NO CLEAN SINGING

SHORT BUT SWEET: CROWN OF MADNESS / TORN IN HALF / VAMPIRE SQUID

Feb 272023

(Andy Synn presents three bite-sized morsels of brutality that you may have missed this month)

After my spectacular failure at keeping up with the various short-form releases which came out last year (ultimately having to relegate my coverage to most of the EPs, splits, etc, from 2022 to the end of year round-up instead) I made a vow to myself to stay more on top of things this year.

Obviously this hasn’t happened but… here’s three you may have missed from February that I didn’t want to wait until December to write about!

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: IDLE RUIN — “SHACKLED FOR ADORNMENT”

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Feb 272023

Just last month Bitter Loss Records released the debut album of the Australian band Idle Ruin (from Brisbane). Entitled The Fell Tyrant, it unleashed nine tracks of mainly full-throttle thrashing death, hurling the listener into one exhilarating escapade after another, propelled by bone-splintering drumwork, iron-shod bass lines, wild-eyed guitar work, and larynx-lacerating vocal extremity.

Idle Ruin packed each song with head-spinning twists and turns as well as spine-slugging and skull-smacking grooves, channeling mayhem, madness, and a general air of marauding savagery. The album’s explosive energy was (and is) potent enough to power massive turbines, but the band also picked their moments to downshift their racing speed, darken the mood, make room for surprising instrumental maneuvers, and plow up the pavement with bursts of jolting (and highly headbangable) brutishness.

And although there’s an abundance of guitar soloing through the album, the “personalities” of those solos change repeatedly, sometimes exotic, sometimes ecstatic, sometimes despairing, and sometimes downright berserk.

The album’s opening track, “Shackled for Adornment“, sets the stage for this mind-bender of a record in electrifying fashion, and that’s the song which is the subject of the video we’re premiering today. It was filmed at the The Fell Tyrant album launch show at The Bearded Lady venue in Brisbane on January 21st of this year. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AYYUR — “A CHANT FOR THE DEAFS”

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Feb 272023

Extreme metal finds fertile soil in nearly every corner of the globe, though the soil is undeniably less hospitable in some places than others. It is, for example, more difficult for such musicians to become noticed (and possibly more difficult even to indulge their creative interests) in a country like Tunisia, a land where many ancient cultures intersect in the northern-most geography of Africa. But there, Ayyur was born 16 years ago, and has managed to survive and, against all odds, even to thrive.

After Ayyur‘s inception, Metal Archives shows us that the project quickly released an EP, a pair of splits, and a demo in its early years, but then fell silent for nearly a decade. Beginning in 2018 Ayyur has returned, releasing three EPs with only two-year gaps between them (including last year’s Hidden Room Sessions I), and now the band has at last completed a debut album named Prevail, a title which seems to stand for what the band itself has managed to do.

We’re told by the labels which will release it that through this new album of blackened doom metal “the artist observes the desolating reality which surrounds them, finding a personal path and the answers to their own questions”. It is thus also described as “an intimate album, strongly introspective and ruthless at the same time, with lyrics sharp and pungent like blades”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: XALPEN, KALMANKANTAJA, EXDESTRIER, PESTIS, DEKADENS

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Feb 262023

Xalpen

I read an article about sleep this morning, It reinforced the idea that I’m doing the right thing sleeping 8-10 hours a night on the weekends, a fairly recent development for me. It also helped explain why I have such vivid dreams in the last phase of sleeping right before waking up, even if they’re like ghosts that tend to vanish within minutes of waking. The article may be pay-walled, but you might find it interesting too (it’s here), or maybe you already know the details.

On the downside, sleeping late makes for a slow start on my weekend NCS posts, especially when I don’t get a head start on the selections the night before. Fortunately there’s someone out there who may have a different sleep cycle, in addition to being in a different time zone, and what he finished very late last night in his time zone was waiting for me in my in-box this morning.

Is it stealing for me to just copy/paste a few things from his collection right into this post to make up for my late start? If so, I confess to theft. At least I won’t pass it off as my own. But I do have a few of my own choices to lead the way in blackening the sabbath. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: THECODONTION, CEREMENTED, ZEPHID, NETHERMANCY, VOIDCEREMONY

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Feb 252023

Thecodontion

I used to type lists of new songs and videos I wanted to check out, pasting the links below the band names. Now I use a Firefox thingy called Pocket. When I’m on a web page for a song or video, I tap the Pocket icon on the Firefox browser and it automatically saves the link in Pocket.

Much faster than what I used to do, but the downside is that when I go to Pocket I see endless rows of thumbnail images for all the links I’ve saved. I fear my fingers will cramp from the scrolling, down and down and down… and my mind starts to cramp up on me too.

The result is that I tend to focus on stuff at the top (the links I saved most recently), especially when I’m hurrying. That phenomenon explains most of the choices in today’s round-up. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: KRULLUR — “DEAD LIVE!”

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Feb 242023

The world is obviously a very big place. Most of us will only glimpse relatively tiny corners of it in a lifetime’s worth of travels. Similarly, there are vast numbers of far-flung metal bands most of us will never get to see on stage, no matter how addicted we are to their music, and studio records just don’t often come close to capturing the explosiveness of some bands’ live performances.

Houston, Texas-based Krullur is undoubtedly one of those bands a lot of people overseas, or even in the U.S., will never get to see as they destroy venues with their crazed and crushing amalgams of thrash, death metal, punk, and grindcore. But what we’ve got for you today is the next best thing, the premiere stream of a record called Dead Live! that does an astonishingly effective job of bringing listeners right into the head-exploding blast zone. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HVRT – VERGISSMEINNICHT / NEZABUDKA

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Feb 242023

(Andy Synn presents a new track whose subject matter is painfully relevant on this particular day)

Did you know that today it’s been exactly one year since Russia invaded Ukraine?

If you didn’t… well, I wouldn’t necessarily blame you. It certainly doesn’t feel like the war has been going on that long, even though it somehow also feels like it’s been going on forever.

Let’s face it, the human brain has difficulty processing events like this, especially over long periods of time, and that goes double when we’re not being directly affected (and I won’t even pretend to understand what those actually in the war zone must be going through).

It’s an all too human response, and one which makes it all too easy to grow numb and jaded, to simply accept this as “the new normal” and forget what fuelled our anger and our abhorrence in the first place.

But the song/video we’re premiering today asks us, implores us, not to forget. Not to blind our eyes or cover our ears, but to heed the cries of the dead and the disappeared and to remember those who have been lost… because sometimes that’s all we can do.

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FERUM — “DESOLATE VANTAA”

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Feb 242023

We have one hell of a ferocious and frightening video for you today from the death metal band Ferum for a song off their 2022 debut album Asunder / Erode. It’s a thrilling experience to watch and hear all by itself, but also a timely reminder of what this part-Italian, part-Estonian trio accomplished on that record.

The album is one we had the pleasure of reviewing and premiering here last August, shortly before its release by the Unorthodox Emanations division of Avantgarde Music. If you happened to see the cover art by Paolo Girardi (one of his most hideous creations), we wager that you haven’t forgotten it (it’s down near the bottom of this article, just in case). And if you heard the album, we wager you haven’t forgotten it either.

For those who might have missed out on Asunder / Erode, we’ll share a few of our comments about it later in this feature, but now let’s get right to the new video. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HEAVEN’S DAMNATION — “STORMS, FLOODS AND FIRE”

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Feb 242023

One warning we occasionally give when we spread the word about new music is for people to take deep breaths before they listen. We’re doing it again now, and we really, really mean it this time.

The title of this new song — “Storms, Floods and Fire” — is its own warning siren, though perhaps it might have been more accurate if it had included “…At the End of the World.” It’s the first single to be revealed from the surprising self-titled debut album of the Danish band Heaven’s Damnation, just in time to seize attention before its March 3rd release by Vendetta Records. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: UNPURE, MARIANAS REST, NEGATIVE PRAYER

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 1 Response »

Feb 232023

Since I’m snow-bound this morning and can’t make it to a job-related commitment at mid-day I had time to pull together one more short round-up, to go along with the other one from earlier today.

UNPURE (Sweden)

This seems to be a day for returns from the grave, following my selections from Dååth and 7 H.Target in the earlier round-up. After a silence spanning nearly 20 years, Unpure come back with a new album named Prophecies Ablaze, which will be released at the end of March by Invictus Productions and The Ajna Offensive, and that record is the source of my first pick in this installment. Continue reading »

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