AN NCS PREMIERE: MAJESTIC DOWNFALL — “A DYING CROWN”

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Apr 232021
 

 

A persistent favorite of this site, the Mexican doom-death band Majestic Downfall have already provided abundant proof of their formidable talents, having erected, through five albums and a pair of splits, an imposing sonic edifice that’s as magnificent as it is heart-rending. And now they’re approaching the May 21 release date of their sixth full-length, Aorta, which will be released by the new but rapidly growing label Personal Records — and it reveals the band at the pinnacle of their soul-shaking power.

Written and recorded during the pandemic, Aorta consists of four songs that collectively span 70 minutes, and those songs are expansive in ways that transcend mere length, ranging in their sensations (to borrow the words of the PR material) “from suffocating to vibrating, damning to liberating, utterly devastated to strangely hopeful – but always crushing, and devastatingly so”.

As further evidence of the truth of those words, today we premiere an Aorta song named “A Dying Crown“. Continue reading »

HIDEOUS DIVINITY: “LV-426”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 232021
 

 

(DGR tends to move in fits and starts with his NCS writing, and this week he’s had a fit, with this being the third of his posts for us in almost as many days. Today’s subject is the new EP by NCS favorites Hideous Divinity, which is being ejected today (like a blooming facehugger) by Everlasting Spew Records and Century Media Records.)

Hideous Divinity‘s chosen subject matter of different films to frame their overwhelmingly hostile take on brutal death metal has proven fruitful for them over the years. The recent Cronenberg deep-dives have given them much to work from as they take their chosen genre and morph and contort it to fit their musical equivalent of a bulldozer being launched downhill in a mudslide into a suburb. Often stretched into full-albums, the film nods have been blatant, but LV-426 represents the biggest and most upfront statement of subject matter to date.

It’s already struck a chord around here, given the NCS crew’s fondness for the Alien moves to begin with, and so the group’s decision to tackle a more focused subject over the course of an EP was one we were guaranteed to be looking into. LV-426 consists of two original songs and one out-of-left-field yet surprisingly pragmatic cover song for a total of sixteen minutes of blindingly fast music. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: DÖDSRIT, ANGSTSKRÍG, YOUR FAULT, GHOSTBOUND, UNENDLICH, HAGEL, GOATBLOOD

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 222021
 

 

If extreme metal were a big map pinned to a wall and you got a running start and hurled the contents of a bucket of paint at it, the scattered blots would give you something like the following collection of songs and videos — though one of the splashes lands off the map altogether (I put that one dead center in this playlist, surrounded by everything else).

DÖDSRIT (Netherlands/Sweden)

I’m leading off with “Shallow Graves“, because it so thoroughly swept me off my feet right from the start, thanks to the thrill of its opening riff, the pulse-pounding impact of the racing drums, and the grandeur of the panoramic cascades. The song changes, moving through a variety of rhythms and tempos as well as variations in the riffing that alters the moods, though the vocals are blisteringly intense at all times. Continue reading »

AGELESS OBLIVION – SUSPENDED BETWEEN EARTH AND SKY

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Apr 222021
 

(The long-awaited new album from Ageless Oblivion comes out next week on Apocalyptic Witchcraft Recordings, and Andy Synn wants you to know all about it, and why you should buy it)

It’s a common, and widely accepted, truism that you should never meet your heroes, because chances are they’ll only disappoint you.

The same could, and perhaps should, be said about listening to the long-awaited follow-up to one of your favourite albums, an album which has become accepted by many to be a modern-day classic.

After all, there’s simply no way it could live up to or even come close to satisfying the sheer weight of expectations surrounding it.

…or could it?

Continue reading »

STRANGE TRIPS (PART 2): GHOSTS OF ATLANTIS (“3.6.2.4”) AND TIDES OF KHARON (“TITANOMACHY”)

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  2 Responses »
Apr 222021
 

 

(DGR has been spending his listening time with some strange musical creatures and has offered his thoughts about them in a two-part collection of reviews, of which this is the second. Go here to check out Part 1.)

GHOSTS OF ATLANTIS: 3.6.2.4

At this point in my metal fandom I think its safe to admit that there will always be room in my heart for something a little more theatrical when it comes to music. I’m a sucker for things appearing larger than life, buried in bombast, and suffocated by symphonics. If you’re incredibly ambitious and it seems like you may be swinging for the fences on even your first release and coming off just a little bit campier than expected, then you’ll probably have someone who enjoys what you’ve got right here.

Of course all those things don’t necessarily have to apply, so they can be larger than life without having the veneer of a B-grade horror movie, but sometimes the stars align just so that I can’t help but be attracted to it. Like I said, a larger-than-life spectacle can often be just as interesting for me in the world of the extreme, which is how I landed at the debut album from Ghosts of Atlantis. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ALTARAGE — “SUCCUMB”

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Apr 222021
 

 

In 2015, which seems like a geologic epoch ago at this point, we came across a two-song debut demo by Altarage from the Spanish Basque Country and summed it up as “primitive, poisonous, electrifying music from a band that’s now squarely on my radar screen for the future”. They stayed squarely on our radar screen over the course of three subsequent albums, even though they eventually left it in sharp shards of wreckage.

We characterized 2016’s Nihl as “a monster of an album… that will melt your insides”, combining “sheer malignant intensity” and “catastrophic dirges” capable of “dragging your staggering body down into an abyss of despair”. Then came 2017’s Endingent, which we described as “dealing in a brand of pitch-black sonic horror” (“horrifically dense and devastating”), creating an atmosphere “so thick and choking that this album isn’t recommended for anyone who suffers from even a hint of claustrophobia”.

Altarage followed that with 2019’s The Approaching Roar, which we found even more “grim and gruesome” — “one of those records that hits you like a veritable force of nature, and leaves you with no other option except to kick and struggle as hard as you can to keep your head above the water”.

And now comes Succumb, the new Altarage album that Season of Mist has authorized us to put before you in full, the day before its April 23 release. What should you expect? Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: HADIT — “THE QUEST FOR HEARTS AND CONQUEST OF TIME”

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Apr 212021
 

 

We’ve all had the experience of being misled by PR descriptions of forthcoming metallic extremity, when the night-blooming rhetoric proves to be an exaggeration or a calculated inaccuracy. And so we take such linguistic previews with a grain of salt, even when they generate a reflexive eagerness to listen.

In the case of the new album by the Italian death metal band Hadit (from Varese), the advance press variously portrays the music as “an obfuscating spell of dark cosmological death metal destruction”, “occult ritualistic divinations of total aural chaos”, “sonically annihilating and aesthetically majestic”, “impenetrable and supernatural”, and “hallucinations shrouded in mysticism and esotericism”.

How sad it would be if such evocative and enticing written flourishes weren’t well-founded! Even though Hadit’s last release, the 2015 EP Introspective Contemplation of the Microcosmus, already provided a solid foundation for those descriptions, that was six years ago after all. The question is whether their debut full-length, With Joy and Ardour Through the Incommensurable Path, lives up to the advance billing.

Well, you know where we’re going with this: The answer is Hell Yes It Does. The fact that it’s being jointly released (on May 7th) by such tasteful labels as Caligari Records, Sentient Ruin, and Terror From Hell Records is evidence of that, and so is the song we’re premiering today: “The Quest for Hearts and Conquest of Time“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SNĚŤ — “FOLIVOR”

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Apr 212021
 

 

The Czech death metal band Sněť released a promising demo in 2019 (which we reviewed and streamed here.) and they had planned to follow that with an EP, but their drummer’s broken leg and a global pandemic interfered with those plans. In this case, however, there was a silver lining to the cloud, because the band used the time to write and eventually record more songs, enough to fill out a compact debut album. Entitled Mokvání V Okovech, it’s now set for release on May 14th via Blood Harvest Records on CD and vinyl LP formats, with a cassette version handled by Lycanthropic Chants in Europe and Headsplit Records in the US.

Two arresting album tracks have premiered so far, and today we bring you a third one, accompanied by a DIY video that gives you a chance to see the band in action. This song is “Folivor“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CICADA THE BURROWER — “CORPSEFLOWER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 202021
 

 

Sometime in the middle of next month billions of so-called Brood X cicadas will emerge from the earth for the first time in 17 years, blanketing areas of the eastern and midwestern United States and lending their engine-revving cacophonies to the sounds of daily life. Theories abound as to why these periodic cicadas emerge during these synchronized moments separated by so many years, but no one really knows. It’s an evolutionary mystery.

But regardless of the reason, it’s fitting that on the eve of this great emergence Cicada the Burrower will be releasing an album that in itself represents the emergence of something new — the result of years of stylistic experimentation by the band’s sole creator Cameron Davis. It certainly represents a departure for us, because although the songs on Corpseflower incorporate recognizable metal ingredients, the sounds and styles extend well beyond conventional metal boundaries, resulting in an unusual and unusually captivating collage of contrasts. Continue reading »

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