AN NCS INTERVIEW: CAÏNAN DAWN

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Nov 232022
 

(Through a new album released in September by Osmose Productions the French black metal mystics in Caïnan Dawn invite listeners to immerse themselves and drown in watery vastness, and to help guide your way into the depths Comrade Aleks conducted the following interview with the band’s vocalist Heruforod.)

Caïnan Dawn from Chambéry, Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes will celebrate their 20th anniversary the very next year, but their discography isn’t as extensive as you might suppose. The band took their time to evolve their ideas and had a four-year long pause after the release of the first demo In Darkness I Reign (2007), hiding in the depths of the French black metal underground.

The first full-length Nibiru saw the light of day only in 2011, and then albums started to appear regularly. Thavmial – in 2014, then F.O.H.A.T. — in 2017, and now after the quarantine-induced break we have something new.

Caïnan Dawn’s fourth album Lagu was released by Osmose Productions in September 2022. This material took the band further from the melodic black metal sound of Nibiru and they have tried their hands on its avant-garde branch. The album’s concept fits perfectly with this updated sound, and Caïnan Dawn’s singing vocalist Heruforod told us the story behind Lagu.

Continue reading »

VITTRA – BLASPHEMY BLUES

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 232022
 

(Andy Synn gets riffy with the new album from Sweden’s Vittra)

As we inch closer and closer to the end of the year time is running out for us here at NCS, and tough decisions are having to be made about what, and who, we can cover before “List Season” officially begins.

To be clear, I’ll still be writing and publishing reviews throughout December – mostly of things that I wasn’t able to get to over the last twelve months and which I think deserve more coverage and attention – but probably not as many as usual (the next couple of weeks are going to be particularly hectic and stressful for me, for various reasons, so I intend to take a well deserved rest from work, writing, and everything else).

Until then, however… let’s all enjoy some catchy-as-covid Death/Thrash riffage courtesy of Vittra and their new album, Blasphemy Blues.

Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): EUPHROSYNE — “KERES”

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Nov 222022
 

Not long ago the Athens-based, genre-bending band Euphrosyne provided a starting introduction to their debut EP Keres through an official video for a song from the EP named “When My Fears Conquered All”. The video shrouds the music with haunting and harrowing imagery which well-suits the song’s haunting and harrowing lyrics, interspersed with views of the band performing, fronted by the frightening countenance of vocalist Efi Eva.

The music is also unsettling, but also functions as a statement of intent for the EP as a whole — and the statement is to expect the unexpected.

In that one song the band push and pull the listener through a genre-labyrinth, creating an amalgam of bone-bruising bass blows and frenzied, squirming, and darting fretwork, of skull-snapping beats and eerie astral keyboards, of gasping whispers and blow-torch screams, of grand chords and rapidly ringing melodies, of wailing yet anthemic soloing, suddenly high-flown singing, and anguished spoken words.

If there’s a thread that holds all the moving parts together, it’s a steadily encroaching aura of darkness that spans moods of confusion, desperation, agony, and fury, with glimpses of grandeur and reprieve that seem just out of reach. Continue reading »

IMPLORE: “THE BURDEN OF EXISTENCE”

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Nov 222022
 

(October 28th brought the release by Church Road Records of a fourth full-length by Germany’s Implore, and in this review DGR provides a lot of reasons to get enthusiastic about it.)

It’s been a little while since we’ve gotten an album as clearly “bookended” as Implore‘s October release The Burden Of Existence, yet one glance at track times alone and it seems like the masterminds behind the metallic chaos that is Implore got a taste for track-sequencing symmetry.

Implore are not the type of band to go on musical journeys or prog-dalliances, so none of the songs on The Burden Of Existence stretch for time in any sense of the word, but it is fun noticing how the group have three of their four longer songs on The Burden Of Existence positioned within the front two and the back two of the lineup. Of course, when you close out an album with a song called “The Sense Of Endings”, maybe room for subtlety is a couple of train stops away from where we are currently – but alas, we’re getting ahead of ourselves here. Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST 2023 ANNOUNCES LINE-UP AND EARLY-BIRD TICKET SALE (TODAY!)

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Nov 222022
 

Surely there’s some software plugin floating around out there that would let us put a ticking clock on the site, counting down to 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time today. But hell, who has the time to hunt for that thing? Not us. You’ll have to set your own timer.

Why is 10:00 a.m. Pacific Time today worth paying attention to? Because that’s when Northwest Terror Fest will put a limited number of early-bird tickets on sale for the 2023 edition of the fest, which will take place at the Neumos and Barboza music venues in Seattle next Memorial Day Weekend (May 25 – 27).

And why should that matter? Because look at this line-up, which NWTF announced yesterday: Continue reading »

HAPPY 13TH BIRTHDAY TO US!

 Birthday Posts, Metal News  56 Responses »
Nov 212022
 


artwork by necrosadist

On November 21, 2009, I made the first post at this blog. On the 21st day of every November since then (except last year, when I forgot to do it until a few days later) I’ve made a post celebrating our birthday. And here I am doing it again, because we’ve survived another year.

In these annual posts I usually explain how I had no ambitions or expectations when I started the blog, nor any training or experience as a music writer, and that the sum total of my motivation was to create an enjoyable diversion for myself from the grind of daily life, and to indulge my burgeoning interest in heavy music. And there, I just did it again, albeit in fewer words than usual.

In these annual observances I also tend to reminisce about how many things about NCS have changed from the early days, and about how surprising it is to me that we’re still here. Some of you remember the early days, because you were here with us then and haven’t left. Others who have begun checking in here more recently might yawn if I indulged in that kind of nostalgia, so let’s just skip that, as I did last year too, and get right into expressions of gratitude and the annual tradition of mind-numbing statistics. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ESTRANGEMENT — “DISFIGUREMENTALITY”

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Nov 212022
 

We’re about to premiere an extraordinary album in its entirety. We’re also about to open the floodgates on a waterfall of words, in an unnecessary and probably fruitless effort to explain why it’s extraordinary.

Where to begin? Maybe by saying that although you will see genre labels affixed to the music of Australia’s Estrangement on their album Disfigurementality — principally referring to it as a blending of funeral doom and classical music — there’s no kind of shorthand reference that could be accurate. To borrow from the press materials, “Funereal-Flamenca-Nuclear-Jazz-Fusion-End-of-World Music” comes closer to the mark, but still falls short.

Does it go too far to claim that Disfigurementality is unique? Well, you’ll be the judge of that, but in our estimation that’s what this music really is, something so astonishingly eclectic, so wildly creative, and so mind-blowing to hear that it really does seem unparalleled in the annals of extreme doom. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: TURBID NORTH — “SLAVES”

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Nov 212022
 

 

From the birth of our site (exactly 13 years ago today!) one of our founding principles was, and still is, to write only about music we enjoy and want to recommend. Of course, that doesn’t mean everything we’ve written about stands on equal footing. Based on their growth and consistent achievements we’ve put some bands on higher pedestals than others, and few have garnered the kind of praise over many years that we’ve heaped upon Alaska-born, Texas-based Turbid North (see for yourselves).

Almost exactly seven years have passed since the release of Turbid North‘s last album Eyes Alive. But even seven years weren’t long enough to dim the memory of that record, or for that matter its predecessor Orogeny (from 2011). As proof of the point, our own Andy Synn listed a new Turbid North record as one of his “most anticipated albums” of 2017… and of 2018… and probably would have continued doing that if we hadn’t scrapped the early-year “most anticipated” columns.

Well, you can imagine the burst of excitement we experienced when Turbid North at last announced that they would release a new full-length on January 20th of the coming year. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: AZAGHAL, FORTÍÐ, GAROTA, SKÁLD, UNHOLY VAMPYRIC SLAUGHTER SECT, VIOLET COLD

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 202022
 

My head is clearer today than it was yesterday morning, but this column, although not exactly short, is still shorter than I’d like due to a planned mid-morning rendezvous with friends. Because time is racing away, I’ll cut this introduction off at the knees and just forewarn you that the word of the day is “whiplash”.

AZAGHAL (Finland)

As these blasphemous and terrorizing Fiuns approach the quarter-century mark in their career they’ve readied a new album named Alttarimme on Luista Tehty (“our altar is made of bone”), and the first advance song from it is the one I’ve chosen as a beginning today. It turns out to be a multi-faceted piece of music, and one that passes almost too quickly. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ENSLAVED, JUST BEFORE DAWN, OUIJA, GYAOS:DIABOLICAL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 192022
 


Enslaved

It’s lamentable how little music I’ve written about today. Last night I engaged in an old tradition I’ve rarely observed since covid began marauding in March 2020, i.e., drinking in person with co-workers I usually see only on computer screens. I’m out of practice, and so forgot where the off-switch was, leading to… too damned much drinking.

On my ferry ride home I was thinking about how I would begin today’s column, knowing that I had about three-dozen links to new songs and videos I’d selected out of what I noticed over the last week, and knowing I’d never make it through all that. Fueled by whisky, I wrote this:

Imagine yourself seated across a table from a wizard, or rather what seems like a wavering mirage of a table, alternately expansive and as narrow as a rat’s tail. He buries his hands in a bowl of spiky glittering baubles and throws them at your face. Pleased with your wide eyes and the rivulets of blood coursing down your face, he chortles and beams. The pain and the exhilaration, now you feel alive!, he proclaims. And then black tentacles begin to sprout from his robes and writhe in your direction.

Reading that this morning through eyes almost pasted shut by the goo of sleep, I wonder how the hell that metaphor sprung to mind. The spiky baubles represented all the new songs and videos, I know that much, but the rest of it? The ways of whisky can be mysterious….

Anyway, I don’t feel so great this morning, and the day is rapidly flying by, so what follows is all I’ve been able to accomplish. Maybe these songs will leave you wide-eyed and bloodied. One can only hope. Continue reading »

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