OBSCURA QALMA: “VEILS OF TRANSCENDENCE”

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Feb 142024
 

(We bring you DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Venetian band Obscura Qalma, which was released earlier this month by the Dusktone label.)

The nice thing about Italian symphonic death metal group Obscura Qalma is that they make absolutely no pretense of the style of music they’re going to make nor are they hiding who their influences are.

Obscura Qalma have been kicking around since 2018 and already have two albums and a few EPs – though one of each of those is the instrumental and orchestral version of songs from a previous album, much in the same way Fleshgod Apocalypse have taken to including the purely symphonic tracks as bonuses to their full-lengths recently. Adding to their name, all you need to do is look at a press photo of the band and you can tell there’s likely going to be a rich vein of SepticFlesh running through the group’s DNA.

Obscura Qalma don their lab coats and joyfully smash their death and symphonic elements together, cackling all the while, with lightning crashing in the background. Drawing heavily from the occult for lyrical inspiration – recently pulling large buckets up the well from the Aleister Crowley mines – Obscura Qalma are playing in a very wide musical sphere. The group’s latest EP Veils Of Transcendence punches in at four songs and a little under twenty minutes of boulder-heavy death metal with a huge symphonic and synth line buttressing the events and doing the melodic heavy lifting. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STELLAR REMAINS — “WASTELANDS”

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Feb 132024
 

Let’s pretend you can’t listen to Stellar Remains‘ new EP right now, even though you can if you just scroll further down the screen you’re now looking at.

Let’s take our game of make-believe a move further and pretend you have no idea who this band is and have never heard a note of its music. That requires less suspension of disbelief, because Wastelands is in fact the first release of Stellar Remains, and only one song from the EP has been available for streaming before today.

Moreover, all that most of us know or could find out about the band (apart from that one song) is that it’s the solo work of Brisbane-based Dan Elkin, who has no resume on Metal-Archives yet.

So, if you indulge all this pretending, then you have to put some amount of weight on what we now have to say about Wastelands. How nice for us. Continue reading »

THE LAST TEN SECONDS OF LIFE – NO NAME GRAVES

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Feb 132024
 

(No Name Graves was released last Friday by Unique Leader Records, and Andy Synn reviews it today.)

Despite the many bands who’ve done great things with it, the term “Deathcore” is still a dirty word for some.

And while personal taste is always a major factor, I do happen to think that a lot of the inherent, knee-jerk prejudice can be traced back to the way the nascent genre was originally promoted by labels and the like who saw this “brand new thing” (although we can argue about just how new it was until the cows come home) and set out to make as much money off of it as possible, quickly leading to over-saturation and exploitation (you see, there is money to be made in the Metal scene… just not really by the bands, most of the time).

As a result a lot of potential listeners were put off by the excessive, artificially-inflated hype and the seeming lack of quality-control surrounding that early glut of guttural lovin’, breakdown-heavy bands who helped popularise the scene in the short-term but who, depending on their circumstances (and their resolve) either quickly fell apart or evolved into something different in order to survive.

But while we may quibble about the relative merits of the genre’s early years, the foundations laid by its early adherents have proven remarkably resilient and served as fertile soil for many different variants to bud off and bloom, meaning that even if the Platonic ideal of “Deathcore” that you have in your head doesn’t necessarily appeal to you there’s probably a version of it out there that will.

Which brings us, nicely, to The Last Ten Seconds of Life.

Continue reading »

PERSEFONE: “LINGUA IGNOTA: PART I”

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Feb 132024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Andorran band Persefone, which was released not long ago by Napalm Records.)

A guarantee with Andorra’s Persefone is that you are going to get a lot of music. Persefone have made a career out of albums hybridizing progressive metal, melodeath, and as wide a smattering of other genres as they could into a form of tightly controlled chaos with multiple vocal approaches serving as the icings on the cake.

They’re a full-album band and very rarely, throughout a surprisingly long career, have done any sort of single or EP as part of their discography. Persefone have always dealt in releasing densely packed albums, and as of 2022’s Metanoia were up to a grand total of six.

With all of those elements making up Persefone‘s career it is surprising that the band have seen relatively little change on the lineup front – especially since they really found their groove with 2013’s Spiritual Migration. Since then, other than a re-recording of their first album Truth Inside The Shades in 2020, the band have refined upon the eastern sprituality subject matter and massive keyboard-wall approach to their writing style.

Which is why it is both fitting and very interesting that the group’s newest release is just an EP but also has a ‘Part I’ tacked onto its name. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CHILD — “CREATIVE INVENTIONS OF KILLING”

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Feb 122024
 

As one dictionary tells us, the German word zeitgeist means “the defining spirit or mood of a particular period of history as shown by the ideas and beliefs of the time”. It combines two words that mean those very things — time and spirit.

Now, take a guess about how the Swedish band CHILD think about our current age, given that they’ve named their new album Shitegeist. Continue reading »

JOB FOR A COWBOY – MOON HEALER

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 122024
 

(Moon Healer is out on 23 February on Metal Blade Records)

2024 looks set to be an interesting year for comebacks, and few of those, I’d imagine, will attract as much interest – or generate as much divisive discussion – as the long-awaited new album from resurrected Death Metal revenants Job For A Cowboy.

That’s right, I said “Death Metal” rather than “Deathcore”, because it’s high time we all acknowledged that, whether you like them or not (and I’m sure there are many who don’t) the band haven’t been “Deathcore” since the release of Genesis way back in 2007.

Not only that, but in the years preceding their hiatus – culminating in the challenging technicality and churning intensity of the career-defining Sun Eater – it became clear that the band were more interested in pushing their sound in an increasingly unorthodox and unpredictable direction, rather than giving in to any outside pressures to conform to anyone else’s ideas of who they should be.

And although it’s now been almost (but not quite) a full decade since they last saddled up, there’s no question that on Moon Healer these cowboys have continued to ride even further down the proggy path laid out by its predecessor.

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: URLUK

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Feb 122024
 

(Today we present an excellent interview that Comrade Aleks conducted with the two members of the Italian black/doom band Urluk, with apologies to all concerned for our delay in publishing it.)

The grim Italian duo Urluk was founded by M. (drums, vocals) and U. (guitars) in 2020. They started their underground career with the EP Loss (2022), followed by the full-length More after a formal one-year-long pause. Five new compositions fit into 34 minutes, slightly ahead of the first release in total duration.

More is the spiritual successor to Loss, and the main motives of these five compositions are identical: loneliness, despair, occultism, and obsession with negative states, clothed in the form of black doom.

It is worth noting that “Urluk” in the Lombard dialect means “tawny owl”, an owl often found in this region and, in the context of the album, associated with abandoned dwellings and forests. In this strange way, the duo demonstrates a close connection with their native land and emphasizes an interest in mysticism and darkness in various forms. Continue reading »

GHOUL: “NOXIOUS CONCOCTIONS”

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Feb 092024
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new EP by Creepsylvanian splatterthrashers Ghoul, out now on the Tankcrimes label.)

If you’ve been trawling around the underground long enough, you’ve likely crossed paths with the crazed crossover thrash and death metal hybrid that is Ghoul; they’re a name that probably needs little introduction at this point – having battled out a career for years that is combination tongue-in-cheek shock horror, community theater, public-access TV, pirate radio, and puppet show.

The band, in all their murderous muppety glory, seem to appear out of the ether at shows and crank out crazed sets before vanishing into the night. You’d never know that they’ve been subsisting on a series of splits and singles since 2016’s Dungeon Bastards and prior to that had been on a slightly more sollid rotating albums/eps collection every three or four years.

The upshot of this is that Ghoul have five full-lengths to their name already, but their most recent EP Noxious Concoctions is the most substantial collection of material – four originals songs, one cover, for a grand total of eighteen and a half minutes of music – that the masked madmen have cranked out in almost eight years. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VERWOED — “THE MADMAN’S DANCE”

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Feb 092024
 

We’ve been following the progress of the Dutch black metal band Verwoed (the solo project of Erik Bleijenberg), and becoming increasingly intrigued and viscerally moved by each successive release. And so it was exciting news to learn that Wolves of Hades and Argento Records will be releasing a new Verwoed album named The Mother on March 29th. Getting the chance to premiere a song from it was another thrill.

The song is called “The Madman’s Dance“, and madness does burn within the music, with such intensity and such wholly enveloping power that it’s easy to feel consumed by it, witnessing not merely derangement but bloody splendor. Continue reading »

PRAISE THE PLAGUE – SUFFOCATING IN THE CURRENT OF TIME

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Feb 082024
 

(Andy Synn praises the new album from this German quintet, out Feb 16 on Lifeforce Records)

So far this week I’ve covered a moody “Doom-gaze” album and an ostentatiously melodic piece of bombastic Prog Rock by an ex-Death Metal band… and I’m worried people might be starting to think I’ve gone soft.

Well, to make up for it, here’s a few thoughts about the bleak ‘n’ blistering new album from German Blackened Sludge crew Praise the Plague.

Are you happy now?

Continue reading »

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