NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DEMIRICOUS — “SMOKE CHASER”

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)

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”

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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 »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 147): KATHAROS XIII

THE SYNN REPORT 2 Responses »

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”

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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”

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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 »

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