NO CLEAN SINGING

SPECTRAL WOUND – SONGS OF BLOOD AND MIRE

Aug 192024

(Andy Synn gets deep in his cups with the new album from Spectral Wound, out Friday)

Blame it on whatever you want – the insidious influence of social media, the growing desperation of Youtube “critics” and their need to monetise their “hot takes”, or simply the seemingly endless (and futile) competition for attention in an overloaded digital world – but it definitely seems like a lot of the nuance has been bled out of our ability to engage with, and analyse, music.

The fact is that if you were to listen solely to the mass-media hype machine you might start to think that new albums come in only two forms, either “best album ever” or “total fucking garbage”, to the point where I’ve seen some of the more excessively online fans of certain bands absolutely losing their shit if a writer decides to give one of their favourites anything less than a perfect score.

There’s also an expectation – one which I find entirely unfair and thoroughly counterproductive – that a band’s new album must be “better” (which is an extremely loaded word when it comes to art in the first place) than their previous one, which ends up creating an impossible set of expectations as well as discouraging risk-taking and/or experimentation.

And the reason I’m saying all of this (which some of you may already have worked out) is because I don’t think that Songs of Blood and Mire is better than 2021’s fantastic A Diabolic Thirst… but to say it is anything less than its equal, now that would be a crime.

SHADES OF BLACK: HÄXENZIJRKELL, BONJOUR TRISTESSE, TOUR D’IVOIRE, HYVER, HORNS & HOOVES

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Aug 182024

Häxenzijrkell – photo by Sophia W

(written by Islander)

Two days ago I woke up with a burst blood vessel in one eye. The entire space in the sclera between the iris and the inner corner of the eye had turned a deep and solid red, as if some devil-worshiping artist had figured out how to photoshop the real me.

It doesn’t hurt, nor has it affected my vision, but it looks hideous. The Mayo Clinic’s website says this condition (a “subconjunctival hemorrhage”) will heal itself in a couple of weeks, as the conjunctiva slowly absorbs the blood over time. The same site lists potential causes, but none of them seem to fit my situation, unless I rubbed that eye really hard in my sleep.

For the sake of symmetry, I’ve wondered if there is a non-painful way to burst a blood vessel in the other eye. I thought if I played today’s selections of black metal extra-loud, that might do the trick. So far, no luck; a blown-out eardrum is more likely, but blood draining from the ear canal would also create a kind of symmetry, yes? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: KILLING SPREE, RÅDDEN REKTALVÆSKE, ODIO DEUS, MELTED BODIES

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

Aug 172024

Getting a late start today. Went on a bit of a bender yesterday. Paying for it today. Lots of new stuff to get through, my mental trawler forging through frothy musical waters. Still frothy, even after my mid-week roundup (4 songs, but could have been 14). Thought that sacrificing complete sentences here in the intro might help accelerate things. Now, to hit the accelerator harder:

KILLING SPREE (France)

A rarity for me to include a cover song in these roundups, and even more rare to start with one. But this isn’t an ordinary cover. It shot lightning into my nerves and simultaneously scrambled my brains like swirled eggs on a hot pan. The live, unedited video (“filmed in the historic trenches of the Maginot Line in Alsace”), is quite cool too. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TORREFY — “STREET REAPER”

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Aug 162024

The last time we hosted a premiere from Torrefy‘s forthcoming fourth album Necronomisongs we used the album’s remarkable cover art as the jumping-off point. As you can see, it portrays the performance of a hellish orchestra, stripped of flesh but not stripped of their deathless desire to perform, and the song we premiered itself sounded like the demented revels of a devilish orchestra — fast and frenzied, brazen and baroque, and perpetually veering in a multitude of different but diabolical directions, creating an extravagant display of technical pyrotechnics and crazed yet sharply executed ebullience.

Today, as you can also see, we’re premiering another song by these unconventional Canadian black/thrashers from Necronomisongs, and this time our jumping-off point concerns the inspirations for the album tracks: Each of them is based on a favorite book of Torrefy vocalist John Ferguson.

The song we previously premiered, “Enslaved New World“, was inspired by a fantasy series called The Death Gate Cycle by Margaret Weis and Tracy Hickman. Before that, the band had revealed the album’s first single, “Of Wind and Worm“, along with an electrifying performance video. That song, as perhaps you might guess based on its title, was inspired by Frank Herbert‘s Dune.

And today we have a song incited by a Stephen King novel. As John Ferguson explains: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: DECEASED

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Aug 162024

Photo Credit: Thirdxposurephotography

(Looking forward to the impending August 30 release of a new album by Deceased, Comrade Aleks reached out to the band’s co-founder Kingsley “King” Fowley for an interview, and that resulted in a very engaging and wide-ranging discussion, which you can now read below.)

The legendary Deceased returns with a new full-length album, though “return” is a wrong word, because they’ve kept an active pace since 1985 and (almost) never stop. The band’s lineup is pretty steady and the new album Children of the Morgue was recorded by Deceased founder Kingsley “King” Fowley (vocals), Les Snyder (bass) who joined the crew in 1988, Mike Smith (guitars) who’s been in the lineup since 1990, Shane Fuegel (guitars) since 2006, and “youngest” member Amos Rifkin (drums) who had to replace untimely departed Dave “Scarface” Castillo in 2019.

The crew prepared an album full of driving death and thrash metal hits, proving to be damn heavy, alive, and creative despite the band’s respectable age. And we were honoured to interview Kingsley himself, a most friendly and communicative death metal undertaker. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE, PART I: BETWEEN REALMS, LAMENTARI, TRAIL OF TEARS, AS THE SUN FALLS

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Aug 162024

(DGR is attempting to clear out a backlog of reviews he has been planning for some time, beginning today with a collection of writings for four bands who released records in May of this year.)

You could probably set your watch by this – right down to the opening sentence even – but it seems once again that the back half of the year has crept up faster than one might expect, which means it is now time for the honoured tradition known as ‘clearing the slate’.

These are quicker, more stream of consciousness reviews than I generally prefer to do, and although the brevity is certainly appreciated, it does still kind of bother me personally that I’m not quite diving as deep into an album as I would generally like to.

This may come as shocking but even though I’ve had extended periods of radio silence on the site throughout the years, that doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily stopped listening to music. Instead, the musical net behind the good ship DGR remains constantly deployed, and full, even after I’ve removed and returned any protected species to the their homes in the wild.

What you see here are albums that’ve slowly built up in the collection over the year, some recent and others very clearly and assuredly not so recent. Some of these are even releases that I intended to write about before fucking off for the entirety of May, when I jammed out something like eleven or twelve reviews so the site wouldn’t go completely dark while we were all out in the wild that is both Terror Fest and Deathfest.

Either way, if I don’t at least attempt to kick this boulder downhill, the act of leaving so many releases I’ve been listening to without at least something to help get them to a wider audience is going to bother me until December… when I’ll be doing this again during year-end list season. Continue reading »

TOLMINATOR REPORT: DAY 4

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Aug 152024

(Today we share with you Didrik Mešiček‘s report on the fourth and final day of the star-studded Tolminator festival in his home country of Slovenia, which ran this year in late July. It’s again accompanied by excellent photos, including another large Flickr gallery at the end, made by Katja Torkar/Bloodbat Photography. For Didrik‘s reports on the festival’s first three days, go here, here, and here.)

The final day began with a bit more fever which also meant a bit more cocaine (still a joke, calm down) and that meant I couldn’t wait for the entire thing to be done. Combined with the lineup being mostly thrash this, wasn’t my favourite day, yet Saturday started with a band that seemed like it could be interesting – the Italian Astral Paralysis.

Metal Archives lists the band as progressive death metal and while their actual playing wasn’t bad there weren’t too many hints of anything progressive. Given that this was the only band on the lineup that went anywhere near proggy vibes, that was disappointing and definitely something I’ve been missing. The band’s biggest problem is, however, the vocalist who was stiff on stage and looked quite terrified. His vocal skill is good, he just needs to relax and play a lot of shows and that should be a lot easier and result in this band going places. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FLOSCULE — “A TREE OF LIFE”

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Aug 152024

The metal band Floscule, which features members from Silvern, White Ward, and Obrij, is based in Mykolaiv, Ukraine, a city with a shipbuilding history near the Black Sea in the southern part of the country, and an important transportation hub. As this source reports:

“In February and March 2022, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine, Russian military forces attacked Mykolaiv and placed it under siege. Ukrainian forces barred Russian forces from the city, though Russian artillery continued to shell it. By July, half of the pre-war population had left the city…. On 25 March 2022 Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy awarded Mykolaiv the title of Hero City of Ukraine due to the Battle of Mykolaiv.”

On September 27th, Vendetta Records will release Floscule‘s debut album, entitled Ї. Tomorrow, the band will release one of the album’s songs as a digital single, and we’re premiering it today with a lyric video. It has a history that connects with what Mykolaiv experienced in early 2022, and what the entire country has been experiencing as a result of Russia’s brutal and unprovoked invasion, with no end in sight. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: KUROKUMA / SUNFALL / TENDRILS

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Aug 152024

(Andy Synn provides three more recommendations for some home-grown British brutality)

I must apologise for my relative lack of writing/posting over the last couple of weeks – I’ve been pretty busy with a combination of personal, professional, and musical stuff (we’ve got a festival show coming up, for one thing, which will be our first time playing as a three-piece, and then spent all Tuesday this week hanging out at a local brewery and helping out with the creation of a signature beer for the band) which means I haven’t had as much time, or energy, to devote to NCS as usual.

But while I’ve not been able to write very much that hasn’t stopped me from listening… and today’s triptych of album reviews is a product of all that time spent sifting through all the musical chaff to pick out the real diamonds in the rough.

Which may be a mixed metaphor, but I’m running with it all the same.

SEEN AND HEARD: SCHAMMASCH, DEFEATED SANITY, PAYSAGE D’HIVER, MAN’S GIN

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Aug 142024

(written by Islander)

It’s only Wednesday and the week has already seen the release of a lot of notable new songs and videos. Taking advantage of the fact that I only had one premiere on the calendar for today, I decided to pull together some of the new sights and sounds so that the usual Saturday roundup this week might not be as obese as the one I did last Saturday.

SCHAMMASCH (Switzerland)

Yesterday Prosthetic Records announced the sixth studio effort by the Swiss band Schammasch, and the second in their The Maldoror Chants series, which draws upon a 19th-century surrealist book entitled Les Chants de Maldoror. The new album is named The Maldoror Chants: Old Ocean, and it’s set for release on October 25th. The themes of the album, based upon those texts, are captured in these words: Continue reading »

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