NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: FELL RUIN, LYKOTONON, UNGFELL, NYTT LAND, PUTRID, HEXORCIST, IMPLORE, ASBEST

Sep 242022

Fell Ruin

Yesterday, September 23rd, was the first day of autumn in the northern hemisphere, as defined by the September equinox. And so we begin the inexorable march toward the Winter Solstice (with the autumnal equinox in between, when all the spooks come out).

I thought about focusing today on music with a cloudy and wintry cast, but it still seems too early to be that blinkered in the choices. I also thought about focusing solely on music released on the first day of fall, especially since I did a shit job keeping up with press releases and other sources of new music this past week. It would have been easier just to make selections from the top of the pile. But this morning I did manage to do a lot of catching up, and made some selections from earlier days too.

FELL RUIN (U.S.)

We’ve been waiting with bated breath for something more from this Detroit band over the five long years since the release of their debut album, To the Concrete Drifts. At last that “something more” is here, in the shape of a new album intriguingly named Cast in Oil The Dressed Wrought. Last week brought the first song from the album, “Stain the Field“, along with a video that makes a frighteningly intense and extravagantly twisted song even more nightmarish. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HUSSAR — “DISSONANT WEEPING OF A THOUSAND WIDOWS”

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Sep 232022

For the third day in a row we’re helping spread the word about a new album whose release is fast approaching from the wonderful I, Voidhanger Records. We’ve previously had the pleasure of putting our spotlight on new albums by Acausal Intrusion (U.S.) and Voak (Greece), and today we’re fixated on All-Consuming Hunger, the bombshell debut album by Toronto’s Hussar. I, Voidhanger introduces it this way:

“The effect on the listener’s eardrums is that of a tank that proceeds inexorably breaking through everything it encounters. The metaphor is not out of place, given that in All-Consuming Hunger HUSSAR tell stories of war, denouncing its inhumanity and horrors, the sacrifice of soldiers sent for slaughter by their superiors, the paranoia of the troops in the trenches, the frustration of the war widows, the disfigured faces of those who found themselves too close to an exploding mine…”

With that prelude you’ll already have an insight into the subject matter of the song we’re presenting today — “Dissonant Weeping Of A Thousand Widows“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FROM THE VASTLAND — “THE CROWNED OF OSHIDARN”

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Sep 232022

From the Vastland‘s steady rise to prominence in the global realms of black metal began in the spring of 2013 when its then sole creator Sina journeyed from his homeland in Iran to perform at Oslo’s Inferno Festival, backed by a group of black metal luminaries from Norway. It happened to be a performance that our own Andy Synn witnessed and memorialized here. From then, and following Sina‘s immigration to Norway, From the Vastland has put out one impressive album after another, and we’ve continued following the band’s progress all along.

From the Vastland‘s most recent album was 2020’s The Haft Khan, a work that the same Mr. Synn lauded here as “pleasingly raw, yet mercilessly melodic”, delivering “great riffs”. “hideously infectious grooves”, “bold, bombastic hooks which, nevertheless, absolutely bristle with blackened menace”, and an obvious passion for a hallmark style of Norwegian black metal developed in the late ’90s and early 2000s.

Throughout From the Vastland‘s rise, Sina has drawn thematic inspiration from wellsprings of Persian history and mythology, and he continues doing so on a new album (the band’s seventh) named Taurvi, which will be released on October 7th by the band’s new label, The Crawling Chaos Records. Continue reading »

MOTHER OF GRAVES: “WHERE THE SHADOWS ADORN”

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Sep 232022

(On October 14th Wise Blood Records will release the debut album of Indianapolis-based Mother of Graves, an album mastered by Dan Swanö and with cover art by Paolo Girardi, and below you’ll find Todd Manning‘s review of this new opus.)

Mother of Graves has picked the perfect time to drop their debut full-length, Where the Shadows Adorn. First of all, anyone who heard their excellent EP, In Somber Dreams, has been dying to get their hands on more material from this great band. In addition, there is something about this particular brand of death/doom that just seems to herald the changing of the seasons. The music feels autumnal, or even winter-ish. Like black metal, this type of forlorn music feels connected to the seasons. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VOAK — “FÜR JEDE WUNDE EIN PFEIL”

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Sep 222022

For the second day in a row (and there will be a third tomorrow) it’s our pleasure to premiere a song from a forthcoming album on one of our favorite labels, the always distinctive I, Voidhanger Records. Yesterday it was Acausal Intrusion, and today the focus is the Greek black metal band Voak and their debut album Verdrängung.

The musical drive of Voak is fueled (as the label explains) by their concerns over “societies shaken by racial tensions, sexual discriminations and extremisms of all kinds”. They chose for the title of their album a German word that refers to the suppression of inner feelings and conflicts, which can lead to inaction in the face of wrongs. They write:

“The presence of our inner conflict shall trumpet over the mesmerizing melody of our comfort and fear of quarrel. To identify ‘Verdrängung’ as such, is a step to be taken in order to be able to fight among others, after fighting against the causes of our own inertia…. The oppressed and the ones struggling against the ‘Verdrängung’ may live in different prisons, but they are the majority… And in unity there is hope.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SFEERVERZIEKER — “MASTERS OF INSANITY”

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Sep 222022

In its debut album Death is the Desired Ending, the Dutch solo project Sfeerverzieker invites you to “Embrace depravity, Embrace brutality”. Consistent with that invitation, the songs’ lyrical themes are themselves centered on “brutality, misery, negativity, and the destruction mankind brings to this world”.

But as is sometimes true of metal spawned by such negative and nihilistic thoughts, the music of Sfeerverzieker, which broadly could be summed up as an atmospheric amalgam of sludge, doom, and post-metal, expresses them in ways that are often brimming with vitality and stunning in the scale of their power. Wide-ranging in their variations, the songs are often unmistakably disturbing and devastating in both their sonic force and their emotional impact, but also relentlessly captivating.

We have two striking examples of these accomplishments today, one of them a song that has already debuted but which you might have missed, and the other a track we’re presenting for its first public airing. Continue reading »

CONCERT REVIEW: HEILUNG LIVE IN SEATTLE, SEPT. 20, 2022

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Sep 222022

(Our editor Islander [that would be me] wrote the following concert review and took all the photos that accompany it.)

The literature of anthropological evolution (in which I’m a dabbler rather than an expert) makes a convincing case that much of our behavior is rooted in instincts that evolved over a vast span of time, instincts geared toward the survival of the species. Unfortunately, it’s also pretty clear that in the “modern age” those instincts no longer function very well as instruments of preservation and advancement. Instead, they lead to behavior that’s just plain dumb, or worse yet self-destructive, or still worse yet, dangerous to the survival of the species as a whole.

Unlike almost all other creatures on the planet, our big sophisticated brains give us the ability to override instinct for the better. Sometimes we actually behave in genuinely altruistic ways. Sometimes we’re able to extricate ourselves from dangerous predicaments through the exercise of reason when instinct alone would fail. We just don’t do any of that as often as we should, and there’s a case to be made that time is running out.

These thoughts bubbled to the surface as I reflected on the performance of Heilung I was lucky enough to witness in Seattle on the night of September 20th. On the one hand, the intense primal attraction of the show was a vivid reminder that “primitive man” still dwells within us. On the other hand, it was a testament to the willed creativity of which we’re capable, and the capacity to create beauty and magic. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ACAUSAL INTRUSION — “TRANSFORMATIONAL DEATH PHENOMENON”

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Sep 212022

For reasons that our man Andy Synn incisively explained in his review last year, Acausal Intrusion‘s debut album Nulitas was a rare piece of work. My favorite fragment from the review was this one: “[T]his is one record that actively feels like it’s evolving and mutating as you’re listening to it, which is no mean feat”.

It wasn’t just that Nulitas morphed from song to song, it was that the individual songs themselves seemed to change when listening to them a second and third time, which was a strange experience. But as Andy also noted, it was only after repeat listens that the album began to make sense — albeit a weird and warped kind of sense.

Now this dizzying and devastating duo are fast returning with a new album, this one named Seeping Evocation. Not surprisingly, it’s a challenging listen, and a frequently disturbing one. As the band’s label I, Voidhanger Records, expresses it:

“Once again the watchwords are chaos and transformation…. Seeping Evocation is like a living organism from another dimension, a giant black hole that pulsates and breathes, the eye of a forgotten Lovecraftian god open to our reality, ready to burn and destroy everything.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MAJESTIC MASS — “APOSTLES OF THE BLACK DAWN”

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Sep 212022

The last time I wrote at NCS about a song by Majestic Mass, back in 2018, I tried to explain my enthusiasm by spewing out a string of addled words that didn’t come close to a complete sentence, and ended by referring to the track as “a song with sensations of lewdness and lust, fire and triumph….”

Majestic Mass now have another album on the way, following up on that 2018 debut full-length Savage Empire of Death (and a 2019 EP named Onwards). And look at the epigram featured in the PR materials for the new record.

Feel no fear nor woe
Embrace the final blow
See the crimson glow
Let lust and fire grow… Continue reading »

GAEREA – MIRAGE

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Sep 212022

(Andy Synn takes a look behind the mask with Gaerea‘s new album, Mirage, out on Friday)

What’s in a name, anyway?

Well, according to some people… not a lot. And according to others… a great deal. Especially when it comes to genres.

Case in point, there are some people – by no means a majority, I should point out right away, though often the loudest and/or most obnoxious – who would balk at the very suggestion that Gaerea are a “true” (or “trve”) Black Metal band due to the fact that their sound is too “polished”, their visual aesthetic too “clean”, and so on.

And yet, for every one of them (I think of them as the Black Metal equivalent of the Amish – zealously convinced that a certain time period was the only “righteous” one, and that any progress beyond that should be shunned) there’s at least a dozen more for whom the very idea of questioning the band’s right to “belong” to the genre (of which they are so clearly and obviously a part) is patently ridiculous.

But the thing is… while much digital ink (and the occasional bit of non-digital blood) has been spilled over this argument, and many like it over the years… it’s obvious that Gaerea themselves don’t really care what you call them. They know who they are. And it’s the music, and not the labels which others put on it, which defines them.

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