You already know what we think of Serpents Unleashed, the new album from Skeletonwitch that’s due for release on October 29 by Prosthetic — and if you don’t, check out BadWolf’s review here.
Now you can hear the title track, because it’s just been released for streaming. Go past the jump, and there it will be, waiting for you, with teeth bared and claws open. Continue reading »
As explained in my last post, I’ve been diverted from metal over the last three days by activities relating to the old fuckin’ day job. However, I did manage to make a quick slog through the interhole in search of new music and found three diverse items worth sharing. Here they are:
RUDRA
I would venture to say that no one else sounds quite like Rudra. This Singapore band, whose last album I reviewed with lavish praise here, incorporate traditional Indian music, Sanskrit chants and mantras, and themes drawn from Sanskrit literature into a galvanizing combination of black and death metal, calling the result “Vedic Metal”. They’re now on the verge of releasing their seventh album, entitled RTA, through Sonic Blast Media, and today they began streaming the album’s second track, “Heartbreak”.
From its sublime meditative introduction to the jolting main section of the song (which features chants as well as strangling black metal vocals and a serpentine melodic guitar lead), this is an attractive tease for the new album. Continue reading »
Hails and horns from sunny Southern California, where your humble editor has had his days and nights consumed by activities related to the old fuckin’ day job since Wednesday morning. This has viciously interfered with my ability to listen and write about metal. I will have a lot of catching up to do after I return to non-sunny Seattle tonight.
I did wake up early this morning in order to make a quick circumnavigation of the interhole in search of new things, and found some items worth talking about. I’m putting one of them in this post and will collect a few more in the next one, and after that I may have to resort to cat memes for the rest of the day. First item:
In a bit of perhaps unfortunate timing, I saw via a press release this morning that Plastik Musik will be releasing a vinyl split by an East Coast black metal band named Bitter Peace and Chicago’s Nachtmystium. I say “unfortunate timing”, of course, because of Blake Judd’s recent arrest for theft and the subsequent outpouring of criticism about Judd (vividly summarized here), which paints a portrait of a con man and ripoff artist.
(Andy Synn offers some thoughts, and some questions, about why we do what we do here. The artwork above is a new piece by Sam Nelson, and it’s here not because it resembles Andy Synn but because I like it.)
Something that comes up occasionally, both online and out in the real world, is the question of what a review is really for? What is it trying to achieve… what is the point… heck, why even bother?
So I thought it might be interesting to put down a few thoughts about why we here at NCS – or at least, me personally, since I’m not aiming to speak for anyone else really – do bother writing, blogging, and putting our thoughts and opinions out there.
Although I’ve had this column in my head in a vague form for a while now, just recently a couple of (minor) incidents have helped me start to crystallise this question of who/what we are writing for, who our audience might be, and – notably – who our audience definitely isn’t. Continue reading »
(In this post guest writer Austin Weber reviews the new album by Rivers of Nihil. He also took the live photos included with the review.)
For the last few years, Reading, Pennsylvania’s own Rivers Of Nihil have seen their profile continue to rise through a combination of excellent EP releases and a lot of dedicated touring. Last year all that hard work payed off as Metal Blade Records decided to sign them, and now that October is upon us, their full-length debut The Conscious Seed Of Light arrives.
While Rivers of Nihil began as a hybrid of rich old-school and new-school death metal influences, they’ve wisely developed their sound further. On this debut the band have matured and are just as comfortable easing back on the aggression and letting reflective atmospheric moments develop and flourish. Unlike some other bands who have incorporated these kinds of sounds into their death metal framework, Rivers Of Nihil never allow them to become the focus for whole songs. They merely let those moments flavor and enhance parts of most tracks. So in the end you still get the experience of being bombarded by an angry wall of sound, and the songs don’t lose any aggressive appeal. Then, as an added bonus, their sorrowful excursions lend a gnawing melancholy to the music that is quite emotive. Continue reading »
Germany’s Endstille are about to follow up their 2011 album Infektion 1813 with their eighth full-length, Kapitulation 2013, and today we will give you an exclusive taste of the album with the premiere of its eighth track, “Stalin Note”.
Endstille have always been somewhat unusual in the sphere of black metal, with many of their lyrical themes drawn from historical events, including events related to World War II and its aftermath. The “Stalin Note”, for example, refers to a proposal that Josef Stalin made to Western powers in 1952 “for the reunification and neutralization of Germany, with no conditions on economic policies and with guarantees for ‘the rights of man and basic freedoms, including freedom of speech, press, religious persuasion, political conviction, and assembly’ and free activity of democratic parties and organizations.”
German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer and the Western allies ultimately rejected this overture, and of course what followed were many decades in which Germany was a divided nation. There has been much debate about whether Stalin’s Note was genuine and about whether the West missed a chance for early reunification of Germany. It should not be forgotten, of course — and Endstille do not forget — the barbarity of Stalin’s regime. Continue reading »
(BadWolf is back with a review of the stupendous new album by those swamp lords from France, Glorior Belli.)
I’ve gotten in a few discussions about Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls, the new album by France’s Glorior Belli—already a mark in the record’s favor. People seem to be of two camps regarding the band’s unqiue—and oftentimes infuriating—mixture of black metal and blues rock. Glorior Belli begs the question: where does meaningful experimentation end and gimmick begin? Their choice of blending ingredients doesn’t seem meaningful on the surface, or organic. It’s certainly hard to get right judging by their previous album, 2011’s The Great Southern Darkness, which suffered from an incoherent production that often reduced the band’s experimenting into mush. However, if this year’s iteration is any indication, Glorior Belli is no gimmick, despite an irreverent tone.
On Gators Rumble, Chaos Unfurls, the blues licks overpower the black metal foundation. Only the first leaked song, “I Asked For Wine, but He Gave Me Blood” has more grime than blue notes. A cursory listen to opener “Blackpowder Roars” reveals squealing Les Paul pentatonics and some swing time drumming. The album benefits first and foremost from some added clarity and a boosted bass sound—like Skeletonwitch did earlier this year, Glorior Belli show credence to the raw power of the Rickenbacker! Songs like the mostly instrumental “A Hoax, a Croc!” greatly benefit from the separated instruments, as for most of the record the bass and each guitar play distinctly different lines—it’s a rich, complex sound that somehow goes down smooth. Continue reading »
I’m pretty sure that Living Sacrifice are one of those bands that all of us here at NCS agree upon, and so we were excited to learn today that LS have a new album scheduled for release by Solid State Records on November 11. Entitled Ghost Thief, it will include 10 songs, one of which will feature a guest appearance by Demon Hunter’s Ryan Clark and another of which will feature Dave Peters of Throwdown.
We loved the band’s 2010 comeback album The Infinite Order and we have high expectations for this new one. “Ghost Thief is a reference to the personification of Death,” guitarist/vocalist Bruce Fitzhugh explained via a press release. “Depending on the circumstance, death can be greeted as an enemy or a friend. We have a few songs that deal with the suddenness and finality of death. ‘Ghost Thief’ and ‘Sudden’ both are inspired by people who died suddenly and unexpectedly. Friends of ours or family members that we were close to.”
There’s not much else to report at this point — other than to mention (as you knew we would) that the cover art is fantastic. Unfortunately, we haven’t yet identified the artist, but this post will be updated to include it once we find out.
UPDATE: As some of us on the NCS staff had guessed, we can now confirm that the killer cover art was created by the renowned Travis Smith, who also created the cover for the band’s 2002 album, Conceived In Fire.
(DGR took in the live performances of Between the Buried and Me, The Faceless, The Contortionist, and The Safety Fire in Sacramento on Oct. 1, 2013, and here’s his review of the show.)
I consider myself somewhat lucky in that I’ve gotten to see Between The Buried And Me three times, and each time has been during an era of the band that I enjoyed. I first saw them as part of the Ozzfest 2006 tour package, and then would later see them again after Parallax I came out, and they were playing that as a chunk of their set. I have an up and down history with the band and will fully own up to getting a bit tired of them during The Great Misdirect. However, I think the Parallax Hypersleep works have been some of the best material they’ve created by far, so hearing that they were doing the second one all the way through pretty much sold me on the show no matter who would be opening for them. Throwing The Contortionist and The Faceless into the mix made the deal ever so much sweeter, with the added bonus of of exposure to some new music through The Safety Fire – whom I had never heard prior to the show.
So it came to be that I returned to one of my favorite venues in Sacramento, Ace Of Spades, and stood out front on Tuesday, October 1st. The line grew pretty rapidly, and honestly, it was one of the most impressively attended shows I had seen in Sacramento, especially given that it was on a Tuesday. Even a quarter of the way through The Safety Fire’s set the place was starting to get packed. It would prove to be an exciting show too, as every band absolutely smashed their set and the crowd would feed right into it – and that was even prior to Between The Buried And Me’s massive light show and prog explorations, which would turn the whole place into a massive sweatbox.
I was excited when I spotted the folks from Rock Hard Live setting up because that meant that I would get the opportunity to link out to some of their live footage as soon as it was posted, which is something I haven’t gotten to do in a while. So be sure to check them out, as they do some great work for this city and really do show off that we actually have some good venues out here. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn reviews the latest album by Belgian progressive death metal band In-Quest.)
Make no mistake, The Odyssey of Eternity is a fantastic album, punishingly heavy and furiously aggressive, yet at the same time coldly, hypnotically compelling – pulsing with razor-sharp death metal hooks and spell-binding sci-fi ambience.
Though the core of In-Quest’s sound has long been an amalgamation of monstrous post-Meshuggah mecha-groove and wrenching Darkane-style cyber-thrash – along with more than a hint of Decapitated-esque devastation– this time around the Belgian post-death metallers have further augmented their murderous robotic rampage with haunting layers of synthetic soundscapes, artificial atmospheres, and cyberspace dynamics, in a flawless fusion of beauty and brutality.
The clever, intricately precise way in which the album is constructed – each track flowing into the next with intelligent design– is testament to the care and creativity involved in its creation. Each track has something which makes it stand apart from the others, its own identity and method of attack, yet the fluid transitions between them are utterly seamless. This mesmerising, interwoven connectivity of sound and vision is incredibly rare, and ensures that the album is best experienced as one cohesive whole.