NO CLEAN SINGING

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 147): KATHAROS XIII

Jul 012022

Recommended for fans of: Black Metal, Dark Jazz, Neo-Noir soundscapes

Romania’s Katharos XIII are a band I’ve been wanting to cover here for quite a while.

But, as you might have guessed already (especially if you’ve glanced at the “Recommended for fans of…” section above) they’re not the easiest band to write about, as their diverse yet distinctive sound is hard to compare to other bands.

Sure, I’d say fans of White Ward‘s sax-infused savagery or Deadspace‘s anguished extremity will most likely find a lot to appreciate here, and the doomy ambience and dramatic clean vocals prevalent in their most recent work will surely appeal to fans of bands like Sinistro and SubRosa, but the fact is that Katharos XIII aren’t easy to put into a box… and that’s a big part of what makes them so good.

NWTF BLOG BREAK

Metal News 4 Responses »

Jun 302022

The fourth installment of Northwest Terror Fest begins today (Thursday) in Seattle and runs through Saturday night. Three of us here at NCS — Andy Synn, DGR, and myself (islander) — will be working the festival, which is an event we’ve helped produce since the first year,

This is going to be the best-attended installment of NWTF ever, which probably is in part a reaction to two years of covid screwing up everyone’s life, and obstructing the ability of NWTF to proceed safely. We’re obviously not out of the woods yet, and the festival is requiring pro of vaccination to get into the venues, but people are obviously ravenous for this kind of thing to happen again.

As you can see, the line-up is also great — though some covid-produced last -minute changes aren’t reflected there, including Cryptic Slaughter having to drop and Midnight agreeing to step up and take their place at the literal last minute. Continue reading »

OBSCENE: “FROM DEAD HORIZONS… TO DEAD HORIZONS”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Jun 302022

(In late May Blood Harvest Records released the second album by the Indiana-based death metal band Obscene, and here we have an enthusiastic review of it by Todd Manning.)

It’s been a pleasure to watch Indianapolis-based death metal unit Obscene evolve from a scrappy and primal bunch of berzerkers on 2018’s Sermon to the Snake to the ruthless, well-oiled killing machine they are now. Their latest, From Dead Horizon…To Dead Horizon, finds these guys in prime form, with the underground theirs for the taking.

From Dead Horizon…To Dead Horizon sees Obscene taking their foot off the accelerator a bit and leaning into more mid-tempo material. In some ways, it’s a bold move in a genre that favors the extremely slow or the extremely fast, but it pays off.

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ORTHODOX — “PROCEED”

Premieres 3 Responses »

Jun 292022

The new Orthodox album represents both a return to an earlier essence and also a step forward, with the former (perhaps paradoxically) making the latter possible.

Proceed (which is due for release tomorrow by Alone Records) is this Spanish band’s eighth album in an extensive discography that began with the 2006 debut, Gran Poder. In these last 16+ years they have let very few years go by without releasing something new, short or long, and have seen their star rise, to the point of playing festivals such as Hellfest, Roadburn, Supersonic, Amplifest, and Primavera Sound, opening for the likes of Voïvod, High On Fire, and Corrosion Of Conformity, and collaborating with artists as diverse as Julian Cope and flamenco dancer Israel Galván.

Along the way, however, the original trio became a duo after the departure of guitarist Ricardo Jiménez following the 2011 album Baal, which left bassist/vocalist Marco Serrato and drummer Borja Díaz to handle all recording and live performances since 2014. But Proceed represents Ricardo’s reunion with those two, and in that way, and others, it is a revisiting of the past — but still a formidable movement forward into uncharted waters, as you’ll understand when you hear our premiere stream of the album as a whole. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): IRONHAWK — “RITUAL OF THE WAR PATH”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Jun 282022

It’s time to raise hell and horns, to get hearts hammering, heads pumping, and voices snarling. To do that, we’re bringing you a full stream of the fierce and feral debut album by the Tasmanian devils who call themselves Ironhawk. Fittingly named Ritual of the War Path, and fittingly emblazoned with battle-ax imagery, it’s set for imminent release on June 30th by Dying Victims Productions.

By way of quick introduction to the particular kind of punk/metal rampaging embraced by this trio (who made their start covering Motörhead songs), we’ll first share an excerpt from the PR material: “We hear the cavernous crunge of early Bathory, the sooty surge of early Sacrilege, the burning spirits of prime English Dogs, and definitely (and uniquely for this style) the epic landscapes of mid ‘80s Amebix across the album’s surprisingly dynamic 37 minutes”.

So that’s one kind of preview, but of course we have our own…. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SOUL DISSOLUTION — “THE ABSOLVING TIDE”

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Jun 282022

Four years have passed since Soul Dissolution released their last album, Stardust, a phenomenal achievement that still rings in the head with lasting power. Since then we’ve had the good fortune of two further releases by this Belgian atmospheric post-black metal band, the EPs named Nowhere and Winter Contemplations, both of them delivering two long-form tracks it was very easy to get lost in. And now Soul Dissolution are returning with an eagerly awaited new full-length.

The name of the new album is SORA (a Japanese word for “sky”), and it’s described as “a conceptual work about the sky and its many facets”. We’ll still have some anxious waiting to discover what all five of its tracks do with that expansive concept, because the release won’t come until September 30th (via the band’s own Viridian Flame Records). But we do have a powerful first sign in the song we’re helping the band reveal today. The title of the song is “The Absolving Tide“, and it comes with an official video. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TUSCOMA — “GU-CCI”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Jun 272022

The title and lyrical themes of Tuscoma’s new album Gu-cci have little or nothing to do with the usual tropes of extreme metal. Anti-church tirades are missing, as are demonic invocations, troughs of gore, dank catacombs, the blaze of torches, or the brandishing of blades. They’re more poetic, more emotionally rooted, and never exactly spell things out.

Tuscoma‘s music on the new album is also itself unorthodox, bringing together elements from a range of genres, including black metal, post-metal, death metal, shoegaze, and hardcore. The results are monumentally heavy, powerfully turbulent, and emotionally fracturing. The songs become daunting, desolate, and deranged, coupled with rhythms that hit with concrete-splitting force. In other words, it’s not what you might expect from the album title or the lyrics.

Before elaborating on the sounds ourselves, we’ll begin by sharing a comment from Tuscoma bassist Craig Leahy: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SEDIMENTUM — “UN GROTESQUE PANORAMA”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

Jun 272022

The Québec city band Sedimentum made their horrifying presence known within the most ghastly and gruesome realms of death metal through a pair of demos and a pair of splits released over the last three years, paving their way across subterranean plains of rotting corpses and crushed skulls toward a debut album that will soon be upon us. With the mouth-filling name of Suppuration Morphogénésiaque, it will be co-released by Me Saco Un Ojo Records and the Memento Mori label.

It’s hard to overstate just how stunningly destructive, barbarically crazed, and hideously foul this album is. Sedimentum use convulsive speed and overwhelming sonic power as their weapons — one of many weapons they bring to bear. With adrenaline-fueled execution they go fast. With corrosive distortion, a massive low end, and plundering percussive assaults, they brutally smash bones and ruthlessly scour the mind. With unnerving melodic ingredients they conjure nightmarish visions of cruelty and suffering.

It’s all electrifying, and it’s all unmistakably malignant. As proof, we offer a new album track appropriately named “Un Grotesque Panorama“. Continue reading »

BONGBONGBEERWIZARDS: “AMPIRE”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Jun 272022

(Last Friday the distinctively named BongBongBeerWizards released a new album through Electric Valley Records, and today we bring you a review of it by the distinctively named fetusghost.)

We here at NCS, the editorial “we” that really means “me” of course, we love Bong Metal. The subgenre you didn’t know existed until you clicked on my Bong Metal Round-Up by accident. Maybe it doesn’t exist. Do any of us really? If existence is faker than the moon landing, well then at least we got riffs in the Matrix. Fat, juicy, keyboard and fuzzy bass enhanced riffs. Appropriately stoned metal. The anti-grindcore.

But we’re just talking about an opposite, not an enemy. If you’d like to go fast, Godspeed! But Satan and BongBongBeerWizards’ meditative, skull-rattling tones are gonna take it slow as hell.

Even the smoke clouds in their logo seem leisurely, but peel back the layers and you too can reach the interstitial zone of bliss that is often found in fellow bong metal (bong drone?) merchants like Bong and Bongripper. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC No Responses »

Jun 262022

As predicted yesterday I shook myself like a wet dog, but I didn’t entirely clear my head. What has happened isn’t something that can be blinked away. But I did start listening again, focusing on furious music of different kinds to match my mood. Somewhere along the way, I became open to a change. It came gradually, as you’ll see for yourselves below. The fury’s not gone from my head, just tempered for a time.

Maybe you’ll get something out of this. It’s a big playlist, a baker’s dozen of tracks in all, some with videos, almost all of it new. Because it’s just a playlist, I’ve pulled some of the songs from records that have been released in their entirety. I hope you’ll find time to explore the other tracks on those, as I will.

P.S. No Shades of Black today. I’ve made the picks, but have run out of time. Maybe tomorrow…. Continue reading »

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