AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ABYSSUS — “UNDER SIEGE”

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Feb 022024
 

As their name portends, the Greek death metal band Abyssus did not arise to shine light and love on a miserable world, but to submerge it into deeper darkness and more relentless savagery. Since the release of their debut EP a dozen years ago, they have not wavered in their dedication to musical renditions of blade-sharp barbarism, esoteric terrors, and punk-fueled mayhem, nor allowed mercy to mediate their music.

The band’s latest descent is an EP named Under Siege. It was released without much fanfare near the end of last year, and so the title of this feature plays fast and loose with the “premiere” word, which is something we almost never do. But the chance to help spread the word about Under Siege was just too tempting, especially now that it’s being offered by Chaos and Hell Productions on CD. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 022024
 

(Andy Synn has a few words to share about four albums from last month you may have overlooked)

Here we are… one month into the new year… and we’ve already fallen behind.

Of course, that’s nothing new. As I’ve said before (several times, in fact) it’s impossible for any site, let alone any individual writer, to keep up with everything that’s released week after week (which is one reason I don’t trust anyone who claims that they’ve somehow listened to literally hundreds of albums every month – they may have heard them, but I doubt they really listened to them the way they deserve), so even at this early stage it’s no surprise that there’s so many artists and albums we haven’t been able to write about.

To be quite honest though, this is less and less of an issues these days – simply by accepting the fact that there’s always going to be stuff we’re not going to be able to cover, while also acknowledging that we’re definitely going to be featuring some stuff here that other places, and other people, won’t cover, we’ve gotten over our fear of missing out and embraced the idea that our value comes not from covering everything but from providing an interesting and distinct perspective of our own on what we do write about.

So, with that in mind, here’s four artists/albums from January – some of which you may already have been aware of, some of which you may not – that we (or, at least, I) felt compelled to pen a few extra words about so that they didn’t get overlooked following what was, after all, a very packed month of new releases!

Continue reading »

OBSCURITIES – VOLUME I: WHAT DID WE (ALMOST) MISS LAST YEAR?

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Feb 012024
 

(Daniel Barkasi, an NCS writer from long ago, has returned here with the first installment in a planned monthly column. In this inaugural edition he recommends 10 albums released last year that deserve a closer look.)

Welcome NCS readers to my first, brand new column of music that’s been bouncing around in my often deranged cranium. I feel vigorous.

What we’re going to be doing here is highlighting releases that have – at least, according to my spidey senses – slipped under the radar and haven’t gotten much attention or buzz. We’ll cover an undetermined number of these unsung heroes monthly. Most of these will be relatively current and put out within the last few months, but I also don’t want to be that rigid all the time, so we’ll do so liberally and make sure to add a release date for each entry.

For this inaugural piece, I’m going to highlight a few albums from 2023 that were unsung gems that deserve a little love, in no particular order. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DÖDSRIT — “CELESTIAL WILL”

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Feb 012024
 

For their forthcoming fourth album Nocturnal Will, the Swedish band Dödsrit have created a remarkable musical symbiosis. Their hallmarks of black metal and crust punk are still there, but the music is also elaborate and frequently elegant, the melodies intensely moving and immediately memorable.

And there’s a reason why the new album’s cover art depicts a stricken knight, on his knees in a wintry plain and head bowed beneath glowering skies, because the music seems to cast its gaze back to an ancient age of valor and bloodshed, of triumph and death, of devotion and suffering, so much so that we’d venture the guess that devotees of medieval black metal will relish this as much as metalpunks will.

As evidence of what we’re trying to convey, we present today the premiere of the album’s second single, “Celestial Will“, in advance of the record’s March 22nd release by the Wolves of Hades label. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NECROWRETCH — “SWORDS OF DAJJAL”

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Feb 012024
 

With 15 years of recordings and performances behind them, the French extreme metal band Necrowretch likely need no introduction to the horned denizens of this site, nor any added fuel of anticipation for their forthcoming fifth album Swords of Dajjal, which we’re presenting today on the eve of its release by Season of Mist.

But it’s worth knowing that the new album was one of those unexpected fruits of the covid pandemic, which ruined the band’s touring plans in support of their just-released fourth album but provided a pause they used for the creation of this new fifth full-length. And thus Necrowretch spent more time writing and fine-tuning Swords of Dajjal than they’d ever spent on previous releases.

Not only that, the band changed their gear, their sound, their tuning, and even initially wrote the songs on acoustic 12-string guitar. The result, as described by the band’s vocalist and rhythm guitarist Vlad, is the group’s “most black metal record, with splashes of death metal here and there”.

He adds: “Whereas on the previous album all tempos were pushed to the extreme, there’s far more variety here to be found. It also gave us free reins to reach a more mystical, Biblical if you will vibe”, fed by Vlad‘s experience living in Turkey in the late 2010’s. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, JANUARY 2024

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jan 312024
 

(Gonzo returns with another end-of-month roundup of recommended releases, this time shining a light on albums and EPs released by six bands in January.)

January is such a bullshit month.

It’s cold as all fuck, everyone’s burned out – financially, emotionally, professionally – and shows/tours are few and far between. To pile it on, it’s also customarily a terrible month for new music. I wasn’t expecting to unearth much during my monthly search of metal’s grimy underbelly to include in this feature.

Lo and behold, I was dead fucking wrong. 2024 has already seen so many good releases in just over three weeks that I actually had to figure out what not to include here. (Coincidentally, three of the releases are from France, so make of that what you will.)

Regardless of geography, the sharp rise in early-year quality in 2024 is making me rethink old paradigms. Is the January curse on its way out? Am I reading too much into this? Is reality a lie? Are the machines reading my thoughts? Fuck. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): HASTURIAN VIGIL — “UNVEILING THE BRAC’THAL”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jan 312024
 

Possibly drawing upon a reference in the Ambrose Bierce short story “Haïta the Shepherd”, and/or stories in Robert Chambers‘ collection The Yellow Sign, H.P. Lovecraft added Hastur the Unspeakable to his pantheon of the Great Old Ones in his tale “The Whisperer in Darkness”.

Spawn of Yog-Sothoth, the half-brother of Cthulhu, and possibly the Magnum Innominandum, Hastur was a vast monstrosity of hideous power drawn from nameless aeons and inconceivable dimensions. And that terrible thing seems to have been an inspiration for the Irish musical duo who chose for themselves the name Hasturian Vigil.

However, these two — multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Cxaathesz and drummer Shygthoth — were not content to set their music solely within Lovecraftian spheres. For their debut album Unveiling the Brac’thal they created a mythos of their own, Yith-Melle, inspired not only by Lovecraft but also by Machen, Lord Dunsany, and Yeats, all the better to “embrace their fascination for cosmic dread, deranged pantheons, and unspeakable curses”.

So says the materials accompanying the album which we have received from the publicist for Invictus Productions, which will release Unveiling the Brac’thal on February 2nd. We also have these prefatory words from Hasturian Vigil: Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 167): SHEDFROMTHEBODY

 THE SYNN REPORT  4 Responses »
Jan 312024
 

Recommended for fans of: Darkher, Holy Fawn, Junius

Finnish fatalist Suvi Savikko (aka Shedfromthebody) is a relatively recent discovery – having only released her debut album in 2020 – but has been a prolific presence here at NCS all the same, as we’ve so far covered all her releases (which, including last month’s Amare, now totals three full-length albums and one EP) to one extent or another.

Sonically the project’s combines brooding guitars, desolate ambience, and mesmerising melody – as well as, increasingly, a blending of Shoegaze, Sludge, Grunge, and Alt-Rock influences – into a sound that could best be described as “Doomgaze” or “Post-Doom”, if one were so inclined.

It’s an acquired taste, certainly, but one which is both rich in real emotion and resonates with raw potential, and I am hopeful that many of our readers will come to love the music here as much as I have after reading this.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: REPLICANT — “ORGASM OF BEREAVEMENT”

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Jan 302024
 

Insanity reigns supreme in the Replicant song you’re about to hear, like a mad god gone berserk. It has the impact of a live power line thrashing unsuspecting pedestrians in a deluge, while teleporting their brains into a whipping centrifuge. Minds will be boggled, bones will be broken, blood spray will paint the walls.

Now that we have your attention, let’s fill in a bit of the back-story. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SARCASTIC OBEDIENCE — “FADING FAITH”

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Jan 302024
 

It may have been the English writer Jonathan Swift (he of Gulliver’s Travels) who was the earliest source of the proverb that, as time passes, everything old is new again. Or it might have been Ovid. But whoever first coined the phrase was surely right.

The members of the Greek metal band Sarcastic Obedience aren’t that old, but they are new again. They look very young indeed in photos of them taken when they released their debut EP Internal Disturbance in 2013.

But now they’re more than a decade older, and they have their first record since that EP now on the horizon, a self-titled album that will be released on February 14th by Chaos and Hell Productions. New again, but man, for them that horizon must have seemed like it was receding farther away with every step they took toward it. Continue reading »

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