AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: MAIRU — “WILD DARKENED EYES”

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Aug 282023
 

In late July of this year Trepanation Recordings released the debut album Sol Cultus by the British post-metal/sludge band Mairu. In our review (by Mr. Synn) we praised its sheer sonic weight, and its engaging nuances:

“For all the album’s devastating density and immense intensity (or should that be ‘intense immensity’?), however, it’s clear that Mairu possess a keen understanding of the importance of employing a variety of tones and shades as well, with every punishing passage of gargantuan grooves and hammering heaviness being carefully balanced by moments of mood-altering ambience and/or gorgeous, gloom-shrouded melody that serve to add an extra dash of musical colour to the group’s creative palette.”

What we have now, one month after the album’s release, is a reminder to those who might not yet have discovered it, and that reminder takes the shape of an official video for the song “Wild Darkened Eyes“. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LIGHTLORN, DEATH SHROUD, GLYPH, GRIFT

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Aug 272023
 

I have a vague memory that when “blogging” began in the late ’90s most of them were personal diaries, presumptuously based on the notion that other people cared what you ate for breakfast or what you read while falling asleep or the great laxative you just discovered. Or what you thought about some music you’d listened to.

It’s obvious that on the weekends I regress to those early days, because no one can stop me. Like yesterday, when I complained about how early I woke up, or today, when I’m revealing that I made up for that by sleeping really late. I’m still writing thoughts about music I just listened to, just not as much today because… I slept really late.

LIGHTLORN (Sweden)

I’m happy to have been an “early adopter” of the “cosmic black metal” of Lightlorn, which is another way of saying that I raved repeatedly about the songs on their independently released 2022 debut EP These Nameless Worlds, which was then picked up for a physical release earlier this year by Black Lion Records.

I’m also very happy to see that Lightlorn will now be releasing a debut album, especially because the first two advance tracks from it are so damned good. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: OCTOBER TIDE, BARING TEETH, IMHA TARIKAT, ELS FOCS NEGRES, ASH PRISON, ZVYLPWKUA, NOCTOMB

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Aug 262023
 

I woke up at 2:30 a.m. this morning. No fucking idea why. I was wiped out last night and fell asleep by 8 p.m., but that still doesn’t explain it. I was thinking 4 a.m. would be the likely waking hour, a solid 8 hours later. Maybe it’s Mariners fever (baseball fans may understand.)

I hope my loss is your gain. The ridiculous waking hour gave me lots of time to catch up on music, and to compile a bigger than average roundup for this Saturday. In organizing this I decided to lead with the most prominent name in the collection, and then move in a more obscure and musically challenging direction before embarking on a pair of anthems and then concluding with nastier notions.

OCTOBER TIDE (Sweden)

When my compatriot DGR reviewed October Tide‘s last album, 2019’s In Splendor Below, he found it “a very different album from its predecessors,” “one of the fastest-moving albums they’ve created” and with a new emphasis on “death metal atmospherics and groove” — though he noted that the band had not completely abandoned “the beautiful and cold atmospheres” that had become a major part of their hallmark.

The new October Tide album, The Cancer Pledge, is likely to be in a similar vein as that last one. Indeed, guitarist Fredrik Norrman calls it “a direct continuation of the previous album — less doom and more death metal, yet melodic and with more layers”. That’s born out by the album’s first single, “Tapestry of Our End“, which arrived with an engrossing animated lyric video. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DARK HALL — “CHANGING WEATHER”

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Aug 252023
 

Most visitors here know that we often delight in musical horrors of different kinds — roaring and shrieking voices; percussion that resembles the discharge of devastating weaponry; guitars that sound like whirring bone saws  or sledgehammers pounding concrete; and moods of menace, mayhem, and abysmal agony.

But today we share a delight of a very different kind — four very talented individuals embarked on a head-spinning musical adventure, reveling in their instrumental mastery but with no more apparent effort than what’s required to breathe in and breathe out. The chance to watch them all do what they do makes the smiles even broader. (There’s still no clean singing, nor singing of any kind.)

There’s also a tale behind this song and video. The tale itself is also a delight, and we’ll begin there. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEVIL’S HOUR — “BEERLETHICS”

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Aug 252023
 

Back in January we helped slap the ass of newborn 2023 and get the baby screaming through our premiere of the title song from Black n´Punk Marauders, a debut EP by the German band Devil’s Hour.

As the record’s name signaled, the EP’s music was a cauldron of sound mainly influenced by Punk, Rock, and First Wave Black Metal bands from the ’80s and ’90s, but Devil’s Hour also masterfully pulled from wellsprings of old-school speed metal and classic heavy metal. And as feral and ferocious as the music was, the EP quickly proved that Devil’s Hour know how to write songs that are also highly infectious.

Since the release of that EP the band’s vocalist Wild Rogan deoarted, but they decided to forge ahead as a four-piece, with guitarist Burt Cocaine stepping into the vocal role, as he had done before in the band’s live shows.

Before they were Devil’s Hour the band had a different name — Sexrex. Under that older name they put out a 2020 EP named Beerlethics. And now with the revised lineup mentioned above they decided to re-record that EP’s title song. It’s being digitally released today by the German label Crawling Chaos, and we’re bringing it to you now, to help viciously kick 2023 careening toward the end of the year. Continue reading »

BEFORE THE DAWN: “STORMBRINGERS”

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Aug 252023
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the comeback album by Finland’s Before the Dawn, which Napalm Records released at the end of June.)

When you follow music for a long time there are bands that after a while you figure are well and truly done — even though this is proving to be less of the case year by year — their logical conclusion reached or the fuel behind that particular project redirected into other forms.

When it came to Before The Dawn, it seemed like all of the energy driving the band had been redirected well into other directions when the group finally hung up its hat. Tuomas Saukkonen had multiple projects going at that point, and after Rise Of The Phoenix — which honestly is starting to feel more and more like invoking a curse, since naming your album something after a phoenix following a drastic lineup shift almost seems to doom future endeavors — closed up shop on nearly everything he had going and folded it into what would become Wolfheart.

However, after returning with Dawn Of Solace — another project that would’ve figured to be wrapped — in January of 2022, it seemed like the embers for all of those earlier projects hadn’t quite burned out like we thought. Continue reading »

BLUT AUS NORD – DISHARMONIUM – NAHAB

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 242023
 

(Andy Synn gazes into the abyss once more via the medium of the new album from Blut Aus Nord)

Why, you might ask, am I reviewing the new Blut Aus Nord album?

After all, you can already hear it for yourselves in full here, or simply wait until its official release tomorrow and form your own opinions.

Perhaps it’s because I just like to hear the (proverbial) sound of my own voice as I share my opinions online.

Perhaps it’s because I feel like I have something of interest to offer in my analysis that might help illuminate the album a little more.

Or perhaps it’s because, after listening to Disharmonium – Nahab so many times over the last few weeks this is the only way to purge these horrific visions from my mind.

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): AUGURIUM — “UNEARTHLY WILL”

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Aug 242023
 

One way to think of the Canadian band Augurium‘s new album Unearthly Will is as a tour through a potentially deadly wildlife refuge of arcane and even astral origins. It provides close encounters with a variety of musical beasts, some more extravagantly colorful than others (but still with teeth bared) and some more savagely hostile. By the end you might be relieved that you didn’t become a meal for the menagerie, yet electrified by all the close calls — and by the sweeping splendor.

Augurium‘s name is a Latin word for omen, and Omen was the name of the band’s 2017 debut EP, which was an omen of things to come but not entirely predictive. Adorned by an eye-catching cover of an intriguing young woman with hands ending in talons, and introduced by a sinister symphonic intro, it delivered a brand of death metal that was equal parts blistering, bludgeoning, and imperiously hellish, anchored by vicious tremolo-reliant riffing and berserk vocal monstrosity, and accented by melodies of cruel menace, pestilential terror, oppressive gloom, and demonic violence.

From there Augurium moved more in the direction of brutal death metal with their 2018 debut album Unhallowed Ascendance, but with more dynamism than is often found in that genre, even more fully embracing bombastic, thuggish grooves, the ugly distortion of eviscerating riffage, melodies of illness and agony, and bursts of obliterating mayhem. Yet still, the music had plenty of eerie, insidious, and sometimes surprising melodic elements that helped shroud it in an atmosphere that seemed genuinely infernal. Continue reading »

SLOW FALL: “OBSIDIAN WAVES”

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Aug 242023
 

(Today we present DGR‘s review of the new album by the Finnish band Slow Fall, which was released a couple months ago.)

It is always toughest reviewing the straight-shooters. They have a tendency to gum up the brainworks factory when you least need them to. Most of the time it’s because those albums are generally enjoyable but you find yourself constantly stumbling about an empty maze searching for a better way to describe ‘why’ rather than just the part where the band happens to excel at pushing the buttons to unleash good brain chemicals.

While we tug at that same thread though, there is also that sensibility that some of those groups are scraping up against the glass ceiling of releasing something exceptional and you can already see the signs of it in your current subject, it just isn’t quite there yet.

The halls of those who are cramming up against that breakthrough point are increasingly packed, and it’s an area we’ve often trawled over the years as we dig through the underground. Sometimes we get lucky and get to watch a band shoot through to bigger things. As always though, it ties back into the part where you can see exactly what the band are doing at that particular moment in time. There’s no mystery to the blueprint they follow, only how well they execute it.

Finland’s Slow Fall are one such group, whose early-June release of Obsidian Waves is scraping up so hard against the pathway to greatness that you can almost hear the glass cracking. Straight-shooting as they may be, there’s always room for a little bit more keyboard-inflected melodeath in the world. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FOSSILIZATION –“EON”

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Aug 232023
 

Fossilization refers to the very slow natural process in which organic material becomes mineralized, eventually transforming it into stone. It takes a dead thing and makes it deader.

In some ways it makes sense that the Brazilian band Fossilization (whose members are also a part of the stupendous sludge/death/doom metal band Jupiterian) chose that name. Their music is stone heavy and stone hard, and the specter of Death looms large over their lyrics and their music –which is a particularly grim and devastating form of death metal.

On the other hand, the music itself is very far from a cold dead thing. Both its pacing and its effects on a listener proceed much faster than the transformation for which the band are named.

Like the specter of Death, Fossilization have a debut album looming on the horizon. Entitled Leprous Daylight, it’s set for release on September 8th by Everlasting Spew Records. So far, two tracks from the album have been revealed, and today we present a third one — “Eon“. Continue reading »

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