AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE PLAGUE — “HACKED AND BUTCHERED”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 182023
 

Hailing from Sydney, Australia, The Plague erupted from cemetery earth in 2017 with a debut EP appropriately named Mass Genocide, and then honed their grisly blades with live performances in support of such bands as Angelcorpse, Master, Entombed AD, and Ensiferum (among many others).

Time passed and in 2021 Bitter Loss Records released the band’s debut album Within Death. As we wrote around that time, on the occasion of a premiere:

The music of this full-length debut does indeed live within death — death metal of the old school to be precise, of a particularly mauling and murderous, gruesome and ghastly variety. Powered by that beloved chainsawing guitar distortion, propelled by bone-smashing drumwork, and elevated into rarified air by truly astonishing vocal madness, The Plague‘s music is electrifying. We have little doubt that (as the advance press claims) it will strongly appeal to fans of classic Dismember and Entombed as well as more recent entrants such as LIK and Entrails.

And now The Plague return again, on the other side of a real-world plague, with a second album named Erosion of Gods, which will be released on October 28th by Brilliant Emperor Records. And once again we have the ghoulish pleasure of premiering a song from the album, along with a gore-soaked video-tale of hideous torture and cannibalism. Continue reading »

DREAMWELL – IN MY SADDEST DREAMS, I AM BESIDE YOU

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Oct 182023
 

(Andy Synn encourages you to give Dreamwell‘s new album – out this Friday – a chance)

Before you go any further, I encourage you all to go read what I wrote about Dreamwell‘s previous album, which was one of my favourite records of 2021.

Finished?

Well, now let me tell you why – as good as Modern Grotesque was – In My Saddest Dreams… is even better.

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): RECKLESS — “SHARP MAGIK STEEL”

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Oct 182023
 

We are fast approaching Dying Victims Productions‘ October 20 release date for the debut album of the Bogotá-based speed metal band Reckless. Or rather, that album is rushing toward us with the momentum of an 18-wheeler whose brakes have failed at the zenith of its power.

The band jam the pedal down on the very first track, “Kneel Before the Gods“, and they don’t ease up very much until the closing track “Unholy Odyssey” has run its own riotous course. It’s an album fueled by adrenaline, and it’s a big transfusion of adrenaline for listeners, but as you’ll discover from our full streaming premiere, the thrills derive from more than just the music’s turbocharged intensity. Continue reading »

DEATHBLOW: “ROTTEN TRAJECTORY”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 182023
 

(Here’s Todd Manning‘s review of a new EP from the Salt Lake band Deathblow.)

It’s a bit baffling to me that the word ‘crossover’ does not appear a single time in the press release for the latest E.P. from Salt Lake City-based Deathblow because that’s exactly what kind of damage they’re dealing out. Rotten Trajectory spewed forth into this decaying world on September 29th, courtesy of the appropriately monikered Sewer Mouth Records.

For the youth not familiar with the term crossover, it was used to describe that late eighties-early nineties blend of punk and thrash characterized by acts such as D.R.I., Crumbsuckers, and early Excel. Deathblow tread similar territory but update their sound with a smidge of death metal brutality. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ISKANDR

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Oct 172023
 


Photo Credit: Twan Spierings

(At the end of September Eisenwald released Spiritus Sylvestris, an excellent new album by  the Dutch band Iskandr, and that moved Comrade Aleks to get in touch, leading to the following interview with founder Omar K.)

Iskandr was started by multi-instrumentalist Omar K. in around 2016 as his solo black metal project. The solo-project turned into a duo as the drummer Mink Koops joined Omar, and since then they started to work together.

Primordial and natural, Iskandr’s black metal evolved from Heilig land (2016) to Euprosopon (2018), and then from less blackened Vergezicht (2021) to brand new and ethereal Spiritus Sylvestris, which was released on September 29th.

The chain of metamorphoses leads the project to a new form that combines black metal spirit and a deep, in some ways heathen magical, and almost psychedelic, experience. As Omar, the band’s ideologist, says: “I wanted to write a eulogy to the world we have lost; a funeral dirge for the natural world we have left behind and an omen to the world that is to come”.

We caught Omar in the middle of Iskandr’s tour, but he found time to answer a few questions. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DISPLAY OF DECAY — “VITRIOL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  5 Responses »
Oct 172023
 

This makes the fourth time we’ve premiered music from the Edmonton-based death metal band Display of Decay since 2014. The last time, in 2018, we began this way:

If you imagine Display of Decay as a big rocketing road machine with a roaring jet engine in place of the usual pumping cylinders (and that’s not hard to imagine at all), the brakes obviously failed a few hundred miles ago, to the vicious glee of the blood-lusting demons at the controls. When you listen to their new album, Art In Mutilation, it’s patently obvious that they’re having a howling good time, and their full-throttle, take-no-prisoners enthusiasm is highly contagious.

Five years later, Display of Decay are finally following up Art In Mutilation with a new album (their fourth full-length) named Vitriol, which will be released by Gore House Productions on October 20th. The album title alone suggests that the band’s music is no less bloodthirsty than it was before. If anything, they’ve doubled-down on the slaughtering — but not at the cost of what makes their music simultaneously so damned contagious. Continue reading »

DESOLATE SPHERE: “MALEDICTUS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 172023
 

(On October 13th Necrogenesis Records released a new EP by the Japanese band Desolate Sphere, and it caught our writer DGR by surprise in more ways than one, as he explains in the following enthusiastic review.)

Who doesn’t love themselves a good ole’ fashioned Friday the 13th release date? Even across waters and international borders the idea is fun….or most likely lost, since Western world superstitions probably rest at the corner of fuck all and jack shit in terms of how much Desolate Sphere might be aware of it.

But needless to say, while we’ve often portrayed the date as being a harbinger of bad luck and decent slasher films in this corner of the world, last Friday gifted us a pleasant surprise in the form of Maledictus, a new EP from a newer death metal project hailing from Japan.

Lesser creatures out there might admit that they were drawn in almost by their album art alone but we…..oh, that’s what we did too? Oh, well in that case…with our attention initially grabbed entirely by the fiery and bright orange album art, Desolate Sphere‘s Maledictus proceeded to surprise on multiple fronts, though the tracklist being only five songs and the average tempo of every song hovering just shy of blisteringly fast was certainly a bonus. Continue reading »

SULPHUR AEON – SEVEN CROWNS & SEVEN SEALS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 172023
 

(Andy Synn catches up with NCS favourites Sulphur Aeon following the release of their fourth album)

I doubt there’ll be many people willing to argue against the statement that Sulphur Aeon have long-since proven themselves to be one of the best bands in Death Metal – hell, in Metal in general – operating today.

After making an impressive impact with their 2012 debut, Swallowed by the Ocean’s Tide, they then blew practically everyone away with the inhuman intensity of 2015’s Gateway to the Antisphere, only to then turn around and knock people’s socks off all over again with the more epic and melodic strains of The Scythe of Cosmic Chaos in 2018.

So to say that the band have set themselves a very high bar would be an understatement, and I want to make it clear that when I tell you that Seven Crowns & Seven Seals isn’t quite the quantum leap that …Scythe… was from Gateway… (or Gateway… was from Swallowed…) that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It simply means that Sulphur Aeon are finally settling into their own strange and sinister skin.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VOICE OF RUIN — “THE LAST FEAST”

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Oct 162023
 

At our site we’ve been enthusiastically following the progress of the Swiss band Voice of Ruin since 2014, which was when we hosted the first of two premieres we’ve done for them over that span of time — and now we’re adding a third one.

The occasion for this latest revelation of new music is the approach of the band’s fourth album, a record entitled Cold Epiphany that’s now set for release on December 1st. It follows by four years the band’s last full-length, Acheron, a record our review described as “melodic death metal’s melody mixed with thrash’s technicality and hardcore punk’s energy and punishing aggro beatdowns”.

As even that brief excerpt suggests, and as our review of Acheron explained in greater detail, the music of Voice of Ruin has always been difficult to classify, and the new album hasn’t made the task any easier. But the band’s willingness to pull from different stylistic wellsprings in different ways has also been a continuing source of their appeal.

That remains true on the new album, for reasons you can begin to appreciate through our premiere of a video for a song named “The Last Feast“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ASKESIS — “BEYOND THE FATE OF DEATH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 162023
 

Today marks the third time we’ve premiered and reviewed a release by the Venetian band Askesis. The first was their 2016 debut EP The Path to Absence (here), and we followed that with their 2018 demo Black Ontology (here). Now we have a full stream of their debut album Beyond the Fate of Death, which is set for release on October 20th by Time To Kill Records. It’s a concept album inspired by “The Myth of Sisyphus”, a 1942 essay written by the philosopher Albert Camus.

“Dawn of the Current Inferno” was the first single from the album. The band described its inspiration in these words, which we share here because they also seem to provide insights into the album as a whole (as we hear it):

“‘Dawn of the Current Inferno‘ serves as a testament to the power of artistic expression to push boundaries and challenge societal norms. It encourages us to embrace the enigmatic and the unexplained, reminding us that within chaos, there’s a hidden order waiting to be discovered. This composition is an invitation to embark on a journey of introspection, where we confront our own biases and preconceptions, and ultimately find a deeper connection to the world around us”. Continue reading »

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