AN NCS PREMIERE: MONDOCANE — “ULTIMA”

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Jan 242023
 

The Swedish solo black metal project Mondocane has been on a heated creative run since the pandemic began (perhaps spawned by the lockdown), starting with a self-titled debut EP in 2021 and continuing through a pair of albums, one that same year (Dvala) and another last year (Gloria, briefly reviewed here), and then a split release last year as well (also reviewed here, along with a premiere).

But despite such a fast and ferocious start, Mondocane isn’t slowing down for a nice nap. There’s already another record named Ultima that will be released sometime in the first part of this new year. We don’t yet have a lot of details about it, but we do have the title track, and it makes us even more grateful that Mondocane have kept the creative fires burning. It’s also further proof that Mondocane’s stylistic influences are more expansive than conventional Scandinavian black metal, and the music is all the better for that. Continue reading »

DEATH CRUSADE – ZN​Ó​W P​Ł​ONIE NIEBO

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Jan 242023
 

(The sky may be on fire, but Andy Synn still has new music to share with you all)

While the start of 2023 has (thankfully) been relatively calm – release-wise, at least – allowing us all to take a metaphorical (and also literal) breather before the inevitable onslaught of new albums begins again, there have already been a handful of highly-anticipated, and justifiably hyped, which have received the lion’s share of the coverage over the past few weeks.

As a result, there’s also been a fair few more underground and/or underappreciated artists/albums which haven’t received their due, including (but by no means limited to) the new album from Poland’s Death Crusade – eleven tracks of crusty grindy, Punk-infused Death Metal (and I know some may argue with this description, but I hear at least as much Entombed in this album as I do Extreme Noise Terror and their ilk) whose gnarly riffs and gravel-gargling vocals disguise a keenly-honed sense of structure and flow.

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: FROM BEYOND

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Jan 242023
 

(Those for whom Lovecraft is their nightmare food and for whom progressive blackened death metal makes a fine condiment will relish the following interview by Comrade Aleks of the duo who make up the Portuguese band From Beyond.)

I bet that we should thank Gordon Stuart for his poisonous gem of the VHS-era named after H. P. Lovecraft’s story From Beyond, for Stuart was the one who inspired a few bands with his video adaptation of that horrible story of scientific fanaticism, madness, murder, and nightmarish beings from another world.

Two guys from Portugal’s Porto founded a quite progressive band transferring their occult visions in a form of blackened death metal. Chronicler (guitars, bass, drum programming) and Innsmouthian (vocals) released their first album The Great Old Ones on the 12th of December 2022, and we’re going to talk about this work while it’s fresh and hot. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2022’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 16): BLACKBRAID, PUTRID, GUDSFORLADT

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  1 Response »
Jan 232023
 

We have seven weekdays left before the end of January, which marks my self-imposed ending of this list. Seven days before I ought to stop, and like every other year, the impending end adds to my anxiety levels because I know I have so many more songs I’d like to include and not enough room to include them all. To begin this final seven-day stretch I decided to concentrate on shades of black metal.

BLACKBRAID (U.S.)

Seemingly out of nowhere this indigenous black metal project from the Adirondacks made a big splash in 2022 with a debut album denominated I. The size of the splash was measured by how often it appeared on year-end lists, both here and in many other locations across the web. For those of you who somehow missed the album despite all the attention and acclaim it received, I’ll borrow some words from Andy Synn’s NCS review: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ALLFATHER — “TAKE THEIR EYES”

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Jan 232023
 

We’ve been avidly following UK-based Allfather since their first EP release in 2015, sort of like a dog madly chasing after a semi-truck and hoping not to get run over. As our own Andy Synn wrote in the context of reviewing their last album, 2018’s And All Will Be Desolation, their music has been “heavy and heartfelt,” the kind of experiences “where you can practically feel every ounce of blood and sweat and tears” that go into their creation.

And let’s underscore heavy, because their Sludge-injected, Hardcore-inflected, proto-Death Metal sound has been potent and punishing. Getting run over and flattened by the music has always been a serious risk.

In the years since that last album, and especially during the last two years, the world seems to have rapidly been descending into a burning cesspool. With an active moral and political conscience, Allfather could not help but react to that in the music they’ve made. They wrote and recorded a new album named A Violent Truth across these last two years of “global pandemics, increasing oppression, and the slow creep of contemporary fascism”, and (to quote further from their label’s preview) “the album captures and distills the pent-up fear, anger, and exhaustion of living in desperate and seemingly hopeless times”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: 71TONMAN — “WAR”

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Jan 232023
 

Let’s not beat around the bush: You’re bulbous skull is about to get flattened into a pancake shape and you’ll lose even more height through spinal fracturing and compression, not to mention the simultaneous searing of mind and soul.

Of course, lucky you, we’re only speaking figuratively. But those are the kinds of sensations imagined by a mind’s eye when listening to the song we’re presenting today from the forthcoming third album by the remorseless Polish sludge/doom behemoths in 71TonMan.

Aptly named Of End Times, the new record envisions apocalypse, with each of its four long tracks named for the Four Horsemen in the Book of Revelations. These songs do authentically sound like harbingers of utter doom and devastation, and the one we have for you today is “War“. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: TULUS, LOTAN, ARNAUT PAVLE, ANARETA, NATTSJÄL, ANHAGUAMA

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jan 222023
 


Tulus – photo by Morten Syreng

Well I slept late again today. But unlike yesterday it wasn’t really a luxury this time. Did some partying last night and didn’t succumb to sleep until after midnight, so the sleeping late was just an effort to be barely functional today, with not a lot of hours of rest to show for it. The day is now pretty far along, and there are NFL playoff games rapidly approaching, so I’ll have to cut back on some of my own words here and there (I can hear the wailing and gnashing of teeth).

Prepare for a very twisty and turny trip that sometimes stretches the limits of this column’s usual focus in unusual ways.

TULUS (Norway)

From 1993 through 1999 this Norwegian group released three demos and three full-length albums, after which Tulus became dormant. Two of its members (Sarke and Blodstrup) went on to form Khold and recorded six albums under that name from 2001 through 2014 (the last of which in that period was Til endes).

When Khold temporarily went on hold in 2006, Sarke and Blodstrup revived Tulus and released Biography Obscene in 2007, as well as Olm og bitter in 2012, even after Khold itself had been resurrected. They were joined in both Khold and Tulus by bassist Crowbel. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ONDFØDT, MAN MUST DIE, MORS SUBITA, VERTEBRAE FETISH TOTEM, CHOIR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jan 212023
 


Ondfødt

I’ve concluded that sleeping late is a luxury to be indulged, probably because I’ve done so little of it. I still never do it during the work week, and pre-pandemic I was so habitualized to getting up before the ass-crack of dawn revealed itself that I awakened very early on the weekends too, even when there was no sensible reason to do that. The pandemic caused lots of us to re-think lots of things, and for me one of those things was the habit of crawling out of bed at 5 a.m. on Saturdays and Sundays.

I mean, hell, I’m not a farmer, just a compulsive blogger. Still, the compulsion is strong and I’ve had to make a concerted effort to re-train my subconscious mind, convincing it not to wake me up, or when it does, training my conscious mind to just close my eyes and let the sleep take me again. And man, does sleeping feel good, even if the robot part of my brain still feels a little anxiety when I do eventually wake up, under the illusion that I’ve been wasting time.

Well, that’s an absurdly long-winded way of getting to the point that, once again, I slept late today. I still wanted to find some new songs and videos to recommend before the small number of people who actually visit NCS on a Saturday just vanished altogether. Here’s what I chose: Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2020’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 15): DISILLUSION, DYSGNOSTIC, DISHARMONY

 Exceptions to the Rule, MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  No Responses »
Jan 202023
 


Disillusion

You see what I did today? I guess it’s not very subtle.

Believe me, it’s not easy to pick the songs for this list, because so many are deserving. When things jump out like these did as I was frantically scrolling up and down through my alphabetized list of candidates, it’s very easy to give in to impulse rather than yield to insanity.

Mind you, these songs were on the list of candidates for a reason, and they jumped out not only because of the bands’ names appearing in fairly close proximity to each other and with phonetic syllabic kinship. I remembered the songs and mentally exclaimed THERE! THAT’S IT! PART 15 IS DONE!

DISILLUSION (Germany)

Three years ago I picked a song from Disllusion’s comeback album The Liberation for the 2019 edition of this list. Three years later Disillusion returned with another album, Ayam, and here we are again. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: LURK — “THE BLOOMING”

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Jan 202023
 

Paolo Girardi somehow managed to reach new heights of horror when he painted the cover art for Lurk‘s new album Aegis. With astonishing detail he created a nightmare vision of a dragon made of macabre creatures emerging from the maw of an equally hideous monster (from which a waterfall of wraiths and demons descends), swooping down toward a graveyard of risen dead.

It’s a fitting presentation for an album that is itself an experience in dread and revulsion, panic and despondency, one that creates harrowing otherworldly visions and inflicts immense traumatizing brutality. Paradoxically, Lurk also succeed in making their blood-freezing and bone-smashing musical excursions spellbinding. They describe their own conceptions this way:

“Aegis embodies the power of discord feeding the individual. The songs roll out in sporadic forms of different persons, under the guidance of furor and perseverance. Those stem from all things which are against divinity. No void too deep or mind too obscure, no action too human.”

The album is still fairly far away, with a release date of April 7th set by Transcending Obscurity Records, but there are already tangible reasons to get greedy for it, with a couple of songs already sprung from the crypt and one more we’re presenting today. This new one is named “The Blooming“. Continue reading »

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