NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TELOCH VOVIN AND VISERION — “THE IRON AGE OF KALI YUGA”

Jul 252023

On Friday of this week, the 28th of July, two New York based black metal bands whose music we’ve covered here before — Teloch Vovin and Viserion — will release a new split entitled The Iron Age of Kali Yuga, available on CD and digital formats from both bands and featuring artwork by Elena Vasilaki. On Friday night they’ll also participate in a listening party for the songs at Duff’s Brooklyn.

A pair of songs from the split, one from each band, have already surfaced, but what we bring you today is a full stream of the entire split — essentially one new EP from each group. They will serve as a fine introduction to these bands for people who haven’t encountered their music before, and for existing fans it provides a portrait of where their music has arrived in the current day (though it will undoubtedly continue to evolve).

As usual, we’ll share our own thoughts about the split as a preview of the listening experience, along with some insights from the bands themselves, and we’ll take them in alphabetical order. Continue reading »

THE GORGE – MECHANICAL FICTION

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Jul 252023

(Andy Synn wants you to think a little differently about the new album from The Gorge)

As I’ve stated a few times now, 2023 has been a surprisingly Prog-friendly year so far – for me, at least.

But it’s worth noting that words like “Prog” or “Progressive” mean different things when applied to different styles and sub-genres of music.

After all, what’s considered “progressive” in one genre might be par for the course in another, and vice versa.

Case in point, the sinuous songwriting and impressive instrumental abilities underpinning Mechanical Fiction certainly suggest that The Gorge are a “Prog” band.

But what sort?

BIZARRE PLAYLISTS TO PISS OFF YOUR NEIGHBORS – SUMMERTIME EDITION

Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Jul 252023

-Good morning, my neighbors!
-FUCK YOU!!!

(In March of this year Axel Stormbreaker brought us a two-part “Bizarre Playlist to Piss Off Your Neighbors“. as a way of welcoming Spring. Being seasonably adjusted, he now returns with a Summertime Edition.)

Oh my, oh my. Thank you very much. It’s true these past few months haven’t been good (life’s shit, currently), hence why you haven’t seen any proper reviewing work on my behalf. Not that I’m looking for pointless sympathy from strangers, it’s just that several bands have asked me to review their work. And I should have done something weeks ago, at a time I wouldn’t feel like I could put together a concrete sentence, even if that’d save my own life. And then guilt came along, spreading its bleak, bat-shaped wings all over my entire subconscious.

Or maybe I should just blame my enjoyment for promoting music, even if it’s just a dumb, occasional hobby. I even started this blog in a hopeless attempt to lift my spirits; mostly for publishing conceptual work that bears no relation to NCS, such as fictional tales, ’90s TV show reviews, Japanese jazz, and other bizarre concepts. Sadly, so far I only uploaded one fictional tale I wrote right after the initial outbreak of COVID’s pandemic, but I guess I’ll work on it further, sometime.

So. enough with my senseless mumbling. You’d better enjoy the following muzick, or else. I’ll only recommend six, six, six releases for now, ‘cos I’m a horrible person and words don’t seem to flow anyway.

Here we go. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COLONY DROP — “THE CLOCKWORK GRIP”

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Jul 242023

On their debut album Brace for Impact, the Seattle band Colony Drop have found a particular kind of sweet spot, which accounts for the glowing reactions that have already started pouring out from both so-called “music critics” like us and listeners looking for a hell of a good time. They’ve whipped up a stylistic amalgam that’s wild in its diversity but doesn’t sound either artificially bolted together or chaotic, and they’ve chosen lyrical themes that could be summed up as… the revenge of the nerds.

That last point isn’t intended as a criticism, by the way, because even though most of the above-ground world thinks of metal as a hellish house of malignant horrors, you’d be hard-pressed to find a nerdier group of fans of any kind of music (including, to be clear, the perpetrators of this site).

As one example of the sweet spot Colony Drop have made for themselves, today we’re premiering the album’s fifth track out of 11, a song called “The Clockwork Grip” that’ll knock your teeth out and light a fire under your imagination. We’ll provide our own introduction to it, but let’s start with comments by CDrop lyricist/vocalist Joseph Schafer (an old friend of this site and the long-timers who toil here): Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OF DARKNESS — “DIES IRAE”

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Jul 242023

Of Darkness is an unusual band in many respects. Its three members also play in such significantly better-known Spanish groups as Graveyard, Teitanblood, and Balmog, yet the earliest recordings from Of Darkness are at least as old as all of those. A glance at the Of Darkness discography suggests that although their recorded output has been scattered and unpredictable, something about it continues to exert a hold on their imaginations. Like an ember that grows so cold it might seem to have been extinguished, some new oxygen unexpectedly causes it to burn again.

But that’s just a start to what’s unusual. In addition, we’re told that the band never rehearse, and rather just improvise in the studio while recording. They composed, recorded, arranged, and mixed their new album Missa Tridentia in three days, which may make you wonder why eight years have elapsed since their last album, which in turn followed their first demos by a decade or more.

And then there’s the album credits, which recount that all three members contributed “orchestral arrangements”.

We might mention that their last album was also their first one — and that it was a tribute to the modern classical composer Krzysztof Penderecki, the author of such works as “Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima” and an opera named The Devils of Loudun, as well as many sacred works — though the members of Of Darkness are themselves said to hold “extreme nihilistic beliefs”.

And to these facts we’ll add one more significant observation: Although it’s not out of place to consider their new album under the headings of “funeral doom” and “orchestral metal”, it’s far from a conventional example of either genre. Continue reading »

MENTAL CRUELTY: “ZWEILICHT”

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Jul 242023

(In the following review DGR takes a very deep dive into the new album by the German band Mental Cruelty, which was released near the end of June by Century Media Records.)

The deathcore genre is one that has absorbed so much over the years in the nuclear arms race for ‘heavy’ that we’ve gone beyond being able to track down any particular list of influences or context being provided. We’re layers upon layers deep at this point, and much as it was opined in our writeup for Worm Shepherd‘s latest, it seems like the genre has folded in on itself enough times that at this point it’s just short of a few tempering baths and a sharpening stone that it could be morphed into a sharp blade.

Lately, groups have made use of these insanely multi-talented vocalists, adding their own multitude of vocals on top of it, so that the attack comes from multiple directions, embraced backing symphonics, and cranked the tempo up to near-lightspeed at all times. It has become a genre of ‘a lot’, and a lot is thrown at you any time you’re listening to such a group. Many, it seems, have warmed to the idea of getting by on sheer bombast alone. However, some impressive groups within that sphere have managed to make use of the ever-increasing multitude of weapons offered to them, and Germany’s Mental Cruelty are one such group.

Germany is already pretty skilled at making brutal death and slam music, so it wasn’t too shocking that Mental Cruelty‘s earlier works were born out of and were fully within that vein, but the group made a massive leap in that symphonics-backed brutal-death direction on their 2021 album A Hill To Die Upon. Of course, not long after the group would lose a vocalist as sexual assault allegations came to light post-signing to Century Media, because that seemingly inevitable sword that hovers above all -core group’s heads came collecting. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: NIDARE, COLLIER D’OMBRE, GRIFT, ATGEIR, VOIDMÏLKER

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Jul 232023

Nidare

Why would any sane person wake up at 4:00 a.m. on a Sunday morning, which is what I did today? Was it too hot to sleep in our un-air-conditioned bedroom? Not at all — it was a delicious 55°F (12.7°C) outside (eat your hearts out all you hell-dwellers in the rest of the sun-broiled world). It may have been that I limited my Saturday-night intoxicants to one ice-cold martini. Possibly I was subconsciously anxious because I had made no start on the writing of this column yesterday.

I don’t recommend this kind of behavior. I see no evidence that the early bird gets the worm. Instead, it turns the brain wormy… or at least very foggy. I went in search of music to function as a pesticide (the more forever chemicals, the better) and a bitter wind to blow away the fog. Here’s what I found:

NIDARE (Germany)

Late last year we premiered a song from Von Wegen, the then-forthcoming debut album by this German post-black metal band, and it pulled me headlong all the way into that album. It’s a very good thing, then, that we haven’t had to wait long for a follow-up, which hit the streets on July 12th in the form of a stunning EP named Naehe und Flackern (via Through Love Records). Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS ON A SATURDAY: ARCHSPIRE, DREAMWELL, HUMANITY’S LAST BREATH, KUNSTZONE, SLEEPWALKER, CHOSHECH, SWARRRM, SYLOSIS, TRIVAX, WORMHOLE

Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

Jul 222023

Archspire

Someone wrote they get by with a little help from their friends… don’t tell me… it will come to me….

I got by with some help from my friends this morning. It was one of those especially distracting weeks when I had almost no chance to claw my way through the hundreds of e-mails we get every day, so I didn’t have much new music bookmarked to check out over the last 24 hours and really wasn’t eager to do the catch-up chore. However, DGR and Andy Synn pitched five new songs and videos at me, and I also noticed a few recommendations from some other valued influencers.

Collectively, those became my main targets… and like the blind squirrel who found an acorn, I did stumble across a few nuggets of musical nourishment myself. The result is the very big collection I’ve assembled below, organized alphabetically by band name and with fewer words than usual for Saturday round-ups. Surely you will find something to enjoy….

The Beatles! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEADSPACE — “THE MALEVOLENCE I’VE BORN UNTO OTHERS”

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Jul 212023

It’s hard for us to imagine that there is anyone out there who doesn’t begin or end their day visiting our site. Still, perhaps the record-shattering heat that has afflicted much of the globe in recent weeks has produced a malaise that has led to inattention. And so it might be wise for us to repeat some of the news we broke about the Australian black metal band Deadspace exactly one week ago (here) — as a prelude to something new from them that we’re presenting today.

The principal news is that on on September 22nd Immortal Frost Productions will release the band’s seventh album, Unveiling the Palest Truth, which was very good news indeed, given that there was a time when it appeared Deadspace had ended its existence. The related news that we broke last week is that even before then Deadspace will release another record, an EP named Within Haunted Chambers that includes three tracks from two Deadspace albums, The Promise of Oblivion (independently released in 2015) and Dirge (released through Talheim Records in 2019), that the band re-recorded to showcase their evolution over the years in the live and studio arenas. As they explained to us:

This is part of us re-establishing ourselves and a much harsher and heavier entity, leaving behind the DSBM moniker. These tracks are how these songs are played live now in 2023 and are designed to sit well amongst our newer material that will be out in September.

AN NCS PREMIERE: LACRAU — “DECLINIO”

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Jul 212023

We have paid a lot of attention here over the last six months to the Portuguese band Carma and their second album Ossadas, which was released in early March by Monumental Rex. If you haven’t heard it, you really should find the time to go to this location and do that. We have learned, however, that there are members of Carma, as well as the Portuguese band Everto Signum, that have worked together in another musical entity named Lacrau that will also release an album this year — their full-length debut.

The name of that album is Axioma, and the same Monumental Rex will release it on September 22nd. To help spread the word, we’re premiering one of its emotionally powerful tracks today.

The album is a conceptual work that grapples with an ages-old phenomenon that concerns the burdens of aging, and it’s described in these words: Continue reading »

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