NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HUSQWARNAH — “PURIFICATION THROUGH SACRIFICE”

Sep 122024

(written by Islander)

In December 2021 we premiered and reviewed Husqwarnah‘s debut album Front Toward Enemy. I also put one of the songs from that album (“Ignoto1”) on our list of 2021’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (here), a recognition of how hook-laden and compulsive the music was — in addition to it being tank-like, ravaging, fire-breathing, and morbid.

Today we see what these Italian death metal marauders have been up to since then, as we again host a full stream of Husqwarnah‘s newest album, Purification Through Sacrifice, which is set for release on September 16th by the distinctive Time To Kill Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HAMMERFILOSOFI — “SOLUS”

Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET No Responses »

Sep 122024

(written by Islander)

Tomorrow, on the first Friday the 13th of 2024, ATMF will release a new EP by the Italian/Norwegian duo Hammerfilosofi. Its full name is SOLUS (Igne Natura Renovator Integra).

The EP follows by almost exactly one year the band’s first release and debut album The Desolate One, which we premiered here, calling it ” fanatical, fiery, and frightening,” but also “a harrowing esoteric process of liberation and elevation.”

ATMF portrays the new EP as “four psalms of relentless, multi-layered, and hellish madness,” and the band’s NKTFR describes it as “an inward journey of spiritual violence and cathartic soul-searching,” picking up from where The Desolate One left off: “Both musically and conceptually we want to bring back some of that rebellious pride, wrath, and danger – some Blood, Fire, and Death – that for us are mandatory ingredients in Black Metal.”

As we did for the album, today we present SOLUS… from beginning to end. Continue reading »

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER – SERVITUDE

Album Reviews No Responses »

Sep 122024

(Today our man Andy Synn steps up to tackle one of the most difficult reviews he’s ever written)

How exactly, let me ask you, does one even begin to talk about – let alone judge – an album like this?

Let me be clear, the untimely demise of the band’s infamous (and seemingly irreplaceable) frontman Trevor Strnad hit a lot of us here at NCS very hard – hell, I was the one who volunteered to pen a few words in tribute after his passing – but it obviously hit his bandmates harder than almost anyone, and I don’t think anyone would have blamed them if they’d chosen to hang up their spurs in the aftermath.

But, as it turns out, giving up wasn’t in the cards for these Detroit death-dealers, who are set to solidify their return with the release of their tenth album – the first one to feature long-time guitarist (and last-remaining original member) Brian Eschbach taking over as the group’s vocalist, as well as the recording debut of the newly-formed guitar-duo of Brandon Ellis and the returning Ryan Knight – in just over two weeks from now.

With all that in mind then, perhaps the best thing I can do with this review is simply set your expectations appropriately, as while many (if not most) of us may have been hoping that the band’s big comeback would be an unqualified success and an unparalleled triumph over tragedy… the truth is that Servitude is not that.

Or maybe it is. Maybe I’m looking at it wrong. Maybe its very existence – it’s still a good album, just not a great one, after all – is enough of a triumph on its own… especially considering that it almost didn’t happen at all!

AN NCS PREMIERE: FERAL — “THE DEVOURING STORM”

Premieres No Responses »

Sep 112024

Seventeen is a prime number, and seventeen is the number of years that the savage Swedish band Feral have lived so far. Their music has also proven to be prime, prime cuts for carnivores of massive and mauling but also dynamic and addictive death metal.

On October 18th Transcending Obscurity Records will add to an already impressive Feral discography by releasing the band’s fourth album, To Usurp the Thrones, and today we’re premiering a song from the album fittingly named “The Devouring Storm“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INGURGITATING OBLIVION — “THE BARREN EARTH OOZES BLOOD, AND SHAKES AND MOANS, TO DRINK HER CHILDREN’S GORE” (PART 3)

Premieres 1 Response »

Sep 112024

(written by Islander)

It’s a standard practice for bands and record labels to preview forthcoming albums by releasing a song or two (or more) in advance of the release date. It’s extremely uncommon for anyone to do what the German avant-garde death metal band Ingurgitating Oblivion and Willowtip Records have been doing over the last few months: releasing three segments of a single song, one after another.

On paper, it looks like a risky strategy. Wouldn’t most people lose patience or get frustrated, hearing only a part of a song instead of getting the chance to listen to all of it, especially when listeners have to wait a month in between each part? And because even at the end all you have before the album release is one song, instead of several songs?

Well yes, it’s risky. But this uncommon strategy works for Ingurgitating Oblivion because the long song they’ve been rolling out in segments is itself so unusual, and because each Part has been as long as (or longer than) an individual track on most albums, but mainly because each Part has so powerfully seized attention on its own.

Moreover, the first two parts have succeeded in building an eager anticipation for the third one, to find out how this uncommon extravaganza is going to end — and today we bring you the answer. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: VENDEL

Interviews No Responses »

Sep 112024

(Below you will find Comrade Aleks‘ interview of the Moscow-based epic heavy metal band Vendel, whose debut album was released by Dying Victims Productions on June 14, 2024.)

I learned about the Moscow band Vendel thanks to their cover of Bathory’s immortal killer hymn “Under the Runes”, and then I found out that the guys have a couple of their own tracks with covers of Saint Vitus and Manilla Road. And, perhaps, these references already give a fairly accurate idea of what Vendel offer us on their debut album Out in the Fields: high-quality and lively old-fashioned metal at the junction of heavy (Manilla Road, Iron Maiden) and doom (Bathory, Saint Vitus).

The band was founded in 2015, but its actual lineup was formed in 2017: Alexey Goryachev (vocals), David Kazaryan (guitars), Lasha Khabalov (bass), Sergey Kargalsky (guitars), and Sergey Skorodumov (drums). In their new material, Vendel focus on the old-fashioned heavy metal with references to albums like Hammerheart as well. Despite all the clearly discernible influences, Vendel does not tend to copy anyone, although you’ll hear some familiar turns here and there, things happen.

But first of all, Out in the Fields sounds sincere and charged; the guys are possessed with the spirit of true and epic viking doomy metal. Secondly, there are no bands that would embody this spectrum of musical influences in Russia.

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HAND OF OMEGA — “THE END OF THE BEGINNING”

Album Reviews, Premieres 2 Responses »

Sep 102024

(written by Islander)

We live in a world where Darwin’s radical old theory has been replaced and evolution is now determined by the survival of the shittest, a world in which some are sworn to the Mentat’s Oath and others have become cyberspace conscripts, with our lives supported by nothing but foundations built on shifting sands, watching the Amazon burning (and much of the rest of the world with it), our shapes determined by a wretched new convolution.

And there I’ve managed to stitch together all of the song titles from the debut album by the UK band Hand of Omega, the name of which is The End Of The Beginning.

I have no idea whether Hand of Omega would endorse this way of interpreting their thematic intentions, but their music seems consistent with it, because it’s both crushingly bleak and destructively enraged — as you’ll find out today through our premiere of the album in advance of its September 13 release by the Irish label Cursed Monk Records. Continue reading »

KANONENFIEBER – DIE URKATASTROPHE

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Sep 102024

(Andy Synn goes back to the front with the new album from German fusiliers Kanonenfieber)

War… war never changes.

And neither, in some ways, do Kanonenfieber, whose long-awaited and highly-anticipated second album, Die Urktatastrophie (transl. “The Original/Primal Catastrophe”) comes out next week (September 20, to be exact).

And yet… and yet… those of us who’ve been marching alongside the band over the years, slogging through the mud and blood of Menschenmühle (2021), then going on to join the Yankee Division to fight against Der Füsilier (2022), only to find ourselves staring deep into the abyss as a U-Bootsmann (2023), will know from experience that although the band (strictly speaking a solo project, I know) may not have changed, their tactics have definitely, albeit subtly, evolved with each new engagement.

In particular, there’s been a slow but steady shift in focus to incorporate more of Death Metal’s riff-centric heft and rhythmic hookiness with each and every release, with the result being that the group’s career has, up to a point at least, followed a similar arc to their Dutch cousins (and similar WWI scholars) God Dethroned.

But whereas the latter’s most recent album ended up falling a little (or, more accurately, a lot) short of achieving its objectives, the anti-war anthems of Die Urkatastrophe have no such problems hitting their target.

WOLFHEART: “DRACONIAN DARKNESS”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Sep 102024

(Below we present DGR’s review of the new album by Finland’s Wolfheart, which was released on September 6th by Reigning Phoenix Music.)

Much as we joke about it – yours truly in particular has created enough material to 3-D print a house – Finland’s Wolfheart have become a hallmark of consistency on a near unchallenged level since their inception. Save for a brutal year-over-year album schedule a few discs ago, Wolfheart have been a band you could set your watch by. Every two years, without fail, ballpark eight or so songs and about forty minutes of music. In fact, it wasn’t until the band’s Napalm era that Wolfheart flipped their career paradigm on its head by putting out albums with seven and nine songs.

It won’t shock then that a discussion of Wolfheart‘s newest album Draconian Darkness is going to contain a lot of familiar shades to it, because with consistency comes familiarity, and familiarity leads to an odd approach in reviewing their discs wherein you almost reset-to-zero with them every time and approach a new album at face value.

Which is interesting, because in a lot of ways you could view Draconian Darkness as a double-album with the one that preceded it, King Of The North. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BTK (BIND TORTURE KILL) — “BANDAISON”

Premieres 3 Responses »

Sep 092024

You’re about to see a violent short film in the company of violent music. The video doesn’t show us what the victim did to deserve his brutal punishment, if he did anything deserving of such a fatal encounter. We only get the headlong chase, a struggle in the mud, and the vengeance of the hangman’s noose.

Based on the name of the song presented through the video — “Bandaison” — the motivating factor may have been a perverse kind of sexual thrill, though whether the perversion took root in the victim or his assailant is ambiguous (the lyrics might shed light, but the expulsion of the words is so terrorizing that even those who speak French might face a challenge in deciphering them).

The perpetrators of the song are the French band BTK, which stands for Bind Torture Kill, and the source of the song is their forthcoming third album album Sauvagerie, which will eventually be released by a trio of labels on different formats. This one track will see digital release on September 12th. Continue reading »

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