(Our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri prepared the following review and recommendation of the latest album by Tennessee-based black metal band Saidan, which was released about a week ago.)
Realizing that my writeups are overlong in this age of mass-consumption and shortening attention spans, I attempted writing with a number in mind. I’m a simple soul, so I went for 666 words on an album worthy of a master’s thesis.
The dramatically unconventional Italian band Laetitia in Holocaust haven’t quite reached the quarter-century mark of their existence, but they’re not too far away. In that time they’ve created a discography that is a cavalcade of aggressive surprises, and their latest addition is a forthcoming fifth album (not counting an early album-length demo). Entitled Fanciulli D’Occidente, it will be released by the Dusktone label on May 31st, and we’re premiering it in full today.
The album’s name translates to “Children of the West”, and we’re told that conceptually it’s intended as a memoriam to ancestors of European peoples and a wish that today’s children may prove themselves worthy of blood shed by those long-gone predecessors. It would seem to connect to the band’s own name, which stands for “happiness in sacrifice”. Continue reading »
(On May 31st Sound Pollution/Black Lodge Records will release the closing album in a trilogy about death by the Swedish band Wormwood, and today we provide Didrik Mešiček‘s review of the new record.)
There are not a lot of bands who haven’t made any bad records but I’d say Wormwood is one of them. The Swedes are celebrating their 10th anniversary this year and releasing their newest album, The Star, on May 31st, 2024, on Black Lodge Records. Their previous release, Arkivet, delved a bit into post-metal and came with a rather melancholic, misanthropic view, suggesting mankind deserves death for its role in the current events on the planet, but they’ve been known to involve folkier and more melodic elements in their tracks before that as well, so now it’s time to see what the new release offers. Continue reading »
Originally formed in 2008, the Peruvian band Fervent Hate are about to launch their third album, In Rot We Trust, through the cooperation of Satanath Records and Australis Records.
The album was victimized by the covid pandemic, which forced a postponement of its recording, but at last the recording work was done last year (at Alto Calibre Studio in Arequipa, Peru with Miguel Asencio), completed by the mixing and mastering of the great Dan Swanö at Unisound Studio.
The new album brings us 10 songs, again influenced by classic Swedish death metal and hard rock bands, reinforcing Fervent Hate‘s genre moniker of “death ‘n’ roll”, and today we’re very happy to premiere one of them, a track called “A Haunting Tale“. Continue reading »
(Here’s Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by the U.S. metallic hardcore band Candy in advance of its June 7th release by Relapse Records.)
It’s cool for a metallic hardcore band like Knocked Loose to be able to ride the hype machine on their way to becoming the next big thing, but Candy’s new album kicks you in the face harder with the kind of experimentation I expected to find on You Won’t Go Before You’re Supposed To. This should not be a surprise as Candy’s 2022 album Heaven is Here was one of my favorite heavy albums of that year. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn collides with the new album from Cobra the Impaler, out Friday on Listenable Records)
Greetings all!
Today I’m writing to you from the airport lounge at the Baltimore/Washington International airport, having just spent the last few days enjoying the sights and sounds (well, mostly the sounds) of another fantastic edition of Maryland Deathfest.
This has nothing to do with the subject of today’s review, however, it just felt like something worth mentioning as I/we get back into the regular swing of things here at NCS this week.
Anyway… last time we checked in with Belgian Prog-Metal types Cobra the Impaler I was lavishing praise upon their debut album, Colossal Gods, and describing it as a strikingly melodic, multifaceted mix of Mastodon, Alice in Chains, and Byzantine.
But, as DGR recently pointed out to me – and which their upcoming new album, Karma Collision, has only reinforced – it turns out I was ever so slightly off-base with one of those comparisons.
(Our writer DGR finally made his way to the debut album by the San Fernando Valley melodic death metal band Upon Stone, which was released in January by Century Media Records, and was moved to write about it at length in the following review.)
Upon Stone were a heck of an anomaly when they first appeared in the early part of 2024. Seemingly emerging out of the aether with a full-length album and a professed love for melodeath, it was eyebrow-raising to see the group gaining enough steam to grab headlines in the early part of the year, right about the time everyone is still on their post-end-of-year list collection comedown.
Admittedly, we’re late to the bus on this one. Upon Stone‘s first full-length Dead Mother Moon has been on the back-burner since its mid-January release, mostly waiting for a gap in time when we could truly explore the album’s deepest reaches but also to take a deep glance at why the band might’ve garnered such interest with its melodeath necromancy in the year 2024: a time in which even the old-guard are glancing over the mid to late ’90s era efforts of a lot of those bands in favor of material more in line with music from the mid-aughts. Continue reading »
(Hot on the heels of their blistering debut album, Festering Grotesqueries, Portland’s Dripping Decay spewed forth a new EP in January 2024 via Satanik Royalty Records, and DGR finally caught up with it, provoking the following review.)
Always being behind the eight ball when it comes to playing catch-up with music releases has proven to be the best sort of motivator in a twisted perversion of the idea.
When you have a deadline upcoming there’s always a sense that you can relax a little, and we have been lucky enough to receive our fair share of early promo works that have allowed us time to really soak in a release and absorb as much as it can offer. But the ones where we miss the bus or discover later? Now it feels like we owe them, which is strange given that many of these are ones we’ve found on our own time or became part of our own private collections to dive into.
This is the case with Oregon’s Dripping Decay and their late-January EP Ripping Remains (we did receive a timely promo, btw). Continue reading »
(Not long ago the Greek black metal band Funeral Storm released their newest album, and on its heels today we present Comrade Aleks‘ interview of the band’s Wampyrion Markhor Necrowolf.)
We go further into the catacombs of Hellenic Black Metal, and this time Funeral Storm is our guide. This band started by Wampyrion Markhor Necrowolf in 2001 under the name Raven Throne, then he changed the moniker to Funeral Storm in 2002, but took a pause in 2007 that lasted until 2012.
That was the real start of the band as the records finally began to appear: split albums, compilations, and finally the first full-length Arcane Mysteries (2019), which gained its portion of praise and helped to win Funeral Storm its share of recognition.
Now, five years later, the band is back with Chthonic Invocations. I’m not sure that you’ll find the answers to all the questions this album may raise, but at least we tried. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn provides a preview, and a pre-review, of the new album from Aseitas, out May 30)
Let’s get one thing straight – I happen to think that Aseitas‘s second album, False Peace is… well, I’m not going to use the word “masterpiece”, because that word has been so over-used and bastardised it’s basically become worthless and/or meaningless these days (though I am still a fan of, very occasionally, using it in its original meaning)… but it’s definitely what I would call an unsung and underrated underground gem.
With a sound that runs the gamut from Artifical Brain to Zao (taking in influences from everyone from Gorguts to Godflesh, Car Bomb to Cattle Decapitation to Krallice along the way) it’s the sort of album which doesn’t fit neatly into any one box – being part Death, part ‘core, part Sludge, part Tech, and more besides – and established Aseitas as a band with the potential to find fans all over the musical map.
And now, after lying dormant for four long years, they’ve emerged from hibernation with a brand new album (set for release next week via Total Dissonance Worship), and a new mutation of their sound – but is their latest evolution full of hybrid vigour, or a genetic dead-end?