SHADES OF BLACK (BREAK)

 SHADES OF BLACK  12 Responses »
Dec 222024
 

I have an explanation and a request.

The explanation concerns why I haven’t written a Shades of Black column today for one of a very few times since I started this Sunday thing many years ago. After finishing the Saturday roundup I checked out of listening to music or writing about it the rest of yesterday and last night, and spent all that time with my spouse and cats instead.

And then this morning I left the house very early with her and another friend to go to a reputedly great breakfast place about a half hour away that you reportedly couldn’t get into without a long wait if you didn’t arrive when it opened (turned out to be true). By the time I got back home, having satisfied my total recommended caloric intake for the whole week, the morning was gone.

Now for the request I’d like to make of you. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: OBSCURE SPHINX, THIS GIFT IS A CURSE, SH-BO-OO-OM, BANK MYNA, MISANTHROPÆ

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 212024
 


Obscure Sphinx

(written by Islander)

It seems like the end of the year is coming up in a big rush. It’s now four days before Christmas and the start of Hanukkah and 10 days before New Year’s Eve, a block of time when many people do something different from what they normally do (like taking time off from work), and other people feel grumpier about what they normally do because they’re still having to do it (like working).

We’re still here of course, and not even feeling grumpy about it. For a bunch of reasons I won’t bore you with, it’s the fanatically commercialized “holiday season” that makes me feel grumpy, and it’s continuing to pound away on this blog that helps get me through it.

Part of what we’re pounding on, of course, is year-end LISTMANIA. Even on a Saturday I nailed another list to the door. Next week we’ll have lists from at least four more of our writers, plus a bag of odds and ends from Neill Jameson.

But for now, just more new music — quite a lot of it actually. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2024: ROLLING STONE’S LIST OF “THE 20 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2024”

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
Dec 212024
 

(written by Islander)

We’re again including Rolling Stone‘s list of the year’s best metal albums because it has become a tradition, a largely comical tradition at this point which dates back to the halcyon days of 2013 when a commenter somehow just skipped past all our introductory text, looked at Rolling Stone‘s list, and chastised us for not naming Gorguts as AOTY instead of Deafheaven.

Of course, Rolling Stone hands-down qualifies as the kind of “big platform” site or zine that we pull from as part of our LISTMANIA orgy, as a way of getting a glimpse into what the top-side world perceives as great metal.

This year, Rolling Stone compiled a Top 20 list (the number seems to vary from year to year). As it often has in the past, it displays a lot of scatter, for want of a better term. There’s albums on the list (quite a few of them) you wouldn’t be surprised to see on one of the lists assembled by our own writers, and there’s others that will make you cringe, just like the ranking will. Continue reading »

THANK GOD IT’S ONLY THREE PARTS THIS YEAR: NEILL JAMESON’S BEST OF THE BEST 2024

 LISTMANIA 2024  2 Responses »
Dec 202024
 


photo by Alyssa Lorenzon

(Below is the third installment of Neill Jameson‘s year-end list for NCS, and we thank him again for sharing it with us and you.)

I could have spread this out a little more this year by posting a whole bunch of ambient I’ve been enjoying from various Youtube channels or maybe going into some of the great reissues that 2024 included, like the first three Blood records so nicely done through Nuclear War Now!. I could have even written about the “Schizophrenia” rerecording the Cavalera brothers released (which I did enjoy quite a bit). But, as I get older, I’m striving to figure out how to say more with less, to be more impactful. 

That made my head hurt just typing it. I’ve been having to lead a lot of corporate training and that kind of phrasing just sticks with you like some obscure STD you probably got sitting on a toilet at work, ironically enough. Everything connects, it’s fucking spiritual. 

So, what have I been up to recently? Glad you asked. I’ve undertaken a new project, Fuck Music, which is initially just going to be a Substack where I write about, you guessed it, music. What a fucking shocking reveal. I’ve considered podcasting but it’s a lot easier on the ears to just read my inane shit without listening to me trail off, searching for ghosts. Plus I’m shit with followthrough, so let’s just see if I stick with this one, ok?

So, this is the end. [Editor’s note: It actually isn’t… tune in again next Monday.] These are the truly special releases in a year that was shockingly packed full of them. I said before I had a really difficult time figuring out a top ten elsewhere and, especially from my second list, any of the releases I wrote about could have ended up here. For a year that felt like an unenthusiastic handjob, given with no love, it was a truly stellar year for music. Here’s my favorites: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MANIFESTUM DARKNESS — “HOSSANA IN THE ABYSS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 202024
 

(written by Islander)

For the first time we introduce our visitors to the soul-slaughtering Mexican death metal band Manifestum Darkness. Founded in 2016 in the city of León, Guanajuato, they released a first demo named Initiation at the end of 2018, which was later re-released on cassette tape by the Dark Recollections label. And now they’re primed for the release of their debut album Desecration Rotten Corpse in February of the New Year via the Death in Pieces Records label.

Manifestum Darkness have dedicated their album “to blasphemy, dark and rotten sound towards the abysses.” As a sign of what this means, today we’re premiering a foul and ferocious song from the album named “Hossana In the Abyss.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NONRESTRAINT — “BROKEN SMILE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 202024
 

(written by Islander)

“Broken Smile“, the name of the Danish band Nonrestraint‘s new single, has a dual meaning, at least as I interpret it. Lyrically, it refers to its narrator emotionally and mentally falling apart — “dead inside,” hating “everything inside,” dwelling in “thoughts of malice.” He says, “All I’m left with is a broken smile.”

But then there’s the other meaning: The song itself will knock your teeth out, leaving you with a different kind of broken smile. Continue reading »

BECAUSE WITTY YEAR END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS – THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART FIVE: 10-1

 LISTMANIA 2024  9 Responses »
Dec 202024
 

 

(We’ve arrived at the final installment of DGR‘s Top 50 list for 2024, which has been unfolding day by day since Monday of this week. Now it’s time for the Top 10.)

Well this is it folks: the big kahuna, the final ten, the end of all ends, the great sandwich in the sky, the pothole to end all potholes, the grandest exercise in feet dragging you have ever seen, the golden egg, the sponsored award, the singularity of all fifty albums that we’ve been talking about over the course of the week, the grand conjuration, the comically oversized rabbit, the final ten…again.

I wish I had prepard a slightly bigger fanfare than this but it is really hard to explain to your local high school that you would like to borrow their marching band for an hour so you can film them playing as they walk by a camera for each album announcement. What I’m getting at here is this is it. After a week long rollout of the fifty albums I’ve enjoyed jamming the hell out of over the course of the year, we’ve accomplished reaching the end.

It’s been a hell of a thrill ride getting up to this point after all the mountains we’ve climbed, epic journeys we have undertaken, the critic-proofing we’ve had to participate in, the general explanations and explorations of gore, the occasional horror show, yet it never occurs to you just how much these things take out of you until you watch Part One of your list run on the website while you’re in the midst of writing up your final few albums for the last part. Needless to say, this fucker is probably coming in hot, so if these final summations (proclamations, conflagrations) of the albums that made my year-end list read like I was in the midst of being eaten alive, it’s probably because they’re a little more panicked than usual. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HORSE BUTCHER — “HORSE BUTCHER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Dec 192024
 

(written by Islander)

It’s not enough that a particularly dismal and disgusting year on Earth will soon gasp its last rotten and rattling breath — Horse Butcher have arisen to murder it with one of the most vicious and mind-mauling releases of the last 12 months. It’s as if they decided this bastard year didn’t deserve to live even another two weeks.

Given how often our putrid glorious site throws emotionally and aurally assaulting sounds at visitors, it may seem like an exaggeration to say that about Horse Butcher‘s self-titled EP. Trust me, it’s no exaggeration.

Sentient Ruin Laboratories, which will release the EP on December 20th, also isn’t exaggerating when they call the record “a disfigured onslaught of gore-fucked bestial deathgrind worshipping directly at the altar of Carcass, Archgoat, Disgorge, Impetigo and Pissgrave” — “six tracks and twenty minutes of neanderthalian carnage and slaughterhouse madness.”

But you’ll see this for yourselves right quick because today we’re hosting the EP’s premiere. Continue reading »

JESUS CHRIST WILL HE JUST GO AWAY? NEILL JAMESON’S 2024 LISTS PT II

 LISTMANIA 2024  1 Response »
Dec 192024
 


photo by Hillarie Jason

(Here’s the second installment of year-end lists compiled for NCS by Neill Jameson (Krieg), with a couple more yet to come.)

Remember how I said things weren’t in any kind of order, until the end, in our last get together? I wasn’t entirely truthful. That list was really more the warm-up because this year I had incredible difficulty putting together a top ten list for my yearly what-have-you with Invisible Oranges, where I had to solidify it just so I could walk away without constantly wanting to move things around. We’ll start seeing those records I left out of the top in here.

I realize there’s several releases that I’m including in these lists that just came out within the last few weeks, which seems to happen every year. Does that mean I had enough time to truly sit with them? I’d like to think so, but it doesn’t seem likely. So I went back to years prior to see if I still felt strongly about late year releases I’d written about before, with a nearly perfect success rate, which was all scientifically calculated. So, in short, fuck off – they’re worth shedding light on.

I doubt anyone truly cares but that seemed like a good internal conversation. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SHRIEKING DEMONS — “PERENNIAL DIRGE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 192024
 

Throughout the history of death metal some bands have been very successful in choosing names for themselves which tell you what they’re up to with a bullhorn. Bands like Autopsy, Death, and Possessed. Of course, we’d still have forgotten about names such as those if their music hadn’t taken deep root in the harrowed and fertilized fields of our minds.

Shrieking Demons is another name that uses a bullhorn to tell you what’s coming. Not coincidentally, we chose those other reference points above not just because they help make the point about evocative band-name choices, but also because they’ve influenced the music of Shrieking Demons.

But if you think about those other, now-legendary names, you’ll also guess that these Italian demons do more than shriek, and a further clue to what else they do can be found in the name of their forthcoming debut album: The Festering Dwellers. Or even more vividly, from the name of the album track we’re about to premiere: “Perennial Dirge.” Continue reading »

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