METAL NEWS, NOW WITH 110% MORE GEEKY STUFF

 Uncategorized  3 Responses »
Aug 052014
 

 

(DGR compiled this round-up of news items and music, the theme of which you will figure out… because you’re a geek.)

OVID’S WITHERING

Ovid’s Withering are releasing a chiptune interpretation of their album Scryers Of The Ibis at the end of the month and calling it Scryers Of The Ibits. It’s being done by a guy named Josh Foreman. Right now the only available pre-order is 50 bucks because you get a poster, the original Scryers, the 8-bit version, A Shirt, and a 7″ sculpture. All physical goods on top of the downloads.

Right now, they’re streaming “Murder To Dissect”, which we named as one of last year’s Most Infectious — so thats a good start — and “Acheron”, another really good track. I’m curious as to how “Panikon Deima” is going to handle the “PANIKON DEEEEIMA….TERMINUS!” yelling section. Also, it has a new intro.

http://ovidswithering.bandcamp.com/album/scryers-of-the-ibits Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: NEW THINGS FROM ANATHEMA, OMNIUM GATHERUM, A HILL TO DIE UPON, COLUMNS, AND SOULMASS

 Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Aug 052014
 

We’ve collected here a quintet of new videos for your viewing and listening pleasure. In a rare display of brevity, I’m not going to attempt to describe the sounds or what you’ll see in the videos. I’ll identify the music and provide a band link, and then let you dive into the streams… beginning with an exception to our Rule.

ANATHEMA

Song: “Anathema”
Album: Distant Satellites
https://www.facebook.com/anathemamusic Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ABYSMAL LORD — “ANGELS OF PERSECUTION”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 052014
 

 

Louisiana’s Abysmal Lord chose well when they named their debut EP Storms of Unholy Black Mass. The five songs on this forthcoming release deliver an unstoppable deluge of massively destructive blackened death metal, a bestial onslaught that vividly creates an atmosphere of pestilence and unholy malignance. Yet the music is more than merely ruinous in its intent and effect. The riffs crackle with ebon energy, the drumbeats strike with bone-jarring immediacy, and the slithering, doom-stricken melodies prove to be unexpectedly seductive. As undeniably venomous as it is, listening to the EP is an electrifying experience.

Today we bring you a taste of what Storms of Unholy Black Mass holds in store, as we premiere the EP’s third track, “Angels of Persecution”. It rains unholy fire and brimstone from the skies in a torrential downpour of grinding, radioactive riffs, thundering percussion, and lightning-strike guitar solos, with ghastly vocals that vomit forth noxious clouds of sulfurous poison. The slashing storm breaks periodically, long enough for the band to deliver slow, skull-flattening hammer blows, just in case you missed the message: only doom awaits. And that rhythmic dynamism is a hallmark of the EP as a whole — Abysmal Lord are as adept at delivering crushing beatdowns as they are at mounting assaults of accelerated violence. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HORNED ALMIGHTY, VAIYA, MARE COGNITUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 042014
 

I’ve spent the last three days having a fantastic time at the Denver Black Sky festival, about which I’ll have more to say and show in the coming days.  My traveling companions and I will be headed back to Seattle soon, and so I doubt I’ll be posting much on our site today, but I wanted to get you a few new things to hear before I once again enjoy the wonders of airport security in the 21st Century, even though I don’t have time to say much about the music itself.

HORNED ALMIGHTY

This Danish black metal band have recorded their fifth album, and the first since 2010′s Necro Spirituals. The new one is named World of Tombs, it features cover art by Mark B. Hansen, and it’s scheduled for release on September 1, 2014, by the band’s new label, Scarlet Records. In June I wrote about the first killer single from the album, “Diabolical Engines of Torment”, and today brought us a second one — “In Torture We Trust Pt. II”.

Through the use of my superior deductive skills, which have justly become famous throughout my own mind, the song title suggested to me that a song named “In Torture We Trust Pt. I” might exist somewhere. Undoubtedly its existence would be well known to fans more familiar with Horned Almighty’s full discography than I am. But this is why Satan created Metal-Archives. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: LEPROUS DIVINITY — “ENSLAVEMENT”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Aug 042014
 

 

(DGR reviews the debut EP by Leprous Divinity.)

Given that California has a huge population, you could rightly assume that this state dishes out a humongous amount of music on a daily basis. Not only that, but genre shifts and sonic waves seem to be massive here — moving through the metal scenes here like tsunamis. So if there is one sound that seems to be catching on, a ton of bands will be doing just that — or will be newly formed to play around with the style.

You could also correctly assume that right now, judging by the scale of California’s metal output and no doubt because of the massive spotlight being shined on it by the recent renaissance of the Unique Leader label and its slate of artists, that we seem to be on one hell of a death metal kick at the moment. Whether it be the brutal, tech, slam, or prefix-core aspects of the genre, you better believe that we’ve been dishing it out in spades.

Thus, it is hard as hell to get noticed, especially if you’re just launching your band off the ground and are attempting to tread a super-fine line. Such is the situation faced by Leprous Divinity, a group whose sound is rooted in the combination of brutal death metal’s slamming elements and the downward-focused chug of deathcore, resulting in a super-slow, gargantuan slab of metal designed for the sole purpose of crushing people beneath its weight. Continue reading »

THE FEVERED: “EPICENTER”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Aug 032014
 

 

(DGR wrote this piece about a song by The Fevered.)

The single-song review is an odd thing for me, mostly because we’re always trying to grab huge swaths of new material, and most of the time a single three- to four-minute track doesn’t lend itself all that well to my habitual jawing-until-my-face-falls-off writing style.

I’ve managed to choke five paragraphs out of just about anything I can think of at one point or another, but I recognize when it doesn’t work all too well — which is why I tend to save those reviews for songs of a longer caliber, ones where the ten-minute runtime could be re-imagined as an EP in its own right. But there’s something about “Epicenter” by Brisbane, Australia-based The Fevered that has set the gears in my mind in motion — no doubt a creaking so loud that I’m writing this review later in the day so as to avoid violating any sort of noise ordinance.

“Epicenter” is a song that The Fevered released close to four months ago now, but one that I’ve only recently discovered through a habitual “random check in on Facebook with bands I haven’t thought about in a bit”. It’s a habit that lends itself well to discovering new material, but I’m now drawing a fifty/fifty shot on not being the most prompt in reporting what I find. In the case of “Epicenter”, the song was released as part of a compilation in dedication to an individual named Chris Torpy. The compilation came out through Art As Catharsis records and they described the release of the compilation and its purpose as follows: Continue reading »

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

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
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 »

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