NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS INTERVIEW: VORKUTA

Sep 162021

(In this new piece Comrade Aleks discloses his interview with vocalist Blizzard from the Hungarian black metal band Vorkuta, who returned with an EP this past spring as the first new music in more than a dozen years.)

You’re wrong if you think from a first glance that the “Vorkuta” name was taken from Tolkien mythology or something like that. This word came from the Nenets language and it means “filled with bears”. It’s a city right in the middle of nowhere — to be precise, in the Russian north, right beyond he Arctic Circle. The city was founded in a place surrounded by coal mines but it’s more infamously associated with “Vorkutlag”, a corrective labor camp, another cold and rotten hole in the Gulag system.

Who could imagine that a black metal band from Hungary would take “Vorkuta” as its name? However such a band has existed since 2002, and though it was silent for nearly 13 years it returned with a new EP, Wandering Alone in the Forest of Transcendence, in March 2021. Taking into account their very underground ethic (there’s just one full-length against eight split-albums in their discography), an EP seems to be a good option. This piece of cold atmospheric black metal could serve as a teaser for something more, and that suggestion was my first reason to get in touch with the band. This conversation with Vorkuta’s voiceman Blizzard may shed some light on the dark history of his creature. Continue reading »

RIVERS OF NIHIL – THE WORK

Album Reviews 13 Responses »

Sep 152021

(Andy Synn sits down to do “the work” with the new album from Rivers of Nihil, scheduled for release on September 24)

There’s a certain type of person – hell, for all I know it may just be the same individual over and over again – who responds to any article about Rivers of Nihil with the cut-and-paste comment “Death Metal’s Pink Floyd!”.

And while I can appreciate their enthusiasm (to a point) not only is it getting a bit tiresome (and also suggests that the commenter(s) in question don’t really know much about Pink Floyd) but it totally misunderstands what the band are trying to do.

Because the Pennsylvania quintet aren’t trying to be “Death Metal’s Pink Floyd”, or even “Death Metal’s King Crimson” (which would, arguably, be slightly more accurate, though still not right).

They’re just trying to be Rivers of Nihil. And each and every album they create is another opportunity for them to further define, refine, and redefine, exactly what that means.

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): COGAS — “UNCONSCIOUS SONS OF THE REPTILE GOD”

Album Reviews, Premieres No Responses »

Sep 152021

“Spewed from a place of utter anxiety, extreme metal harbingers COGAS impose a new strain of dark death-black metal annihilation entirely their own, stitching together the timeless brutality of old school death metal and the transformative sonic bedlam of the current visionary black metal crop, to create a majestic and emotive extreme metal behemoth of epic magnitude”.

We almost never quote from promotional materials for music we’re premiering or reviewing, preferring to lay out our own thoughts in our own words — and we will certainly do that here. But that paragraph above is worth quoting because it does provide a useful and accurate introduction to the debut album of this UK band we’re now premiering in full, in advance of its September 17 release — as does this further paragraph from the press materials:

“Weaving together layers of dense textures, ceremonial rhythms and looming atmospheres, COGAS excels at the art of organized chaos through sound. Across this new material the London-based band blends elements of extreme metal and macabre stories of Sardinian witchcraft (the Italian island is the homeland of two of the band members (frontman Piero Mura and guitarist Davide Ambu) with ambient explorations, epic sensibilities and grinding walls of sound that defy categorization”. Continue reading »

ABORTED: “MANIACULT”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Sep 152021

(Aborted‘s latest album was released last Friday by Century Media, and DGR reviews it today.)

I’ve pontificated a lot over the years about the idea of gateway bands, mostly because its always amusing to see which groups ascend to that role as pathways into the deeper and heavier traverses of metal. It never quite seems to be who you’d expect until years later, when you have the gift of hindsight to scry into the past and see who wound up there.

One hallmark of all groups who wind up in the gateway position has been a consistent sort of quality. Ata certain point they become known quantities within the music world. You can pretty much rely on the expectation that a disc will not be bad by any conventional measure and that the group have long since found a sound that works for them. Often, every release after that particular point can feel like an iteration or a spin on that particular sound but overall is still pretty recognizably them.

It also means there’s a pretty good argument for being able to take everything the band has done and throw it on shuffle and generally have a pretty good time. It’s the sort of plateau that groups like Amon Amarth, Revocation, The Black Dahlia Murder, Gojira, and even to some extent Skeletonwitch, tend to inhabit. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SNAKEBLADE — “THE RED MAGE’S SEDUCTION”

Premieres 1 Response »

Sep 142021

As is always the case with bands, there’s a back story and a front story to Vancouver’s Snakeblade.

The back story is a tale of one person’s escape from the gloom of pandemic lockdown, an escape through tunnels carved by thrashing black metal fury but guided by concepts born of interests in fantasy. The name Snakeblade itself comes from the musical creator’s first character in Dungeons & Dragons (which was a bugbear). Further, Snakeblade’s new album (the project’s second one overall) was inspired by his favorite fantasy series, Game of Thrones, mixed with his own personal experiences. And so, as Snakeblade’s alter ego Mike Redston explains:

“What came out is a melting pot of nerdy fantasy shit plus my own personal shit. GOT plotlines of The Red Woman, Stannis Baratheon, and the Lord of Light religion meet my own personal plot lines of betrayal, failure, and rage. Overall, these songs are both deeply emotional and deeply nerdy. It was a long, pain-staking process making this thing. I hope you enjoy my latest album, The Curse.”

The front story, of course, is the music — well, the music plus the fantastic cover art for The Curse created by Elizabeth Holmes. And as a taste of the music, which has evolved since Snakeblade’s 2020 debut, we now present an album track named “The Red Mage’s Seduction“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GRIZZLOR — “I DON’T LIKE YOU”

Premieres No Responses »

Sep 142021

It’s not often that we reach out and ask to host a premiere. Almost always it’s the other way around. But after listening to a portion of Connecticut-based Grizzlor‘s upcoming album Hammer of Life, that’s what I did. The whole album turns out to be a heavy kick in the head, but I specifically asked to premiere the opening track, and got my wish. Honestly, part of the attraction was its name: “I Don’t Like You“.

The song (and the album) are departures from our usual meat and potatoes around here: Grizzlor draw comparisons to early Melvins, Drunks With Guns, Weedeater, and Deadguy. As the press materials accurately describe, their mission is to “carpet bomb away the stress of daily living in society with loud, abrasive, and riff-addled noise rock with warped and irritated vocals”, melded with lyrics that radiate a “general vibe of misanthropy, self-isolation, and disappointment with society in general”.

That works for me, and hopefully it will work for you. Surely you get the same thought I do about someone every fucking day: “I Don’t Like You“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ORGREL — “AMOR FATI”

Premieres 1 Response »

Sep 142021

According to The Font of All Human Knowledge: “Amor fati is a Latin phrase that may be translated as ‘love of fate’ or ‘love of one’s fate’. It is used to describe an attitude in which one sees everything that happens in one’s life, including suffering and loss, as good or, at the very least, necessary”.

The same article links the concept of Amor fati to what Friedrich Nietzsche called “eternal recurrence”, “the idea that, over an infinite period of time, everything recurs infinitely”.

We ponder those ideas today because “Amor Fati” is the name of the second song to be revealed from Red Dragon’s Invocation, the formidable debut album by the Italian black metal band Orgrel, which is set for release by Iron Bonehead Productions on October 15th, graced with stunning cover art by Luciana Nedelea. Continue reading »

CHOKE ME: “HAUNTOLOGY”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 2 Responses »

Sep 142021

(A Los Angeles band whose 2020 release hit the No. 5 spot on DGR’s year-end list has already returned with a follow-up, and he gives it an enthusiastic review below.)

If you were one of the unfortunate victims to cross paths with my end of the year tome/list – which somehow still managed to happen in the face of 2020 as a whole – then you likely caught my sincerely held belief in the final issue of the list that people had fucked up by letting Choke Me‘s debut release The Cousin Of Death fly under their collective radars.

All joking aside, as a piece of punk-fueled grind, The Cousin of Death was a furious album that wrapped up as shockingly fast as it started. Even were it just a proof-of-concept style release, it showed that there was a lot of potential to whatever spark ignited the Choke Me sound. That is why – even with reservations about the year-over-year churn when it comes to music – it was exciting to learn that the group had issued a follow-up release. We even gave it a brief shout-out in one of our weekend round up posts which archives everything that manages to hit in the back half of the week.

Entitled Hauntology, it consists of six songs and is still very much in line with what worked for the Choke Me crew in their debut. With six new songs – most around two minutes plus – Hauntology only comes in a couple of minutes shorter than its predecessor yet still manages to strike with the same sort of righteousness that blazed through that initial twenty-minute outburst. Continue reading »

EMPLOYED TO SERVE – CONQUERING

Album Reviews No Responses »

Sep 132021

(Andy Synn has followed the UK’s Employed to Serve through thick and thin over the years, so we knew he was the only choice to take on their upcoming new album, Conquering, set for release this Friday)

There’s a certain misconception that Metal/Hardcore fans don’t actually like it when the bands they love become successful.

And while I can understand where this misapprehension came from (there’s definitely a small but obnoxious cadre of loudmouths out there who act like this) the truth, as always, is much more nuanced.

It’s not that we don’t like bands becoming successful… it’s just that we’re tired of bands changing their identity, dumbing own their intelligence, and – yes, I’ll say it – selling out, in order to fit into whatever mass-produced, pre-packaged mould that the mainstream seems to think denotes “success”.

The caveat to this, of course, is that when a band manages to be successful on their own terms, doing what they want to do, rather than what others think they should do, we often love them even more, because they’ve shown that you don’t have to give up who you are in order to be make it “big”.

And, let me tell you now, Employed to Serve are exactly that sort of band, and while their new album looks set to raise their profile to a whole new level, they don’t seem to have had to sacrifice one iota of their intensity or integrity – or their core identity – in order to get there.

AN NCS PREMIERE: PLAGUEFEVER — “CAGE OF GODS”

Premieres No Responses »

Sep 132021

A month ago we came across the title track to a debut record named Crude Implements by the Virginia “black ‘n’ roll” band Plaguefever, and we wasted no time blaring words about it, describing it as “a song that begins as a lurching, moaning death metal monstrosity and segues into a diabolical carnival of sinister swirling fretwork, scalding blackened howls, and skull-busting stomps. A fantastic debut by these Virginians….”

Having had our attention seized by that first excerpt from the album, we were thrilled by the chance to present a second track in advance of its digital release on October 14th and its limited vinyl release on October 29th via Elvte Kvlt Recvrds. This new song, “Cage Of Gods“, is more than twice as long as the title track. If “Crude Implements” was the band swiftly seizing you by the neck with primeval talons, “Cage of Gods” is the raptor spreading its wings and carrying you away to your demise. Continue reading »

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