LAVA: “SACRIFICIAL RITUAL OF PRIMORDIAL FIRE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jul 142021
 

 

(Today we have a guest review by Lonegoat from the Necroclassical project Goatcraft and the host of the podcast Necropolis, and he’s spreading the word about the debut album by the Ukrainian band LAVA.)

Cut from a similar cloth as Panzerfaust, Sacrificial Ritual of Primordial Fire, the debut album from the Ukrainian band LAVA, centers upon its design a powerful exterior. A blend of modern death metal and black metal susceptibilities, namely the worship of intense chord tension, LAVA presents itself as a formidable new project worth paying attention to.

Although this kind of black/death hybrid music generally focuses on its textural components, LAVA allow the chord tension to wane enough so that fierce riffs have room to emerge, at times with flashes of high melodicism. Songs have distinctive flow, permitting bleak themes to materialize and develop in relentless fashion. Venerableness is on display with the addition of angular bass tintinnabulations, which in turn grant the music surprising depth. Continue reading »

A TRIPTYCH OF TECHNICAL TALENT – ALUSTRIUM / COGNITIVE / OPHIDIAN I

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 132021
 

(Andy Synn goes fishing in the Tech Death scene and comes back with a hell of a catch)

If there’s one common theme which unites these three albums – you know, apart from the fact that they’re all brand new additions to the ever-expanding Tech Death canon – it’s that each of them finds the band in question working hard, struggling some might say (though certainly not in vain), to carve out a space, a niche, an identity, for themselves in an already saturated scene.

Let’s face it, there’s no shortage of super-speed shredmasters out there all vying to be the fastest, the most complex, the most ridiculous, and this year alone has already delivered a bumper crop of both killer and filler releases running the gamut from the heaviest to the most histrionic (and everything in between).

One thing that I think we can all agree on though – and which, to a greater or lesser extent, all of today’s selections clearly demonstrate – is that technical talent is nothing without the songwriting skill to match it, because once the initial dopamine rush of being bombarded with a thousand notes a second wears off it’s the structural hooks, the infectious melodies, the subtle repetitions, that trigger the brain’s innate pattern recognition algorithms and ensure that what you’ve just heard gets filed away in your long-term memory, rather than just flying in one ear and out the other.

So let’s see if this particular trio have what it takes to make a lasting impression, shall we?

Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DUNGEON SERPENT — “WORLD OF SORROWS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 132021
 

 

Who doesn’t love a breathtaking surprise? The sight of meteor showers blazing at night, a sudden murmuration of starlings overhead, the penetration of sun rays through heavy clouds… such things create a sense of wonder. Other surprises are more frightening and destructive — earthquakes, flash floods, gunfire going off in crowded gatherings, bombs raining on villages.

Such thoughts have come to mind in listening to World of Sorrows, the debut album of the death metal band Dungeon Serpent from Vancouver, British Columbia. It comes out of left field, preceded only by a two-track 2020 demo (though the demo itself was a very promising surprise). And like those other contrasting surprises mentioned above, it both inspires a sense of wonder and also inflicts breathtaking levels of sonic obliteration. The music is morbid, mauling, and merciless, but also home to both emotionally evocative melodies and the kind of pyrotechnic guitar mastery that drops jaws.

And there’s an especially big surprise at the end.

Little wonder that we leaped at the chance to present a full stream of the album today in advance of its July 16 release by Nameless Grave Records. Continue reading »

SHADES OF SPEED: DUNGEON STEEL, WRAITH, BONEHUNTER, PHANTOM FIRE, SCHIZOPHRENIA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 132021
 


Bonehunter

 

(Our Norwegian friend and long-standing NCS supporter eiterorm steps up today with a round-up of new music, and we’ll let him give his own explanation of it. [And yes, we were trying to trick him, and yes, it worked.])

“Shades of… wait, what? That’s not a thing! And why is this black metal dude sending speed metal all of a sudden?”

That is how I started my latest e-mail to Islander, which contained a few recommendations about new music. I send him such e-mails from time to time, but I haven’t done so in a little while, because lately I’ve had a bit of a music backlog. So by the time I’ve gotten to the news, they have already been posted on the blog, or they’re no longer “news”. And this blog seems to cover most of what I’d recommend even if I don’t send tips as quickly as usual. It’s almost as if I’m not the only person following great labels like World Terror Committee, Iron Bonehead, Ván, etc…

This time, however, Islander wanted to post my message as a guest post on the blog, for some reason. (I think he’s trying to trick me into writing more posts for the blog.) The e-mail I sent him didn’t quite suffice as a blog post, though, so I decided to add a few more words to what was mostly a list of links to recommended music.

Now, to answer that opening question: I’ve been listening to a lot of speed metal lately, which is why this post is all about the speedy stuff. It’s not at all unlike me to listen to that kind of music, but not so much that it outweighs everything else. And coincidentally, some bits of speed metal news surfaced lately, so I thought I’d round them up here. Well, not all of it is news at this point, but none of it has been featured on the blog, so you’re getting it anyway. Let’s go through them in order of newsiness: Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SEVERED BOY — “TRAGIC ENCOUNTERS”

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Jul 122021
 

 

You might wonder how the Massachusetts duo Severed Boy chose their name after the quarantine gave birth to their collaboration. One of the two, Nicholas Wolf (the other is his Lunglust bandmate Reid Calkin), explains the choice:

“When I was writing the songs and starting to think about what the lyrical content would be, I wanted to focus on how people could be capable of acting out such horrible acts on each other – whether it’s not caring, or in this case, NOT KNOWING. There’s a sample from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein in our drone track ‘Agony and Despair’. I started to fixate on the subject not having a conscience like the monster, or being able to just turn off the conscience. The name SEVERED BOY is the idea that someone could sever the actions of their mind from the actions of their body, and the consequences of doing so.”

Those consequences, as explored on the band’s debut EP Tragic Encounters, are among the absolute worst acts committed by the human mind and body. How the band address such abominations in their music is a question answered by our complete EP stream today, leading up to the record’s July 15 release by Caligari Records. Continue reading »

DEATH METAL REVIEW ROUND-UP: IN ASYMMETRY, MVLTIFISSION, CATHEXIS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 122021
 

 

(In this article DGR combines shorter than usual reviews of three records released during the first half of the year — by In Assymetry (international), Mvltifission (China), and Cathexis (U.S.).)

It’s not too often that I’ll try my hand at the “Short but Sweet” style of reviewing, but my travels around the world of heavy metal have proven quite fruitful, so much so that it would be criminal to have some of these releases locked away while I wait for the brain to fully congeal some sort of deep-dive review on them.

Also, in some cases albums can be exactly what is presented on the cover. You know what you’re in for staring at the cover art, and from there it’s just a choice of how far you want to be punched into the side of a cliff. In this case, there’s a near ceaseless brutality flavoring the international travels, starting with a massive union of multiple countries before landing in China for an unexpected visit, and then finally arriving somewhat closer to home with one hell of a tongue twister in the opening line.

Will this be a new norm? Probably not, but there’s an excellent chance here to dispense with the intellectual bullshit – briefly – and just enjoy the death of every instrument present here, because every band within this review collection absolutely destroy on that front. Continue reading »

AT THE GATES: “THE NIGHTMARE OF BEING”

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Jul 122021
 

 

(We present TheMadIsraeli‘s review of the seventh studio album by At the Gates, released earlier this month by Century Media.)

Watching how your favorite musical artists deal with the inevitability of getting older, slower, and weaker is one of the more fascinating aspects of this media consumption thing we all do. That’s especially true of metal, which is a genre that’s often predicated on physical ability. It’s all technicality and endurance, coupled with demands on the performers to be emotionally resonant, to still maintain that human element that makes music touch our souls and make life just that little bit better.

It’s commonplace for a lot of long-running bands to slow down, dial back the technical aspects of their music a bit and try to compensate for their age in other ways. Sometime they try to make their songwriting better, and to try less mechanically demanding ideas. Sure, here and there they can still write a barnburner that’s on a crash course with a brick wall at two hundred miles per hour, but it’s tough to play a whole album of that anymore. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MÜTTERLEIN, 0-NUN, ELLES VĀRTI, CRUCIFIXION BELL, WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, WORMWITCH, NYTT LAND

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Jul 112021
 

 

Hate to say it, but this week’s column is in some respects going to be linguistically abbreviated, if not musically. The day job has been a bear this weekend, and on top of that I’m getting together via Zoom in a couple hours with Andy Synn and DGR to record “voice breaks” for our next session as Gimme Metal DJs on July 30 (at noon PDT, 3:00pm EDT, 9:00pm CET). I’m not confident in my ability to ad lib about the music we’ve picked, so I need to make some notes to myself, e.g., “don’t fuck this up!” We’ve picked a lot of good stuff for our two-hour show, so I hope you’ll tune in.

Anyway, my writing eventually peters out today (you’ll see what I’ve done to short-cut things as you move through this collection), but that’s not a sign of lack of enthusiasm or appreciation for the music itself. I do believe it’s all still worth your time.

MÜTTERLEIN (France)

About three weeks ago in one of these columns I highlighted the release of a giant 24-track sampler by Les Acteurs de L’Ombre Productions. At that time I picked out tracks from three French black metal bands to feature, because they were all from forthcoming albums. I also mentioned that the sampler included tracks from a new split by Limbes (formerly known as Blurr Thrower) and Mütterlein — though I hadn’t yet listened to them. Now I have, and I want to draw special attention to Mütterlein’s track here, in part because it creates such great anticipation for a new Mütterlein album headed our way via Debemur Morti Productions. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GROZA, APATHY NOIR, EYES OF PERDITION, THUMOS, KAAMOS WARRIORS, KASCK

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 102021
 


Groza

It was one of those weeks when my day job jackhammered me into submission. I fell far behind even in saving links to new songs and videos I might want to check out, and the hundreds of emails we receive every day went mostly un-read. And man, what a week to fall behind in. As people used to say 5 or 10 years ago, there was a metric shit-ton of new releases and song or video premieres.

I did obsessively spend a chunk of time this morning just making lists of links, and felt overwhelmed at the end of that exercise. If I had total control over my life I’d spend most of the rest of the day plowing through all those links and compiling round-ups, or at least one gigantic one. But my day-job project isn’t finished, and I’ve got to turn back to it, even on a fucking weekend. So I’ve just dipped my toe in the ocean, and this is what dripped off of it.

GROZA (Germany)

To begin, I chose a video for “Elegance of Irony“, a song off a new album named The Redemptive End by these Bavarian black metallers. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: AGELESS OBLIVION

 WAXING LYRICAL  No Responses »
Jul 102021
 

Ageless Oblivion - photo by Adam Pegg

(Andy Synn brings us another episode in his series about lyrics in Metal, and today the responses come from Stephen Jones, vocalist and lyricist of the UK Death Metal band Ageless Oblivion, whose latest album is out now via Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings)

Anyone who knows me… hell, anyone who’s been reading NCS for any significant amount of time… will be able to tell you how much I love the work of Progressive/Post-Death Metal maestros Ageless Oblivion.

In particular, I’ve gone on record, multiple times, about how highly I rate their second album, Penthos, whose signature blend of mechanical precision, organic biorhythms, and claustrophobic atmosphere is a big part of what makes it, in my opinion at least, one of the best (and most underrated) albums of the last decade.

So it shouldn’t really surprise anyone, especially in light of the rave review I gave their recent “comeback” album, Suspended Between Earth and Sky, that I was eager to bring the band onboard for an edition of Waxing Lyrical, if only to satisfy my own curiosity about what it is that influences, informs, and drives this particular aspect of their sound.

Thankfully they were extremely amenable to my overtures, and sent forth their vocalist Stephen Jones (who has performed on all three of the band’s albums thus far) to offer up some insight on the group’s past, present and future, as seen through the prism of their lyrics.

So, without further ado… Continue reading »

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