NO CLEAN SINGING

SLAM CITY METAL FEST II 2024 MARCH 15-16

Apr 122024

(Our Hanoi-based contributor Vizzah Harri prepared the following extensive report on the Slam City II Metal Fest, which took place last month over two days in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh, Cambodia.)

SLAM CITY II METAL FEST 2024 officially featured 11 bands from three South East Asian countries. Sadly, Lilith from the Philippines were unable to make it this time due to what the author can confirm as exorbitant flight prices this year. My Chemical Bromance, a metallic-dubstep act stood in for the Siem Reap leg. It was set and executed to occur over two days in Siem Reap and Phnom Penh. And again, this scribe can verify that it was a weekend that will go down in the history of Asian metal as what the underground is all about. Grit, grunge, punk-values, inclusion, and mighty riffage. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: CONSTRUCT OF LETHE — EXCERPTS FROM “A KINDNESS DEALT IN VENOM”

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Apr 122024

The concept behind Construct of Lethe‘s new album A Kindness Dealt In Venom is challenging, and frankly, very disturbing. The music is also challenging, frequently so wildly unconventional that it could be branded “experimental death metal”, and in its extravagant twists and turns and instrumental spectacles, some disturbing and others exuberantly delirious, it creates a transfixing union with the concept.

The music is meant to be heard as one continuous song, 44 minutes in length, which follows the shattering conceptual narrative. However, it does include separate segments as it proceeds along its traumatic course, and we have two of those for you today — two that are among the most head-spinning episodes in the stunning pageant that the album creates. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AS THE SUN FALLS — “AURORA”

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Apr 122024

For the sake of As the Sun Falls and the people who filmed the video you’re about to see, we hope they pulled it off in one take so as to avoid frostbite. The expansive snowbound setting (filmed against the backdrop of Nummela, Finland) is dramatic, and the band’s members are heavily bundled and throwing themselves into the performance in a way that surely got their blood rushing — but it still looks icy cold.

Yet with a song named “Aurora” and a band who make their home in “the frozen heart of Finland”, the setting was a natural choice. And the video well-suits the music itself, which gets the heart pounding, creates a bitter and desolate chill, and beautifully but hauntingly shimmers like the aurora borealis. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: CEMETERY OF SCREAM

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Apr 122024

(Following some delays on our part, today we present Comrade Aleks‘ interview with guitarist Marcin Piwowarczyk from the Polish band Cemetery of Scream, who trace their birth to the ancient year of 1992 and still go strong.)

I’m a long-time Cemetery of Scream fan. I remember those innocent days when me and my buddy shouted out the lyrics of “Anxiety”, their best-known song from the first album Melancholy, at a local graveyard. I remember how I watched and appreciated the metamorphosis the band went through from death-doom to… to some experiments within the genre that could be classified as “gothic”. And though I knew that those times, those vibes, won’t return and the band have changed too much, I awaited their new material.

There was a huge break since the release of their last album Frozen Images. It saw the light of day in 2009, and I knew that new songs were already prepared in around 2016. So what happened? It took too much time, yet here they are.

Sleaszy Rider Records released Cemetery of Scream’s sixth album Oceans in November 2023, and here we are with the band’s original guitarist Marcin Piwowarczyk. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CROWN OF ASTERIA — “CYPHER”

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Apr 112024

We don’t know who first coined the term “atmospheric black metal”, but it has obviously stuck. Its meaning, however, despite its wide usage, is somewhat vague. It suggests music that is more geared toward the creation of mood or visions kindled in the imagination than, well, music based more centrally on riffs and riots. But that still leaves a lot un-defined.

The vagueness of the term makes it a big umbrella, or a big tent, or whatever you want to call a canopy that covers a lot of people and the different things they’re doing, including people whose activities spill them outside the covering.

Which brings us to Michigan-based Crown of Asteria, the distinctive solo project of the musically prolific Meghan Wood. Now more than 10 years into its existence, Crown of Asteria has amassed a lengthy discography, one that has exhibited as much experimentation as it has been threaded with through-lines.

But while no year has passed since Crown of Asteria‘s inception without something new from the project (and usually several or many somethings), it’s been more than five years since the last full album — a span that will be closed on April 12th with Fiadh Productions‘ release of a new Crown of Asteria album named Cypher, which is the subject of today’s premiere. Continue reading »

IN VAIN – SOLEMN

Album Reviews No Responses »

Apr 112024

(In Vain‘s is out next week, and Andy Synn decided it deserved an advance review)

Scores, huh? What are they good for?

Absolutely nothing… well, most of the time anyway.

Let’s face it, when so many sites/zines are giving out nothing but 8s and 9s out of 10 (and don’t get me started on the ones who seem to think that adding a decimal point somehow makes them look better) the whole idea of assigning an arbitrary rating to things has been rendered even more meaningless than it already was.

I get it though, writers don’t want to lose access to promos and interviews, and a flashy score and an equally splashy feature quote (more often than not using the word “masterpiece” so as to even further dilute its meaning/value) is a great way to get yourself featured in PR emails and social media posts.

But is any of it actually good for the fans, let alone the bands themselves? Wouldn’t it be better to actually focus on providing some useful insight and analysis and, yes, even some actual criticism, so that the readers (and prospective listeners) actually take something away from what you’ve written beyond just the rating at the end?

Well, let’s find out, shall we?

SRD: “VRAGMESITON”

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Apr 112024

(We present Didrik Mešiček‘s review of a forthcoming new album by the Slovenian black metal band Srd, along with a full stream of the album.)

In all my years of writing album reviews, I’ve somehow never covered one of my fellow Slovenian bands, so it’s about time we tick that off the list as well and therefore I’ll be talking about Srd’s new release, entitled Vragvmesiton, today. The band is widely considered to be one of the best acts in Slovenia’s surprisingly numerous, albeit internationally unknown, scene, and for them this will be their third full-length record since their inception in 2016 and it’ll be released on April 19th, 2024 through On Parole Productions.

There are few bands of which I have such an intimate knowledge of their discography, mainly as I have a bad habit of not really checking out earlier releases, but Srd is definitely an exception. Whilst their debut album, Smrti sel, had some indications of where the band wanted to go, it was also quite clear that the band was still trying to find itself, and they did so in Ognja prerok where Srd developed their own unique and consistent sound a lot more and switched to having all of their lyricism in Slovenian.

The evolution with these two releases felt very natural, however it’s with Vragvmesiton that the band strays from that path and seems to meander through some twisted and chaotic Satanic black metal maze. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MOTHER OF ALL — “GLOBAL PARASITIC LEVIATHAN”

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Apr 102024

I have no competent statistical evidence to back up this assertion, but it seems like the way most metal bands work is that the music comes first and then the vocalist, who may or may not be an instrumental performer, comes up with lyrical themes and words that might have no connection to whatever the other songwriters were feeling and thinking when they cooked up the music.

That is probably not the way things have worked in Mother of All. This band is the brainchild of Danish musician Martin Haumann, and although he has surrounded himself in Mother of All‘s recordings with some very talented instrumental performers to augment his own prodigious talents, it’s he who is the lyricist and the songwriter, and the lyrical themes have been crafted with such conceptual focus and adamance of belief that it seems unlikely they were an afterthought. More likely, those themes were in mind when much of the music was written.

On the other hand, the music on Mother of All‘s new album Global Parasitic Leviathan, which we’re premiering today just days from its April 12 release, is so fantastically exhilarating that it may create a disconnect in the minds of listeners from what the album is about. But let’s begin with what the album is about…. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: THE MONOLITH DEATHCULT

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Apr 102024

(Last week we forced Andy Synn to listen to and review The Monolith Deathcult‘s new album, and this week we forced Comrade Aleks to interview TMDC‘s Robin Kok, and although we can’t affirm that Aleks got away unscathed, he did provide us the interview… below….)

The Dutch band The Monolith Deathcult began its underground career more than twenty years ago with quite brutal and moderately unbridled death metal, which over time was symphonized, electrified, industrialized, and decorated with various, often unexpected, samples. It sounds scary, but, for example, one of The Monolith’s past hits “Fist of Stalin” gained an exorbitant number of plays on streaming services, and on YouTube the views of this video amount to almost a hundred thousand, which is not bad.

As the years go by, The Monolith has changed within the framework of the formula discovered by its members, but the composition of the group has remained unchanged for many years: Michiel Dekker (guitar, vocals), Carsten Altena (keyboards, orchestrations, guitar, vocals) and Robin Kok (growls, bass). If we take into account the band’s tendencies towards electronic sound, then we can assume that their drums are programmed, but for several years now the invariably professional guest drummer Frank Schilperoort has been working in this position. He also worked with The Monolith Deathcult on the new album, released in April by Human Detonator Records, The Demon Who Makes Trophies of Men, which we spoke with Robin Kok personally about. Continue reading »

GVILLOTINE – HELL IS OTHER PEOPLE

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Apr 102024

(Andy Synn presents a wake-up call in the form of the new album from Gvillotine)

For whatever reason, I’ve been having trouble sleeping for the last few days. More specifically, I’ve been having trouble getting to sleep, because my brain just won’t switch off.

The knock-on effect of this, of course, is that it’s been getting more and more difficult to drag my tired, sleep-deprived carcass out of bed each morning, because both my brain and my body just don’t want to wake up.

But, let me tell you, Gvillotine‘s particular blend of blistering Blackened Grind contains more chemical energy than 1,000 cups of the blackest coffee – with none of the associated carcinogens – and a quick burst of it to start the day definitely helps blast (and I do mean blast) away the cobwebs.

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