AN NCS INTERVIEW: GUYOĐ

 Interviews  1 Response »
Dec 212023
 

(Even as year-end draws near it’s still not too late to discover new music released this past fall. Comrade Aleks discovered the debut album by the Austrian band Guyođ, issued by Kult und Kaos Productions, and that led to the following interview with two of the band’s members.)

Guyođ from Austrian Graz is a relatively new band, and Heart of Thy Abyss is their first full-length since the band’s birth in 2020. Daikakuji (bass), Rehoboth (drums), Dohrn (guitars, vocals) and Ōjin (vocals) put doomed death metal in the fundament of the album, twisted it a bit with a few black metal turns, and decorated it with sophisticated lyrics adopted from Charles Baudelaire and Herman Melville. There are some tentacles in the Heart of Thy Abyss artwork, but – a shocking fact! – no Cthulhu was mentioned in Guyođ’s lyrics. And that was one of the reasons why we organized this interview! Continue reading »

NEILL JAMESON CAN’T SHUT THE FUCK UP: A 2023 LIST II

 LISTMANIA 2023  1 Response »
Dec 212023
 


photo by Hillarie Jason

(One of the perennial highlights of our year-end LISTMANIA series are the articles Neill Jameson has contributed, and we’re very happy that he’s doing so again this year. This one is the second of a handful of Parts we’ll be publishing. To be clear, Neill wrote the title of this feature himself. And hey, you should check out Krieg‘s new album Ruiner too.)

Still here? Good. Don’t worry, you haven’t missed your chance to call me a nazi or SJW cuck, depending on your obviously refined perspective. Here’s the next batch of releases from 2023 you should check out. 

Your band probably isn’t here. Maybe next list. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2023: A YEAR-END LIST FROM DIDRIK MEŠIČEK

 LISTMANIA 2023  3 Responses »
Dec 212023
 

(Didrik Mešiček from Slovenia made his first appearance as a writer at NCS this past September, and has given us six reviews before 2023 has ended. In the feature below he shares his list of the year’s Top 20 metal albums.)

If 2022 felt like the year in which we recovered from the pandemic, 2023 really went into full bloom for me from a musical perspective. I’ve seen around 90 bands live, which is definitely my new record (that I, of course, plan on breaking next year). On the front of new releases, however, I can’t say I found it to be a particularly impressive year and would generally rank the pandemic years higher.

The notable shift for me personally though was that there are a lot more black metal inclusions than usual. Whether this is my personal evolution or a sign of the genre continuing to evolve in a positive manner, as I do believe it has in recent years, or a mix of both, I’m not quite sure. Without further ado, here’s a list of 20 albums that I’ve found either most impressive, most appealing, or just worth pretentiously talking about for one reason or another this year.

For those less gifted in the art of reading, here’s also a link to the Best Of 2023 (only about 6 hours of material) playlist, which is made up of my picks from the albums I talk about here plus a few extra songs that were also released this year: https://open.spotify.com/album/6ePCa1DxMuRWkjddULq6GW?si=zrG_Vu2QTR6IWYOaYptR5w Continue reading »

DGR’S YEAR-END REVIEW ROUNDUP (PART 4): PSYGNOSIS, VALE OF TEARS, Θλίψις

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Dec 212023
 

This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the final Part of his four-Part collection of reviews that we started rolling out earlier this week, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before. You’ll find his full explanation for what he’s doing here at the beginning of Part I. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2023: A YEAR-END LIST BY PROFESSOR D. GROVER THE XIIITH

 LISTMANIA 2023  5 Responses »
Dec 202023
 

(Our friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth (ex-The Number of the Blog) has been joining us this time of year for many years to share his diverse year-end lists, and does so again now. There’s a lot here, and it truly is diverse.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. Another year ends, and with that ending comes a barrage of year-end album lists and Spotify Wrapped graphics. Personality, I enjoy writing these lists because it helps me contextualize the past 11 or so months of music listening. As with previous years, this year featured an abundance of really good, entertaining music across a number of genres, and narrowing my list down to 20 was extremely difficult.

Before I get to the list proper, however, here’s a few lists of honorable mentions, divided into a few loose categories. This year, I found myself connecting a number of albums together due to certain similarities, and while I had my struggles in trying to figure out how to represent this in my list, in the end I settled on this method (with a few notable exceptions that made my top 20… more on that later). Anyway, let’s get this started. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NECROTUM — “SHATTERED FLOW OF TIME”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 202023
 

Gaze upon the fabulously ghastly cover art for Necrotum‘s new album Defleshed Exhumation and you’ll know that death metal will follow.

The writhing and hook-lined tentacles, their shadows stretching into the endless distance, the skeletons immersed in putrefying fluids, all of it overseen by the sunken eyes of a looming death’s head, it all foretells gruesome horrors to come.

But what kind of death metal awaits us? Surely something rancid, surely something influenced by progenitors from the ’90s… and those guesses prove to be correct, but don’t go far enough, as you’ll understand when you hear the track we’re premiering today in advance of the album’s January release by Memento Mori. Continue reading »

NEILL JAMESON CAN’T SHUT THE FUCK UP: 2023 LIST I

 LISTMANIA 2023  3 Responses »
Dec 202023
 

photo by Hillarie Jason

(One of the perennial highlights of our year-end LISTMANIA series are the articles Neill Jameson has contributed, and we’re very happy that he’s doing so again this year. This one is the first of a handful of Parts we’ll be publishing. To be clear, Neill wrote the title of this feature himself. And hey, you should check out Krieg‘s new album Ruiner too.)

I’m getting a later start on these this year, meaning I’ve already seen a lot of year-end lists, mostly due to checking to see if my last album made any of them. And because of this I could easily make the joke that most journalists have Helen Keller’s musical taste. I’d like to think I’m above such low hanging fruit, however.

In years past I’ve sectioned these lists off by demos, albums and dungeon synth. This year I’m ignoring that format in favor of dumping a ton of unrelated genres together outside of the final one, which will be the traditional “best of” list. Why am I doing this? I’m glad you asked and showed sincere curiosity: in the customer service industry we’ve begun using the phrase “surprise and delight the customer” and I’d like to take this wonderful philosophy into my writing. 

Or I’m just lazier than usual this year. Because fuck the customer.  Continue reading »

DGR’S YEAR-END REVIEW ROUNDUP (PART 3): SNAKEMOTHER, ABSOLUTISM, DEVILS REEF

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Dec 202023
 

This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the third Part of his four-Part collection of reviews that we started rolling out yesterday, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before. You’ll find his full explanation for what he’s doing here at the beginning of Part I. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DIPYGUS — “THE DOVER DEMON”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 192023
 

The last time we premiered a song by Dipygus (here) we resorted to the word “macabre” not once but twice. Feeling somewhat nauseated, we also shared the results of our researches into the meaning of the band’s name and a particularly disgusting bodily infiltration referred to in the title of the song we shared.

We shared other info about this California band’s wide-ranging but thoroughly bizarre thematic interests, but not nearly enough. A more complete listing of those unusual interests would swell to extravagant proportions, but this time we’re going to provide the more complete exegesis… eventually… after we’ve dealt with the meat of the matter today, which is another Dipygus premiere.

But don’t overlook that historical record at the end of this article, because it’s highly entertaining Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2023: A YEAR-END LIST FROM TODD MANNING

 LISTMANIA 2023  2 Responses »
Dec 192023
 

(As we continue rolling out the year-end lists of our writers, today we move to selections from Todd Manning.)

I think I found the formula for my year-end list last year. Every year, once my own list is finished, I pour over every other list I can find and I am reminded I am a fan first, musician and writer after. So I will keep it brief and give you a bunch of records I loved and I hope you find something new and exciting to check out. Continue reading »

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