AN NCS INTERVIEW: SHROUD OF BEREAVEMENT

 Interviews  3 Responses »
Aug 092022
 

(In late July the doom/death metal band Shroud of Bereavement released its first album in 15 years, and that prompted Comrade Aleks to catch up with the band’s founder, and the man responsible for resurrecting the band, Dan Robinson.)

Shroud of Bereavement! Shroud of Bereavement! Shroud of Bereavement from the darkness that surrounds us! Sorry, but Shroud of Bereavement’s names is very much in line with Paul McCartney’s hit, so I can’t get rid of this melody. Yet to the matter.

Death-doom never was he most popular genre in the States, and yet this band was founded in the most wrong period you could imagine – it was 1995, Kurt Cobain was already no more, but grunge and alternative metal rage on and moved aside most traditional metal bands. Despite this Shroud of Bereavement slowly developed their sound, moving from the demo The Forever Dance (1999) to the single A Rose for a Dying Muse (2001) and further to the self-titled EP (2003) and the debut full-length Alone Besides Her (2007).

The band’s last appearance was another EP While We Mourn (2012) and then they just disappeared from radars until the recent past when Shroud’s founder Dan Robinson started to update its status, sharing information about new recording progress. As a result his new album A Beautiful Winter was released about a week ago. Here’s our interview with Dan. Continue reading »

ETHER COVEN – THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN THE HAMMER AND THE NAIL

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 092022
 

(Andy Synn gets filthy and furious with the new album from Floridian sludge-slingers Ether Coven)

What makes a band “big” these days?

Is it album sales? Streaming numbers? Social media reach?

Maybe, you might think, it’s being on a “big” label… but if that’s the case then why are Ether Coven, currently signed to Century Media/Good Fight, such a relatively unknown and firmly underground phenomenon?

The answer, of course, is that the band’s music is so unflinchingly ugly, so unforgivingly abrasive (yet tempered with moments of bleak, brooding beauty) that, no matter who they signed with, they were always going to be something of an acquired taste.

But while Ether Coven might not be “big” in the conventional sense of the word, there’s no denying that The Relationship Between the Hammer and the Nail is anything less than an absolutely massive album.

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: TISHINA

 Interviews  No Responses »
Aug 092022
 

(Today we present Comrade Aleks‘ interview of Branislav Panić, the man behind the band Тишина (Tishina), whose excellent debut album was released in May 2022.)

It’s always inspiring when bands use their mother tongue in their lyrics or have enough courage to demonstrate their roots, their identity. But that move also builds a barrier sometimes, so there’s a kind of risk if your band’s name is written in Cyrillic, for example.

Тишина / Tishina means “silence” in Serbian, and the band’s founder Branislav Panić gained his first experience playing different sorts of metal in Serbian bands. Then he moved to Canada but the passion towards heavy music can’t be eradicated easily, and soon Тишина / Tishina was born.

Branislav chose to express his interest towards melodic death-doom through his project, and as result we have his first solo album Увод… / Uvod… released just two months ago. And if you dig old good stuff like Katatonia, Saturnus, and so on, then this album will linger in your play-list longer than you expect. Continue reading »

AMON AMARTH: “THE GREAT HEATHEN ARMY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 092022
 

(DGR has finally gotten around to reviewing the latest album by Amon Amarth, which was released last Friday by Metal Blade Records.)

While digging around in old files and folders I came across the old draft of my review for Amon Amarth‘s Berzerker, wherein the opening line – since scratched – was ‘fuck it, let’s do this’.

Even then, and especially around the release of Amon Amarth‘s Jomsviking album, it had become clear that the band that I’ve long referred to as one of a small handful of fantastic shuffle bands in the world were getting to be huge and had started to ascend in their career to the point of becoming more spectacle than music.

That’s fine but it just represents a shift in priority for seeing them live, much in the same way one might see Kiss, Iron Maiden, Gwar, or Tool. Yeah, you get a bonus and it feels great actually knowing the music, but you really don’t need to any more, because the band have become a spectacle to witness. The recent release of Amon Amarth‘s 12th album The Great Heathen Army hammers this fact home. Instead of Amon Amarth being the super-heavy melodeath-skirting Viking pillagers, they’ve become a spectacle themselves. Fewer runes and gravesites and a whole lot more medieval times.

However, since I’ve been the one to write about Amon Amarth releases here for a while now – though I skipped Jomsviking – l felt weirdly drawn to The Great Heathen Army. The traveling show that is Amon Amarth doesn’t really need our corner of the internet much these days, but there’s some amusing stuff happening within this album, so as the old draft for Berzerker said ages ago,

Fuck it, let’s do this. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NEKROTISK — “SULFUR AND ASH”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 082022
 

On the last day of 2021 the Minnesota-based extreme metal band Nekrotisk celebrated New Year’s Eve by releasing its debut EP, Apraxia I: Mors Certa. It was the solo work of Mehrunz Oel (aka Matt McGee), a six-track rendering of blackened death metal that impressively interweaves dire and hellish moods, searing and soaring riffage, jolting grooves, maniacally obliterating percussion, and crazed vocal tirades that are a fitting match for the frequent fretwork frenzies.

Mehrunz shouldered almost all the work that led to that EP, including recording, mixing, and mastering it and creating the cover art (with a guest appearance on the second track by James Benson of Amiensus and Chrome Waves). But his ambitions were greater than creating a studio project, and so in the coming months he assembled a talented live line-up and organized a first tour in June that took the band across the Northwest of the U.S., through Montana, Idaho, Washington, and back through North Dakota on the way home.

What we have for you today is a video that recaps that tour, set to the music of a riveting track from Apraxia I named “Sulfur and Ash“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INHUMAN DEPRAVITY — “BEYOND RHYTHM ZERO”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 082022
 

 

Let’s be honest: the Turkish band Inhuman Depravity are in a challenging place musically, and they consciously and confidently put themselves there.

They’ve chosen to embrace an old-school amalgam of technical/brutal death metal obviously influenced by the likes of Severe Torture and Deeds Of Flesh, Disavowed and Suffocation, Brutality and Sinister. They drop those names themselves. Those bands cast long shadows, and to stand in them risks remaining hidden, out of the light, because this style is so established and has been done so well before.

But even acknowledging the risks, it’s hard to fault the band for their choice of musical lineage. For one thing, this kind of music hasn’t gone out of style despite its age — people still hunger for it. For another, Inhuman Depravity are really fucking good at what they do. We’ve got the evidence of that today, through our premiere of the first advance song from the band’s forthcoming second album The Experimendead, which is Inhuman Depravity‘s first new music in a long seven years following their debut full-length. Continue reading »

SVART CROWN: “LES TERRES BRÛLÉES”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 082022
 

(NCS writer DGR has been on a roll, clearing out a backlog of reviews, and our plan is to publish them on a daily basis this week. We begin with his thoughts about the final recording from the French band Svart Crown, which was released in June by Nova Lux Production and Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions.)

In all honesty the events that took place after the release of Svart Crown‘s newest EP Les terres brûlées kind of took us aback when it came to writing about it. Granted, we were already late on reviewing it because it arrived in the post-MDF/pre-NWTF hangover period, but who would’ve guessed that in the time since its release the group would hang it up two weeks later? Yet here we are, now almost two months since its release, and the world is less one Svart Crown project.

Thus, writing about Les terres brûlées now is a little strange because it feels partially like we’re going to be praising the band for recognizing that it was time to call it quits and partially mourning the potential that Les terres brûlées promised, since the four songs and cover track here are some of the more ferocious material within the Svart Crown playbook.

Wolves Among The Ashes may have been divisive among the writers here (I enjoyed it, Andy ranked it as ‘disappointing’), but it’s hard to imagine anyone making it through even just the first song of this final EP without becoming convinced that Svart Crown sound absolutely mean this time around. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ISKANDR, EXCURSE, DAEMON OF OA, GONEMAGE

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Aug 072022
 

Someday I’ll finally learn the lesson that predicting in print what I’m going to do at NCS from one day to the next is stupid. On Friday I put together a roundup of new music that I described as a way to lessen the load for the roundup I was going to compile for Saturday. And then of course I wrote nothing on Saturday.

The wreckage of that plan was the result of embarrassing misbehavior on Friday night, so it would be even more stupid for me to share details. Last night’s misbehavior was less ruinous, so I was able to get this usual Sunday column finished. It’s not as extensive as I’d hoped it would be, but at least not another complete failure.

I’ll forecast for you that in choosing the following tracks, I wandered well off the usual beaten paths.

ISKANDR (Netherlands)

In the early fall of last year I had the pleasure of premiering what was then the third full-length by this formidable Dutch duo. Looking back on what I wrote, I was a bit dumbfounded by how many words I spilled by way of introduction. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLACK ANVIL, DEAD VOID, PARIUS, BONES, BLODKVALT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Aug 052022
 

Today we’ve already presented a pair of raunchy reviews, the premiere of some dismal and nightmarish black metal, and another evocative installment of a Fire in the Mountains festival report. But even with all that, I thought I’d still try to squeeze in a roundup of new songs and videos, just to somewhat lighten the load on me for the usual Saturday roundup. It will still be a crushing load, but maybe getting the following five items out there mow will leave a few vertebrae intact tomorrow.

BLACK ANVIL (U.S.)

Let’s begin with something bracing, something that’s both chilling and muscular, a song that creates tension and tightens it, becomes scathing and sweeping in its portrayal of despair, stampedes in a fury, and raises its voice in proclamations of hellish reverence. Continue reading »

FIRE IN THE MOUNTAINS 2022: DAY TWO

 Concert Reviews  7 Responses »
Aug 052022
 

(Our friend Gonzo has brought us the second installment of his commentary on the 2022 edition of the Fire in the Mountains festival, which took place in Wyoming in late July. To check out the first installment, go here.)

Saturday morning came before I was ready for it. The sunrise roused me from an intoxicated slumber, and my bladder was quick to remind me of the choices I’d made the night before. “Balls,” I muttered as I put pants on, preparing to leave the warm confines of my tent and head towards the port-a-potties near the entrance to camp.

I unzipped the tent and stepped out into the frigid morning air. The temperature had dropped by almost half of what it’d been during the day. A layer of frost had accumulated on the top of the tent. I was grateful I’d kept my Amorphis hoodie on before going to sleep, even if I had no memory of doing it. So far, the running score of this weekend was FITM: 1, Gonzo: 0. Expecting anything else would’ve been ridiculous of me.

Walking along the makeshift footpath through camp, the stunning peaks of the Tetons were looming through the morning mist. This land, this festival – there was something different about it, something almost tangible. It’s not every day you find yourself immersed in nature, surrounded by wildlife, refreshingly out of range of any cell phone service, and have eight hours of amazing music to look forward to, but that was exactly what this day would hold for the lucky 1,200 of us who made the trek to this festival. Continue reading »

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