SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: PLAGUE YEARS, BLACK ALTAR, SHROUD OF DESPONDENCY, TROG, DVVELL, INTO THE VALLEY OF DEATH, HOMESKIN, DISMEMBER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 092022
 

 

Yesterday I went in search of musical beatings of various kinds. I’m not sure where that impulse came from, maybe the annoyance of being required to do something unpleasant for my fucking day job, or maybe just the surfacing of that constantly lurking desire among metal fans to become embroiled in intensity.

I had no theme in mind when I awoke today, facing the weekend with gummy eyes, and instead just wandered among new songs and videos, like a kid in the candy store aisles. Here’s what filled my hands:

PLAGUE YEARS (U.S.)

Yesterday this Detroit band dropped a surprise EP named All Will Suffer, along with a video for a song named “Suffer“. Lots of suffering in these words, but you won’t wallow in misery when you listen, though you may need to be hospitalized. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: REVOCATION, WOLFBRIGADE, TEETHGRINDER, HELLFUCK, CONSUMPTION, AURIFEROUS FLAME, ASTRAL HORROR

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jul 082022
 

 

The theme of today’s collection of new songs and videos is: THE BEATINGS WILL CONTINUE UNTIL MORALE IMPROVES!

Today is my birthday, and as a gift, my employer has decided to beat me until my morale improves. Therefore, this collection isn’t as large as I would wish, but tomorrow is another day, and I expect I’ll have another collection then.

REVOCATION (U.S.)

We may love Revocation around here (we DO love Revocation around here), but they have repaid all our affections with “Diabolical Majesty“, a merciless new song that invokes champions of hell “to crush the cursed creatures of the Christian right”. “Onward to victory! Set their commandments ablaze!” Continue reading »

MANTAR – PAIN IS FOREVER AND THIS IS THE END

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 072022
 

(Andy Synn hopes that this is not the end for Mantar)

I discovered something this weekend. Something which shook me to my very core.

Did you know there are some people out there who don’t like Mantar?!

I mean, to be clear, I don’t expect every person to like every band – that would be madness – but before this weekend I’d never encountered anyone who actively disliked Mantar before.

Honestly, I’m still shaken by this particular revelation… but maybe the band’s new album will be able to change a few hearts and minds?

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: COSCRADH — “PLAGUES OF KNOWTH”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 072022
 


photo by Piotr Jóźwiak

Even ears and minds that have been hardened by extensive exposure to the most extreme ravages of blackened death metal are still capable of being stunned by the music of the Irish band Coscradh. (Even the toughest callouses can be scraped raw and split open.) The eye-popping impact of their slaughtering talents was made evident from their first (self-titled) demo in 2016, and was renewed and reinforced through a pair of subsequent EPs (Of Death and Delirium and Mesradh Machae), all of them released by Invictus Productions. And now Coscradh‘s debut album is on the way, like a terrorizing, earth-shaking upheaval.

The name of this first full-length (41 minutes long), which the same Invictus Productions has set for release on August 5th, is Nahanagan Stadial. We are told that the title is an old Irish term for the rapid onset of a glacial period 10,000 years ago, which rendered life extinct: “A massive rise in oceans blocked out the sun, and coronal mass ejections and sunbursts hit the planet, overturning civilization, which brought a new ice age upon the island of Ireland”.

That choice of title is in keeping with the band’s entire aesthetic, both their devotion to the old language and history of Ireland and the summoning of catastrophe in their music. The band’s Irish Gaelic name itself (which we’ve learned is pronounced coss-kraa or cuss-kraa depending on the dialect) refers to slaughter or massacre, but such decimating visions would come to mind from the music alone, as you’ll discover from the album track we’re premiering today if you don’t already know. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GALLOWER — “CLAWS AND FANGS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 062022
 

On July 29th Dying Victims Productions will release a new EP by the savage Polish sorcerers in Gallower. The band’s musical identity has already been well-established through a sequence of demos and splits and a 2020 debut album, Behold the Realm of Darkness. As Dying Victims accurately portrays, “Gallower incite a riot of violence that skillfully melds the Teutonic legendry of Destruction, Sodom, Kreator, and Violent Force with the first-wave black magick of Bathory, Hellhammer, Venom, and Japan’s Sabbat“.

The new EP is a five-song, 17-minute rampage that (to again quote the label) “emits strong vibes of early Bulldozer, Running Wild, Deathrow, and pre-Rick Rubin Slayer“. And thus it fortifies Gallower‘s reputation as black thrashing maniacs cloaked in an unearthly aura that merits the title of the new EP — Eastern Witchcraft.

One track from the EP has already surfaced, and today we’re presenting another. Continue reading »

KNOLL, VEGAS, DRUNK MOTHERFUCKERS

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jul 052022
 

 

I’m still in post-Northwest Terror Fest catch-up mode for the new songs and videos I missed over the last 5 days, which is kind of like a Dachshund trying to catch up with a Bugatti that’s moving at top speed. The chase will fail, but still can’t be resisted, so here’s a few more picks to go along with the two I chose yesterday. These three all happen to be recently released complete records — of very different kinds — and I have greedily bought all of them.

KNOLL (U.S.)

To begin, I chose an album named Metempiric that was released by this Tennessee band on June 24th. It’s their second full-length, following 2021’s Interstice. It includes 13 tracks, most of them short, building to an 8-minute closer named “Tome”.

And this is where I tell you to take some big gulps of air before you begin, because you will definitely need the extra oxygen. Continue reading »

TRIUMVIR FOUL: A REVIEW OF “ONSLAUGHT TO SERAPHIM” AND THE PREMIERE OF “SERPENTS’ GNASH FOR WAR”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 052022
 

(Today we’re premiering a song from the forthcoming final album of Triumvir Foul, which will be released on CD by Invictus Productions and on cassette tape by Vrasubatlat on July 29th, with a co-released vinyl version to come soon after. Preceding the premiere stream we have Hope Gould‘s vivid review of the new album.)

Enter the racing drums, rumbling like the bones of an undead army as they clamor up the caverns of the deepest ossuary. A “Presage” indeed – the opening track to Triumvir Foul’s latest offering is the harbinger to something truly fetid.

The Portland duo have emerged from the tombs of Ur with another ode to the Exalted Serpents in the form of their latest, and quite sadly, final album, Onslaught to Seraphim. Despite being their last release, Triumvir Foul have done anything but gracefully bow out. They have offered up perhaps their most caustic material thus far; a killing blow to be lauded for, a subsidence crater in the wake of their destruction. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEMIRICOUS — “SMOKE CHASER”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 052022
 

 

In case you’ve been living under a rock, you may have missed the stellar news that in May of this year Indiana’s Demiricous released their first new album in 15 years. Fittingly entitled III: Chaotic Lethal, it finally follows up a pair of full-lengths released in 2006 and 2007 — I: Hellbound and II:Poverty, respectively — which were both released by Metal Blade and sky-rocketed the band’s name.

Our writer DGR has already given Chaotic Lethal a lavish review here, one that underscores how well Demiricous have picked up where they left off, as if so much time had not passed at all.

Re-uniting the same line-up that brought us Poverty — Nate Olp (vocals, bass), Dustin Boltjes (drums), Scott Wilson (guitar), and Ben Parrish (guitar) — they’ve given us a new record that DGR calls “a constant circle pit”, “purpose built for moshing”. He concluded his review this way: Continue reading »

GEARING UP AGAIN (WITH PUTRESCINE AND KOSMOGYR)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jul 042022
 


Ludicra at NWTF – photo by Islander-NCS

This past Saturday night the fourth edition of Northwest Terror Fest came to a glorious close. NCS has sponsored the fest since the beginning, and some of our staff have worked the fest from the beginning as well. This most recent one was, in a word, fantastic. At least from our perspective, it ran like a well-oiled machine, and it seemed like everyone there, from the bands to the audience to the venues’ staffs, enjoyed the hell out of themselves.

There were dozens of highlights. The best of all was the spectacular reunion performance by Ludicra, who headlined the first night, but all the bands fired on all cylinders, and the biggest crowd we’ve ever had at NWTF had great energy.

Perhaps it goes without saying, but the big crew of festival volunteers who worked the event were left both elated and exhausted, including those of us from NCS. We basically had to shut down this site for the last few days, and it will take a little while for us to get back in motoring gear again. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FLESHROT — “HAUNTED VISIONS OF SICK DEPRAVITIES”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 042022
 

The signs are all there: The grotesquely macabre cover art. The oozing band logo. Song titles like “Wrapped In Entrails”, “”Intricate Dissection”, “In Filth and Pain”, and “Haunted Visions of Sick Depravities” (the song you’re about to here), and of course the band’s name itself — Fleshrot. One might add the photo of these faceless hulking Texans, which looks like someone found a lost tribe of Neanderthals and passed out band shirts, just before being clubbed to death.

These are all signs of devotion, a devotion to death metal of a particularly noxious and sadistically eviscerating variety, a fanatical reveling in excesses of violence, degradation, and horror. The signs are borne out by the music itself, captured in seven body-mauling, mind-mangling tracks which together make up Fleshrot‘s debut album Unburied Corpse, which will be co-released at the onset of August by Me Saco Un Ojo and Desert Wastelands Productions. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries