inverted cross itself.

But more to the point, they uphold the traditions of venomous black thrashing speed metal that will get rattled heads hammering and heated blood rushing, proudly and violently following the ripped path of such bands as Destruction, Sodom, Kreator, Deathrow, and Violent Force.

Today you’ll get the full blast of their hellfire, as we premiere a complete stream of Eternal Flames of Hell in advance of its November 29 release by Helldprod Records. Continue reading »

PANZERFAUST – THE SUNS OF PERDITION – CHAPTER IV: TO SHADOW ZION

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Nov 252024

(Andy Synn advises you to make room in your year end lists for the new Panzerfaust album, out now)

There were a lot of really good records released last week, including the highly-anticipated new Opeth album (which – while perhaps a little overhyped – is less a “return to form” and more a band finding a new form which combines aspects of both their pre- and post- Heritage years), the brain-manglingly brutal new one from Defeated Sanity (which we should be covering soon), and even a cool new EP by the name of Welcome to the New Dark Ages, Part 2 (which, obviously, I may be a little biased towards…).

But, as a long-time Panzerfaust fan – one who, occasionally, feels like he was the only one who really liked the doomier, gloomier sound of Chapter III: The Astral Drain – there was no way I wasn’t going to share my thoughts on the fourth and final part of the band’s Suns of Perdition saga.

The only question being will it all end with a bang… or with a whimper?

SHADES OF BLACK: ALIOTH BOREALIS, ACHERAD, THUNRAZ, DØDSFERD

Album Reviews, Forthcoming Albums, LISTMANIA 2015, LISTMANIA 2016, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2015, SHADES OF BLACK No Responses »

Nov 242024

(written by Islander)

I haven’t kept a running count, but I think a substantial majority of the music I’ve written about in these Sunday columns has consisted of singles, usually advance tracks from forthcoming albums. A couple of reasons for that:

First, I can put our spotlight on a lot more bands and records that way. In the time it would take me to listen to and scribble thoughts about one album, I can do that for pieces of six or seven albums.

Second, I don’t think I’m great at writing album reviews. I find it difficult to provide some kind of succinct discussion because I always feel like I’m leaving out important aspects of the music, and so I often get bogged down in the details. Even when an album is already out I feel that way, even though it might be a silly feeling since everyone can listen and discover the details for themselves.

All of that makes today’s collection a rarity, because today I’ve chosen to write about three albums that have already been released, and one new song (and video) that’s a bonus track for the vinyl edition of another album that’s already out. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GRIMA, A THOUSAND SUFFERINGS, KLUDDE, BODY COUNT, GOSPEL TREMORS, BRÜDNY SKÜRWIEL

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 2 Responses »

Nov 232024

Grima (photo credit: Mikhail Yuyukin, Viktor Shkarov, Marat Zaborovskiy)

(written by Islander)

How’s your day going? Well, I hope. Here’s how mine started:

I woke up way earlier than I wanted. I made coffee and went out on my deck to start inhaling it, along with a few smokes. While doing that I read various lengthy narratives of the Game of Thrones series because my wife and I had started binge-watching it for the first time and I was both confused and curious about where it was going (though I’m still confused). I also read a moving and meaningful report on a ceremony in Gettysburg, PA last week to commemorate the 161st anniversary of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address.

I was putting off a daunting task but finally forced myself to get to it, the task of trying to figure out what to put into this roundup, daunting because even though I managed two weekday roundups over recent days my list of candidates was still enormous. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SAOR, AXIOMA, ACID MAGUS

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC No Responses »

Nov 222024

This collection is short in number, just three new songs, two of them with compelling videos — though those two are quite long. But that’s three songs I now don’t need to include in this weekend’s coming roundups, and thus I’ll have room for three others as I continue trying to winnow down my monstrous list of recent releases.

SAOR (Scotland)

I’ve chosen to begin with a video for the title song from Saor‘s new album Amidst the Ruins. Although the video starts with a majestic but haunting scene from the Highlands, it soon shifts to dramatic film of the band’s performance, appearing as dark silhouettes in the midst of rushing smoke or clouds. The music is equally dramatic. The drums attack and the bass heavily rumbles, but the music flows in sweeping and searing waves, glittering and glorious. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ALTAR OV ASTERIA — “ÉNA”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Nov 222024

If you’ve heard the first single released from Altar Ov Asteria‘s debut album you know these two German women (Satyra and Melpomene) aren’t cautiously feeling their way forward, haltingly trying to figure out who they are musically. They named that song “Kataklysm“, and a sonic cataclysm is what they made — a devastating, exhilarating, and wholly engulfing experience.

The rest of the album, entitled Éna, is equally self-assured, both in its music and in its conception. Altar Ov Asteria liken it to “a storybook of hellish Sodom”, imagining (as Dante and Homer did) “a world full of mysteries and realities woven into each other”, creating allegories of human dystopia through an intertwining of viscerally assaulting, immensely heavy black metal and unorthodox atmospherics.

What we have for you today is the premiere stream of Éna as a whole, all five songs, in advance of its release by the Dusktone label on November 29th. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NEBELKRÄHE

Interviews No Responses »

Nov 222024

photos by Afra Gethoffer-Grutz

(On November 29th the Crawling Chaos label will release a re-recorded version of Entfremdet, the 2009 debut album by the distinctive German black metal band Nebelkrähe. What the production of that entailed, and how it came to be a reality, are among the subjects of the following interview by Comrade Aleks of Nebelkrähe‘s Morg.)

“Do not let your left hand know what your right hand is doing, so that your giving may be in secret”. This quote from the Bible just popped up in my mind, when we finished the interview with Nebelkrähe’s guitarist Morg a few days ago and I learnt that NCS prepared a track premiere as well.

Actually, I interviewed Morg one year ago, because these German black metal intellectuals just released their third album Ephemer (2023) back then, and I was excited with it (although they didn’t have any song based on Lovecraft’s stories). This year the trio of Nebelkrähe’s founders re-recorded their first album Entfremdet (2009), and they had their reasons to do that.

As always, Morg proved himself to be an interesting and focused conversationalist.

SEEN AND HEARD: THE GREAT OLD ONES, OBSCURA, YOVEL, CONCRETE AGE, SPERE

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC No Responses »

Nov 212024

The Great Old Ones – Photo by Daphnea Doto/Solweig Wood

(written by Islander)

This week I’ve done a better than average job staying abreast of new songs and videos that have surfaced since last weekend which I thought would be worth checking out. The result is that my list of things to investigate is now 40 links longer than it was on Monday morning! Anyone who thinks the rollout of heavy new music slows down near the end of the year must have just awakened from a very long slumber.

Fortunately, I had some time this morning (which I usually don’t have on the weekdays) to make a small dent in that list and pull a few things together to get a head-start on my usual Saturday and Sunday roundups at our site. I confess that today I erred on the side of bands who I think of as “proven commodities,” just to make the winnowing process a bit easier — though I did decide to include one I’d never heard before. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LACOLPA — “WHERE GOD LIVES”

Premieres No Responses »

Nov 212024

(written by Islander)

Over the course of two previous albums the Italian band LaColpa have musically and lyrically elaborated their philosophy of pain, “deeply rooted in the human condition of eternal suffering,” through “different stratifications of sonic nightmares.”

I’ve quoted there from the introduction provided by Brucia Records to LaColpa‘s recently announced third album, In Absentia Lucis. The label also describes the album as “a pitch-black magma of suffering in music, combining Sludge, Doom and Dissonant Black Metal with some of the most painful soundscapes of improvisational Noise and Drone.” Regarding the new record’s thematic focus, they say:

After having explored themes like guilt, awareness of own mortality and the condition of pain which inevitably grips our existence, In Absentia Lucis closes the circle by bringing back the reflection on our own condition of impotence.

We are lost in the immense solitude of our Ego, masters of Nothing.
We are the Lords of Nothingness.
Lost in Our Vast Loneliness. Continue reading »

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