AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SNORLAX — “THE NECROTROPHIC ABYSS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Jun 162023
 

It’s not as if we didn’t already know that the Australian project Snorlax (the solo work of Brendan Auld) was capable of making music that causes listeners stop suddenly in their racing tracks, and leaves them feeling kind of gob-smacked. Especially on the band’s debut album II, that became vividly evident. But still, the band’s new album The Necrotrophic Abyss is astonishing, and we’re lucky to get to premiere it today.

Here, the band’s evolving unification of black and death metal has reached full fruition, flowering into compositions that are bludgeoning, violent, and bewildering, elaborate in their constant permutations but both viscerally frightening and soul-crushing in their renditions of desperation and downfall — and all of it executed with jaw-dropping technical skill and captured with remarkable production quality.

On this album, to put it more succinctly, the unexpected becomes expected, and the result is a compact record that stands well out from the pack as we near the halfway point of 2023. It’s not the kind of thing you hear once and move on from. It’s the kind of thing that’s like your own personal Pandora’s box, waiting to be opened again and again, to witness with stark fascination its manifold evils fly into the world over and over. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ALTARAGE / DĀMIM / INNUMERABLE FORMS / MORNU / TRIPHEAD / WOODS WITCH

 SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 162023
 

(Andy Synn collects a series of six short-form releases you may not have heard)

Time, as they say, is a cruel mistress.

No matter what we do, she never seems to give us enough of herself, and always demands that we try to do more, write more, say more, with what little she allows us to have.

It means that we frequently have to make some harsh decisions when it comes to what we do, or do not, cover here at NCS, and so it’s inevitable that stuff we might otherwise have liked to write about – for example, the delicious new Depeche Mode covers record by SOM – sometimes doesn’t make the cut.

Which, ultimately, makes it extra important that you all check out the following EPs… because so much already gets missed out that you really can’t afford to let these pass you by too!

Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): PLAGUEWIELDER — “BURNING DEATH”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jun 152023
 

We’ve closely followed the releases of Ohio’s Plaguewielder almost from the band’s inception, not only for the obvious reason that we’ve found the music consistently compelling but also because the progression from one release to the next has never been entirely predictable.

To be sure, dark shadows have consistently swathed the music, and it has been continuously fueled by harrowing emotional intensity. As we observed in reviewing their most recent album, the remarkable Covenant Death, “feelings of hopelessness, frustration, and fury have always seem to be fighting to get out into the songs”.

But, especially as revealed on that latest album, the band’s stylistic ingredients have become increasingly multi-faceted. That album was still music as catharsis, as Plaguewielder‘s music always has been, but the range of musical influences expanded outward in captivating ways.

We’ve learned that Plaguewielder are at work on their next album, which will have the evocative title In Dust and Ash, and we will again be eager (and intrigued) to hear it. But in the meantime Plaguewielder are bridging the gap between full-lengths with a new EP named Burning Death (set for release tomorrow via Jeff Wilson‘s disorder-recordings), and once again it holds surprises. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SERPENS LVX — “I AM THE ADVERSARY (IMPII IRRELIGIOSI CARNIVORIBUS IMMORTALIBUS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 152023
 

Spirituality is a staple of black metal, more than in any other genre of extreme metal. Although some death metal bands seem to have made a religion out of gore, and there’s no shortage of pentagrams and blood sacrifices in the classics of doom, not to mention the worship of Lovecraft just about everywhere, it is in the realms of the pitch black where supernatural belief dominates.

The exaltation of Nature is its own form of worship among many black metal bands, but there is only one figure at the very top of the pantheon. In different guises and explored through a multitude of different esoteric manifests and practices, it is Lucifer (though his names are legion) who provides the principal inspiration, or at least that is what many bands proclaim, though one suspects it is faux faith in many instances.

Serpens Lvx brandish Satanism lavishly on their debut album, extensively entitled HENDECAGRAMICON: Adversarial Ethos Exoterically Unlocking Shrines Of Dissolution, though their thematic subject matter extends to mythic demonic figures of greater variety: The song titles, for example, include references to Tiamat, Typhon, Quetzalcoatl, and Aztec vampyrism. It is a variant metaphysics — the album also includes a song called “Anticosmic Eroticism (Sexual Black Light Magick)” — but the through-lines are apparent.

The important question, of course, is how this part-Mexican, part-Russian duo have elucidated their themes in sound. We have examples for you, including a song we’re premiering today: “I Am The Adversary (Impii Irreligiosi Carnivoribus Immortalibus)“. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HOLY DEATH — “NECK WOUND SESSION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 142023
 

We’ve been fans of the underground California death/doom band Holy Death ever since coming across their second EP, Supreme Metaphysical Violence, soon after its release in February 2020. We’ve followed them closely ever since, like a pack of hounds chasing after a car, witness the fact that we’ve written about them on seven separate occasions over these three years.

And so my heart sank last September when I read a statement by the band’s vocalist/guitarist Torie John that jut a few days after the band released their 2022 Moral Terror EPs he was diagnosed with metastatic papillary thyroid cancer, and that it had spread from his thyroid to his lymph nodes.

Torie also explained that the cancer could be treated with surgery, and that it was curable. At the time of that first announcement, he was still searching for a surgeon and hospital to perform a complete thyroidectomy and removal of lymph nodes. Ultimately, the search was successful, and the extensive surgery on his neck was scheduled to take place last November.

What did he do to prepare for the surgery? Of course, he and his bandmates spent November 5, 2022, recording a new release with Raul “Riff” Cuellar at his Riff Audio studio in Burbank. Naturally, they named the record Neck Wound Session. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: AEFFECT / THE BLEEDING / WALLOWING

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jun 142023
 

(Andy Synn presents three more prime-cuts of British steel)

The ever-fertile UK scene has produced a lot of new releases so far this year.

Some of them I’ve loved, some of them I’ve not been too fond of, and some of them… I just haven’t had a chance to listen to.

But these three stood out to me recently (even if I’m a little late getting to them) and felt like they deserved more attention, both from me and from our readers!

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: THE PIT

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jun 142023
 

(Just two days ago we had the good fortune to premiere a song off the ferocious, dark, and demented new album by the Mexican death metal band The Pit, which will be released next month by Personal Records, and now we present a timely interview by Comrade Aleks of the band’s co-founder and guitarist Antonio Nolasco.)

Well, The Pit… There’s a deep meaning in this title, and as this band from Querétaro performs pretty violent death metal you can only imagine what goes on in The Pit‘s horrible depths.

The title of their debut, Disrupted Human Symmetry (2008) could give a hint about their ideology, but the fresh second album Of Madness and Evil Whispers seems to be something different.

A fifteen-year-long break between the albums may really promise radical changes in the band’s sound, but The Pit‘s core is the same since its foundation in 2004: Antonio Nolasco (guitars), Octavio Olachea (bass), and Guillermo Galvan (vocals), who play in a few more extreme metal bands, now also Angel Villegas (guitars) and Maw VillAlt (drums) who both joined the band in 2019.

Of Madness and Evil Whispers will be out on July 15th, and I’d like to introduce you to the band in case you missed track premieres, including the one from our own site. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLUT AUS NORD, HORRENDOUS, BLAST SHIELD, THUNRAZ, DØDSFERD

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jun 132023
 

In part, this roundup of new songs and videos (plus a recent EP and two complete new albums) is an effort to make up in part for the absence of Shades of Black two days ago, when an unexpected intervention by my fucking day job de-railed my plans. So, there’s blackened metal here, but not exclusively so. I do think that despite the considerable stylistic variation within the collection, it’s all mind-bending in different ways.

BLUT AUS NORD (France)

The last time I mentioned the news of Blut Aus Nord‘s new album Disharmonium – Nahab I had artwork to share, but no music. Now I have music, but wouldn’t have had it for a Shades of Black column two days ago because the song was just released over the last 24 hours. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DESEKRYPTOR — “FESTERING ULCERATION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 132023
 

Following up on a sequence of four short releases that surfaced over the last six years, the Indiana death metal band Desekryptor have at last recorded a debut album. Aptly entitled Vortex Oblivion, it’s now set for release by Blood Harvest Records on July 14th.

The record is indeed a lethal death metal vortex, both ghastly and gutting — merciless in its bone-smashing force, terrorizing in the violence of its convulsions, disturbing in its moods of monstrous malignancy and abject agony — and yet freakishly elaborate and dynamic in its mauling permutations. It’s the kind of music that not only rewards repeat listening but demands it, to fully appreciate all the twists and turns in the cavalcade of horrors it presents.

In other words, there is ingenuity and intrigue to be found within these hideous cataclysms, and an impressive talent for melding both old school influences and newer-school adventurousness, executed with equally impressive technical skill, which even the density of all the subterranean mangling and mauling doesn’t completely obscure.

We’ve got two prime examples of these qualities in “Festering Ulceration“, the album track we’re premiering today, and “Abysmal Resurrection“, the album’s first single that we’re also sharing. Continue reading »

DYSEASE: “ERA OF DECAY”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 132023
 

(In the following review DGR catches up with one more release from the now-vanished spring of 2023, and this time it’s a debut EP by the German band Dysease.)

Sometimes genre-tags for a band can be amusing, mostly when it comes to the times where the ‘progressive death metal’ tag is applied. Such is the case with Germany’s Dysease – whose name lights up the dopamine centers of the brain over here because we love a good smashing-rocks-against-each-other level pun – and their debut EP Era Of Decay.

Released in the middle of March, the Dysease EP arrived in the hallowed NCS burnt-out corner office sometime in April, but as you’ve noticed, one of the more common refrains around here is how the day job tends to take everything from us. However; that doesn’t mean we’re willing to fully let something go, and in the case of Era Of Decay the constant return to the idea of being ‘progressive death metal’ was enough to keep one wondering what exactly was happening within the EP. Continue reading »

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