AN NCS PREMIERE: TORTURERS’ LOBBY — “REPTILIAN HIDE”

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Apr 152024
 

One look at the cover art for the debut album from Tampa-based Torturers’ Lobby tells you that the music is likely to be disturbing but unconventional. It’s not easy to decipher what we’re seeing. Though skeletal remains and a vulture’s head appear to be part of the scene, the ghastly greenish hues and running veins create a twisted image of an old desecration.

It turns out (thankfully) that the music is also disturbing and unconventional, even more so than the cover art, the result of a willfully free-wheeling hybridizing of influences that follows only its own twisted logic but (also thankfully) doesn’t come off as “different for the sake of being different,” cohesion be damned.

We should quickly add that the music’s intensity is often so overpowering and shattering that it might leave you bug-eyed and slack-jawed.

As evidence of these conclusions we have two songs from the album to spotlight today, one of which has previously surfaced and one of which we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s June 14th release by Caligari Records and Ixiol Productions. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VRYKOLAKAS — “BILATERAL VENOMOUS ASSAULT

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Apr 152024
 

As you can see, today we’re premiering a song from a new album, Nocturnal Dominion of Death, by the veteran Singaporean death-dealers Vrykolakas. It’s the second song from the album to be revealed so far. Together, those two tracks bring to mind the boxing terminology for the “one-two punch”, the devastating combination of blows that leaves an opponent sprawled on the canvas.

So let’s take up the first punch first. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HERESIARCH, MAREA, RITES OF REGRESS, MOISSON LIVIDE

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Apr 142024
 

Well, though I feared that partying last night might make today a wasteland for me, an incipient cold kept me away from the party. The only silver lining from missing that birthday party is that I had a clear enough head to pull together this column, which includes reviews and streams of two new albums and two new songs from full-lengths that are on the way — the theme of which is that “Variety is the spice of life!”

HERESIARCH (New Zealand)

Heresiarch‘s new album puts me in mind of a stunning mountain that seizes attention from far away, looming by itself like a daunting edifice above mundane surroundings, like a Rainier or a Fuji or a Kilimanjaro. Only as you get closer do the details begin to stand out too.

Edifice is indeed the new album’s name, and we’re drawn to it initially from far away, the distance being the seven years that separate us in time from their first album, Death Ordinance, which still looms in the memory. Unlike the mountains named above, however, this one is erupting, and through its vulcanism is re-configuring as the explosions occur, the earth shakes, and the lava flows. In that way, new details take shape in the harsh crags, to leave new memories. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: BOLESKINE HOUSE, CROCELL, GÖDEN, UDOLS, WEREWOLVES

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 132024
 

Following up yesterday’s roundup of recommended new songs and videos, here’s another — five more to help get your weekend off on the wrong foot.

BOLESKINE HOUSE (Italy)

The name of the debut album from Boleskine House is Miserabilist Blues. The ringing guitar harmony that opens the long song I’ve chosen to begin today’s collection is indeed miserable and blue, but “Black House Painters” transforms that feeling of aching loneliness by then processing the melody through a lens of frantic blackened riffing, tumultuous percussion, and abyssal roars. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BARBARIAN SWORDS, DARKTHRONE, LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR, SEAR BLISS, THOU

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Apr 122024
 

Another big week for new songs and videos from some very good bands. I wasn’t able to pull together a mid-week roundup, so we’ve got a lot to cover today and tomorrow. Without further ado, let’s begin.

BARBARIAN SWORDS (Spain)

We start today’s alphabetized collection with B, which stands of course for Barbarian, as in Barbarian Swords, and a song of “true nihiilistic black doom” off their new album Fetid. Continue reading »

SLAM CITY METAL FEST II 2024 MARCH 15-16

 Concert Reviews  1 Response »
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 »

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