NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MANDROÏD OF KRYPTON, ALTAR OV ASTERIA, SLUAGH, DRIVE YOUR PLOW OVER THE BONES OF THE DEAD

Oct 192024

Mandroïd of Krypton – photo by Rebecca Bowring

By the time you read this I will have left home early this Saturday morning on a quick three-day vacation. I mean, really early, so I didn’t have time to write much, and I stabbed these songs off my gigantic list pretty quickly and impulsively.

But that doesn’t mean the songs aren’t excellent, because they are. In fact I impulsively stabbed them because each one of them shivved me right fast and deep.

Due to the vacation, the odds are high that there won’t be a SHADES OF BLACK on Sunday, and we might not have much to throw at you on Monday either. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BECERUS — “TROGLODYTE”

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Oct 182024

(written by Islander)

Once again we gaze upon the mindless marauding of the mighty Becer, the foul and ferocious avatar of the troglodytic Sicilian death metal band Becerus.

The last hideous vision of that rampaging creature graced the cover of the debut Becerus album Homo Homini Brutus in 2021, and if anything, Karl Dahmer‘s artwork for the band’s new album is even more berserk than what he did that first time (as you can see).

Homo Homini Brutus, which we helped introduce through not one, not two, but three premieres, was indeed brutish and bludgeoning — caveman death metal with primordial appeal — but the songs were also full of twisting and turning surprises, demonstrating that Becerus were fully capable of violently erupting like Vesuvius with turn-on-a-dime suddenness and surgical precision.

And so I’ve been greedily and greasily rubbing my hands together in anticipation of this band’s new album-length depravity. Aptly named Troglodyte, it will be released by Everlasting Spew Records on December 20th, just in time to ruin Christmas, and once again we’re helping introduce it with a premiere today — of the new album’s title song. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: GOLGOTHA

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Oct 182024

(Earlier this year we helped introduce to the public the newest album by the long-running Spanish death-doom metal band Golgotha, and today we present Comrade Aleks‘ interview with its leader Vicente Javier Payá Galindo.)

NCS readers already read the in-depth text about Golgotha’s newest album Spreading the Wings of Hope, or at least you should. Anyway I’d like to remind you about this oldest Spanish death-doom band once more and invite you to read the interview with its founder Vicente Javier Payá Galindo, the guitarist and the author of music and partly the lyrics. Maybe it’ll help to understand the motivation of Golgotha’s members better, maybe you’ll dig the album after that. Who knows? Continue reading »

BLOOD INCANTATION: LIVE AT THE BOULDER THEATER, OCTOBER 4, 2024

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Oct 182024

(Denver-based NCS writer Gonzo had the good fortune of seeing Blood Incantation perform in Denver on the day of their newest album’s release, preceded by the solo set of Steve Roach, and he’s given us the following show review. We’re also grateful to Denver photographer Jacob Juno for allowing us to use his photos from the show throughout this article.)

Hype is a helluva drug.

And perhaps no band in modern metal is aware of that statement the way Denver’s Blood Incantation are. Their 2019 opus Hidden History of the Human Race was released to a cacophony of effusive praise from every dark corner of the internet, catapulting the band into interdimensional stardom.

Fast forward to 2024. The past five years have seen Blood Incantation’s career become anything but predictable. There are probably fewer words that haven’t been used to describe Timewave Zero than those that have, and the Luminescent Bridge single was a nice surprise that left many (myself included) wanting more.

It felt like a culmination of all of this, then, to have the band play a special one-night-only headlining set at the foot of the Rocky Mountains last week. And to properly commemorate the release of Absolute Elsewhere, they even brought along the king of ambient sound himself, Steve Roach, to open the proceedings.

What followed was a night nobody in the Boulder Theater would soon forget.

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CURSED CEMETERY — “MAGMA TRANSMIGRATION”

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Oct 172024

(written by Islander)

In the nearly 15 years of our site’s existence our changing cadre of writers have listened to a mountainous quantity of metal, but if any of us have spent time with the music of the Romanian band Cursed Cemetery we must have kept our thoughts to ourselves. Because until last month, their name has not been mentioned in any of our 15,918 articles, despite the fact that since 2007 they released four albums.

But now Cursed Cemetery are on the eve of releasing a fifth album (on the Dusktone label), and finally we’re paying attention, and wondering what we missed across the years when the first four dropped.

The new album, Magma Transmigration, is a mountainous piece of music itself, a massive and daunting range with four imposing peaks, just four songs but each of them exceeding 10 minutes in length and two of them topping 15. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE: OAK, ASH & THORN; FRACTAL GATES

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Oct 172024

(This makes the fourth, and apparently final, installment of DGR‘s effort to clear out a backlog of reviews he’s been pondering for releases spread across earlier months of the year, clearing the decks for the year-end NCS orgy ahead.)

It is wild, staring at the review collective and realizing you’re down to the last two.

The best time to write one of these is not directly after one has woken up, I’ve learned. Something about the brain still trying to wander itself out of the fog with nary a static radio signal and flashlight for help tends to make one’s writing look as if it slid off the side of a mountain.

The artist’s curse is still a minor player at the poker table though, given that some of your best ideas usually arrive in the shower, the drive home from work, or the second before you hit deep sleep, so that’s not to say I still won’t be attempting to do so as if writing right after I’m waking up for the day is preserving some sort of the mental cacophony I’ve tried to piece together for the final one of this initial review pile. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VÖLVA — “THE TOWER”

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Oct 162024

Sweden’s “avenging witches of black metal,” Völva, opened a lot of eyes and ears with their 2020 debut EP Promises Unfold as Lies, and they will open more with their forthcoming debut album Desires Profane, now set for release on November 28th by Grind To Death Records (CD) and Fiadh Productions (vinyl).

The album is described as “ten hymns to the lost souls of their persecuted sisters, incinerated upon the murderous bonfires of Christianity,” as “a scalding assault of vehement rage,” and as a pursuit of “themes of Satanic feminism both in a spiritual cosmic sense as well as using your free will, body and lust as vessels to sin for a higher purpose”.

As a vivid sign of what the new album brings, today we premiere a video of Völva performing a song called “The Tower,” which opens the album, filmed in the setting of Studio Quaalude, a recording studio located in Malmö. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TROLLWAR — “BANE OF THE UNDERWORLD”

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Oct 162024

On November 15th the Quebec-based melodic symphonic metal band Trollwar will release their fifth record, an EP named Tales from the Frozen Wastes. It doesn’t take much guesswork to assert that the EP’s cover art will seize the attention of listeners, even those who haven’t yet encountered Trollwar‘s previous releases. In addition to depicting a fantastic setting it also connects to the album’s music.

As Trollwar have explained (and as you can see): “The artwork represents the journey to the underworld, with a desolate land, ruled by a higher force, where darkness looms over all. Yet still, through this evil sky, light can be seen piercing the night…. This visual representation perfectly captures the essence of Trollwar’s music – epic and hopeful, yet dark and malicious.”

You will have a good chance to investigate these claims today through our premiere of a song from the new album named “Bane of the Underworld“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ELDINGAR — “ARES”

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Oct 162024

(written by Islander)

When the Greek metal band Eldingar released their debut album Maenads in 2021, our own Andy Synn extolled it in his review as embodying a “sense of seminal spirit and elemental exuberance which dates all the way back to the dawn of the Hellenic scene.”

He called it an album that “sits proudly at a nexus point between Black Metal, Melodic Death Metal, and good old Heavy Metal, and practically revels in its hybrid identity,” a “tribute to the metallic majesty of a bygone era” and one that might “also help return it to its former glory.”

We are thus fortunate that Eldingar will soon return with a second album, and its name is Lysistrata. What Andy wrote before holds true again. As before, the music is stylistically multi-faceted and emotionally powerful, viscerally affecting in many ways. Also as before, it’s rooted in compelling philosophical concepts that have a current-day relevance, even though often expressed through ancient Greek traditions and mythologies. Eldingar‘s label describes the themes this way: Continue reading »

SCHAMMASCH – THE MALDOROR CHANTS: OLD OCEAN

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Oct 162024

(Andy Synn plumbs the depths of the new album from Schammasch, out next Friday)

Let me tell you something – I regard Schammasch‘s stunning second album, the now decade-old duology entitled Contradiction, to be one of the finest, yet also most underrated, Black Metal albums of the post-millennium period.

And while I understand and appreciate (and, to an extent, share) the love for Triangle – their even more ambitious triple-disc follow-up – and the way it allowed them to explore three subtly different aspects of their sound, the truth is that nothing since then has quite managed to achieve that same balance between esoteric creativity and focussed fluidity (with 2019’s Hearts of No Light in particular being a collection of artistically intriguing tracks which still, somehow, felt like less than the sum of its parts).

So when I say that Old Ocean is, in my opinion at least, the band’s strongest, most consistent, and most captivating work since 2014… you’ll understand how much that means.

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