PESTILENCE: “EXITIVM”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 092021
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new ninth album by Pestilence, which is out now on Agonia Records.)

Patrick Mameli is a musician in the extreme metal music space I’m often conflicted about.

One one hand, I think he is an absolute genius. What he’s created with Pestilence and continues to do under the Pestilence banner never has been replicated convincingly, and probably cannot be replicated.  He has an unparalled command and mastery, both as a guitarist and as a songwriter of dissonance and chaos.  Pestilence is one of the few bands out there (and the only band that does it the way they do it) who completely shun away from conventional melody while using a jazz bent to create a twisted brand of death metal that I can only say sounds like what it feels like to experience real and severe mental illness and terror.  There is a pathos to Pestilence that is undeniable. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: RISE TO THE SKY — “END MY NIGHT”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 092021
 

 

Rise to the Sky is the vehicle for the music of its sole creator, Chilean multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Sergio González Catalán. Though the project’s earliest releases emerged only in 2019, it has already assembled an extensive discography devoted primarily to atmospheric death/doom metal. The newest album, Per Aspera Ad Astra, is set for release on September 3rd by the Russian label GS Productions, and it’s the second full-length by Rise to the Sky that will see release this year.

But the tragic inspiration for the album is one that should be explained before we reveal the album’s second advance track today: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISKORD — “DIRIGISTE RADIO HIT”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 092021
 

 

Transcending Obscurity Records has already revealed enough music from the mind-boggling new album by the Norwegian death metal band Diskord that perhaps most fans of adventurous metallic extremity are already well aware of what a wild and exhilarating trip it is. Yet perhaps we’ll still catch a few new ears today with our premiere of another astonishing track off the record — the name of which is Degenerations — in advance of its August 3rd release.

Diskord’s intricate and unpredictable music is capable of rapidly twisting and turning your mind so that it resembles a Rubik’s Cube prior to the beginnings of the puzzle’s solution. Everything within your head may feel lined up in the right order when you begin, but then Diskord spins it in reverse, creating a jumble of brilliant colors. In the case of the song we’re presenting today, “Dirigiste Radio Hit“, the music creates overarching moods of madness and ferocity, but how it does this is a source of considerable fascination and continuous thrills. Continue reading »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 092021
 

(Andy Synn offers us a chance to catch up with a quartet of albums you may have overlooked)

Is it just me, or was June an insanely busy period for music?

Honestly, despite doing my best to cover as many new releases as possible, and despite the best efforts of my NCS cohorts to do the same, it feels like we missed out on a lot of records this month.

This, of course, made it pretty difficult to pick just 4 artists/albums for this article, and at one point there was a version of this column that was all Death Metal (including Diabolizer, Noctambulant, and Cathexis, if memory serves) until I realised that maybe, just maybe, that didn’t give the broadest picture of the last 30 days (but you should still check out all three of those bands/albums if you haven’t already).

Don’t worry, there’s still some serious brutality on offer, but I’ve managed to widen the scope a little since then so that today’s article – which features four, count ‘em, four debut albums – should have the potential to appeal to a slightly broader cross-section of our readers than just those who like to have their eardrums perforated by the musical equivalent of a turbo-charged jackhammer.

And, speaking of…

Continue reading »

DIRTY BLACK SUMMER PT. II

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 082021
 

 

(A couple months ago we published (here) a “dirty black summer” playlist compiled and written by Neill Jameson (Krieg, Poison Blood), and now we’re happy that he’s followed that with a second installment of recommendations for your summer listening, presented below.)

Normally for me summer means a change of listening habits to old Swedish death metal, Danzig I-IV, and early Queens of the Stone Age, but this year’s been a little different; seasonal listening hasn’t really come into play for me in the way that it has in years past. I understand there’s a bit of a stigma attached to the idea of seasonal listening anyway but that’s the sort of shit boring people with boring existences have to come up with to shit on people with richer emotional lives. Anyway, if you’ve got a moment here’s another list of things I’m listening to.

You’ll see a batch of Death Kvlt Productions releases in nearly any list I put together these days, which I understand can be a little frustrating if you’re into owning physical releases since the label tends to sell out within minutes only to be flipped to kids who won’t actually listen to the fucking records but post pictures of them incessantly on their social media feeds, almost like a roadmap to letting people know they’re assholes without actually getting to know them, saving everyone a lot of time. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEVOID OF THOUGHT — “SIDEREAL NECROSIS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 082021
 

 

After releasing a pair of demos and a trio of splits, the time has at last arrived for the Italian death metal band Devoid of Thought to present a debut album — and it doesn’t take a crystal ball to predict that it will give this band the kind of rapt attention that the music so richly deserves.

The fact that it’s being jointly released by such connoisseurs of metallic extremity as Everlasting Spew Records and Caligari Records is a dependable sign of the album’s quality, and the mind-blowing songs on Outer World Graves bear out their good judgment.

And speaking of seizing attention, the album’s cover art by View From the Coffin is guaranteed to do that — as will the track we’re premiering today in the lead-up to the release of Outer World Graves on August 27th. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WALD KRYPTA — “POSSESSED BY NOTHINGNESS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 082021
 

 

Wald Krypta are a black metal duo hailing from the U.S. and Canada. To date, they’ve released two demos – Pandemic Winds (2016) and Lost Relic (2019), the former later released on cassette tape by the Eternal Death label – and two albums, 2018’s Nature Enigma and 2019’s Where None Remain, both also released on cassette by Eternal Death. Now they’ve readied a third album entitled Possessed by Nothingness, which will also be released by Eternal Death, on August 6th.

What we have for you today is the premiere stream of the new album’s title track, which seems to perfectly represent the core aspects of Wald Krypta‘s uncompromising musical devotions. Continue reading »

SUMMONER’S CIRCLE: AN ALBUM ANNOUNCEMENT AND TRACK PREMIERE (“CHAOS VECTOR”)

 Metal News, Premieres  1 Response »
Jul 072021
 

 

Today it’s our devilish pleasure to help spread the word that on August 27th the Tennessee sextet Summoner’s Circle will release their third album, Chaos Vector. And to draw further attention to that welcome news, we’re also premiering an extravagant music video for the album’s equally extravagant title track.

The song itself is sonic alchemy, not merely because it creates a frightening atmosphere of dark magic being practiced and dangerous forces being unchained, but also because it blends together different sensations and stylistic ingredients from the realms of black, death, and gothic metal to create an experience that’s greater than the mere sum of its parts. Continue reading »

DEAD AND DRIPPING: “MIASMIC EULOGIES PREDICATING AN ETERNAL NOCTURNE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jul 072021
 

 

(Vonlughlio returns to NCS with a review and recommendation of the second album by the New Jersey brutal death metal band Dead and Dripping, which was released in mid-May of this year.)

It’s been a long time without yours truly doing a small review, mainly due to work commitments and family time in this pandemic-infested world. If you are reading this, I hope you and your loved ones are well.

This time around I have the opportunity to write about the solo BDM project Dead and Dripping from the multi-instrumentalist Evan Daniele. I became aware of this project back in 2017 when they re-released their demo Disillusioned by Excessive Human Consumption, which I believe is back in the Dominican Republic with other CDs I could not take with me when I moved to US.

Last year saw the release of the debut album Profane Verses of Murderous Rhetoric, which we reviewed here at NCS, and that release made it to my list of top 2020 BDM albums. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): OWL CAVE — “BROKEN SPEECH”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 072021
 

 

Prepare yourselves for an extraordinary 43-minute trip, because that’s what you’ll find in Broken Speech, the extravagant debut album by the French band Owl Cave that we’re premiering today in advance of its release later this month by the new French label Time Tombs Productions.

For those who need genre references, this creation is very difficult to pigeonhole in such ways. Over the course of its twisting and turning path, you can pick out ingredients of dissonant and avant-garde black metal, industrial, electronica, and prog, among others.

It incorporates widely varying but relentlessly visceral rhythms and an equally wide and richly textured array of hallucinatory emanations that are both entrancing and unnerving; in those ways it’s both earthbound and completely unearthly. It’s often monumentally heavy, and continuously capable of seizing control of your reptile brain, but equally capable of uncomfortably twisting your mind inside-out or placing it under the power of spells, some of them seductive and some of them harrowing. Continue reading »

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