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 »

A WRETCHED PAUSE

 Off Topic  21 Responses »
Jun 252022
 

 

Off and on all day, every day, I read the news of the world. Every day I come across reports that make me feel varying mixtures of sorrow, disgust, anger, and frustration (because there’s not a damned thing I can do about any of it). A person concerned for their mental health would get a clue and stop doing this. Why I continue, I don’t know.

Most days I still forge ahead with what I do for NCS without uttering a syllable about the news that happens to be upsetting me; I know that no one comes here to see me whine. But sometimes what happens in the outer world is so bad that it becomes very difficult for me to concentrate on music, so bad that music barely seems relevant, or no longer functions very well as an escape, much less a treatment for my mental turmoil. This is one of those days. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SUFFOCATER — “EMPTY STREETS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jun 242022
 

 

We’re bringing you a helluva good song in this feature, one that helps herald the forthcoming arrival of Rotting Existence, a new record from Salt Lake City’s Suffocater. This is a group that only formed last summer, but they’ve wasted no time, releasing a self-titled debut EP last November and now following it with this album.

The band’s three members all played in punk and folk projects in the past, but they united within Suffocater as a way of channeling their passion for heavier music. They describe their style as “straightforward hardcore with brutal metal vocals,” taking influences from bands like Portrayal of Guilt, Eyehategod, and Genocide Pact.

But like most shorthand descriptions, that one doesn’t fully incorporate what you’ll hear in their music. You’ll get a better idea by checking out the song from the new release that we’re premiering today — “Empty Streets“ Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SVART VINTER — “GALE”

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Jun 242022
 

On September 15th of this year the Italian label Black Mass Prayers will release the striking debut album of Svart Vinter, an extreme metal band that combines the songwriting and instrumental talents of Luca Gagnoni and Emanuela Marino from Rome, and the terrifying vocals of Argentinian performer Noctem Aeternus.

Here at NCS we know of Gagnoni and Marino from their work in Veil of Conspiracy, whose latest album we premiered and praised here last year. There were “blackened” ingredients in that music, along with elements of doom and death metal, but in Svart Vinter‘s first full-length, Mist, they’ve indulged their black metal influences to a much greater degree.

Yet in Svart Vinter they continue to demonstrate, as they did through Veil of Conspiracy, the capacity to wholly immerse listeners in spellbinding (and shattering) music of great emotional power. That will become evident when you hear the song we’re premiering today, whose name is “Gale“. Continue reading »

DARKANE: “INHUMAN SPIRITS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jun 242022
 

 

(Today is the day when Massacre Records releases a new album by the Swedish band Darkane, and to celebrate the occasion long-time NCS writer TheMadIsraeli has returned from a long hiatus with the following review.)

Metal, in its current form, from where I observe it, is dealing with an arms-race problem.  Specifically, a technicality problem.  Obviously, I’m not saying that technicality is bad, or compromises the music, or is indecipherable, but THERE IS a trend with modern bands toward what is straight-up a lack of capacity to write an actual song with twists, turns, peaks, valleys, crescendo and climax.

I find myself being kind of stuck between what feel like two extremes.  We’re dealing with the excessively technical to the detriment of everything else, while on the opposite end exists boring commercially line-straddling pseudo prog that barely qualifies under any semblance of the term or the philosophy of progressive style composition.

I had my phase of liking djent, and I certainly have my moments where I like Beneath The Massacre or Braindrill as much as anybody else, but as I’ve grown older I’ve realized the extreme metal that sits with me the best is a sort that has achieved this lunatic fringe, arguably near impossible, perfect symmetry of element and frame.  If you asked me to name my top ten bands of all time up to the point of writing this, without any form of hierarchy intended here, it’d be Byzantine, Meshuggah, Textures, Suffocation, Dying Fetus, Vader, Kreator, Sepultura, Dark Fortress, and last and most relevant, Darkane. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: CONJURER / GOZER / HUNDRED YEAR OLD MAN

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jun 232022
 

(Andy Synn presents three more succulent slabs of metallic vim ‘n’ vigour from his home country)

Really good Sludge/Post-Metal albums from the UK are a bit like buses… you wait patiently for ages and then three come along at once!

Thankfully all three of these bands, each of whom are at a different stage in their career – Conjurer aiming to prove that all the hype around them is firmly, and fervently, justified with their major-label debut, Gozer establishing themselves as “ones to watch” with their highly-anticipated first album, and Hundred Year Old Man reaffirming their status, in the wake of tragedy, as one of the best bands in the British underground – together represent some of the very best Sludge/Post-Metal that you’re likely to hear this year.

Don’t believe me? Well, allow me a chance to convince you.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: REMAINS — “LORDS OF GRIND”

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Jun 232022
 

You are about to experience the third and final video for the third and final single off Grind ‘Til Death, the debut album by the Melbourne-based death/grind powerhouse Remains, which will be released worldwide via Spikerot Records and in Australia via Disdain Records on July 15th.

This one is named “Lords of Grind“, and as you’ll see in the lyric video, the song is about Remains themselves and the punishment their music inflicts on listeners and club-goers. Now if you’re going to brazenly anoint yourselves “Lords of Grind“, you’d better be able to back it up — and man, do Remains back it up! Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ROTHEADS

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jun 232022
 

 

(Comrade Aleks has brought us another informative and entertaining interview, this time with guitarist/vocalist Bogdan from the Romanian death metal band Rotheads, who have a new album headed our way next month via the Memento Mori label.)

Not long ago Memento Mori premiered the first track from Rotheads’ second album Slither in Slime, which is set for release on July 25th, but we already have this interview with one of the band’s founders, Bogdan “Spurcăciune”.

This band from Bucharest, Romania shaped its old school and dirty death metal sound through the EP Unfazed by Death (2016) and the full-length Sewer Friends (2018), so naturally Slither in Slime is a more mature and professional work.

Bogdan performs guitars and vocals in Rotheads, and it seems that he’s the one who’s responsible for the band’s aesthetic and concept, so we got in touch with him in order to learn more about the way Rotheads grow and bloom. Continue reading »

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