AN NCS INTERVIEW: RUADH

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jul 202021
 

 

(This is an interview conducted by Comrade Aleks with the man behind the Scottish Celtic/atmospheric black metal band Ruadh, whose latest album Eternal was released earlier this month by Northern Silence Productions.)

If you want to ask someone about the modern black metal scene, I’m the last person you should approach, as I never was a huge fan of shrieks, blast beats, goats, etc. It’s too fast most of the time, and I don’t know how you guys listen to it. But there are bands who attract even my attention with a twist of their ideology or even their music.

Ruadh caught me with the cover art for its third full-length album Eternal, released by Northern Silence on the 9th of July. Joan Llopis Doménech’s painting drew me to Tom Perrett’s music, and look – now I dig both of his first two albums Sovereign (2019) and The Rock of the Clyde (2020) too. That’s a true evidence of art’s magic power! Isn’t it?

If you were searching for new Scottish atmospheric black metal, then you have it, and Tom Perrett has a few things to tell. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WOMAN IS THE EARTH — “BREATH OF A DYING STAR”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 192021
 

 

Five years have passed since Woman Is the Earth‘s last album, Torch of Our Final Night. It’s possible that some of you are thus new to this South Dakota group. If you are, Andy Synn‘s SYNN REPORT on the band wouldn’t be a bad way to get caught up, since it includes reviews and streams not only of that last album but also the three which preceded it. In that extensive essay he summed up their music as a special “blend of grim grandeur and metallic majesty”, “a brand of Black Metal that’s as heavy in atmosphere as it is in aggression, with songs that meld writhing riffage and rolling drums with passages of acoustic contemplation and ambient meditation, all without falling prey to the more generic tropes and clichés of the over-saturated ‘Post Black Metal’ scene”.

And now five years later we are about to receive a new album, which should be regarded as a signal event of this half-finished year. Entitled Dust of Forever, it will be released by the distinctive Init Records on August 20th, and is a timely reunion of these two musical forces since this year marks the label’s 20th anniversary.

Not long ago Invisible Oranges premiered the new album’s first single, “Spiritual Rot“, and today it’s our great pleasure to present the second one, “Breath of A Dying Star“, which happens to be the track that immediately precedes “Spiritual Rot”. Happily, we have a Bandcamp stream that allows you to hear them back-to-back. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): KROSSFYRE — “RITES OF EXTERMINATION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 192021
 

 

What we have for you today is the complete premiere stream of one of the most exhilarating and explosive albums of the year so far. Anyone who’s heard this Barcelona band’s 2017 debut EP Burning Torches won’t be shocked to hear that, but even devoted fans of that EP are going to have their eyes opened wider and their jaws dropped lower by what Krossfyre have achieved on the rip-roaring Rites of Extermination.

Once again, the band have stewed together a host of metal styles in a boiling cauldron, with black metal, thrash, and death metal being the most prominent. Benefitting from a more clear and cutting production, the music creates blowtorch heat and black powder explosiveness, whirling-dervish wildness and feral savagery, hellish grandeur and dire melancholy — and all of these experiences, save perhaps the last of them, simultaneously radiate an atmosphere of unchained devilry, of a coven of witches and warlocks spinning and levitating in the throes of diabolical possession. Continue reading »

KING WOMAN: “CELESTIAL BLUES”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Jul 192021
 

 

(This is Wil Cifer‘s review of the new album by San Francisco-based King Woman, which will be released on July 30 by Relapse Records.)

Unlike the interviews of the average metal band Kristina Esfandiari does not say this album is going in a much heavier direction than our first one, she just does it. The band’s first full-length, Created in the Image of Suffering, was heavy only by the sheer magnitude of melancholy churned from the sludgey blues it summoned. This new album, Celestial Blues, not only bears a greater emotional weight but carries a more metallic malice.

Sure many of the riffs are depressing at times, which I of course love since darkness and sonic heaviness are what I seek out in music. They lure you in with the introspective title track, teasing a few punchy dynamics. Then slowly the aggression begins to leak from the cracks of the songs. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY (PART 2): INSOMNIUM, FIRST FRAGMENT, COGNITIVE, WORMWOOD, DROTT, DESALMADO, KEHLVIN, AETHEREVM, HAMMERHEDD

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 172021
 

 

This may be the only NCS post of the weekend, and even this one is hurried. I have a work meeting this morning. There’s also a celebration planned for tonight that I have to prepare for. What the hell kind of party requires hours of preparation? One that involves speech-making. But it’s still a party, and has all the earmarks of one that’s going to keep me up past midnight, which means a very late awakening on Sunday and some unpredictable degree of mental incapacitation, which is why there may not be a SHADES OF BLACK column tomorrow.

As for today’s metal roundup: I posted a big one yesterday exclusively devoted to new songs with videos, but big as it was it still didn’t exhaust all the good new tracks that surfaced over the last week. And of course it didn’t include the usual Friday flood of new song reveals. A few of my NCS comrades made sure I didn’t overlook what that Friday flood flung up on the beach, and I’ve included a few of their suggestions as well as a few of my own picks that I left out of that video-only roundup yesterday. Coincidentally all the songs included here also came with videos, hence the title of this post.

What’s missing today, for the most part, is my own commentary. I’ll give you a minute to dab the tears from your eyes… and then on we go…. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GRAVESLAVE — “NO CENTER”

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Jul 162021
 

 

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

That opening stanza from Yeats‘ famous poem The Second Coming has sprung to this writer’s mind more than once over the last year, and came to mind again in thinking about the title of Graveslave‘s new album — No Center — and its title track, which we’re premiering today. But apart from what’s been happening all around us, the times have also had a way of hollowing people out, and it’s that aspect of existence that seems to be the song’s true focus. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FETID ZOMBIE — “BREATH OF THANATOS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 162021
 

 

Almost five years have passed since Epicedia, the last album by Mark Riddick’s Fetid Zombie. That long stretch of time didn’t represent a hiatus, because Fetid Zombie continued releasing splits and EPs every year, but the time has finally come for a new full-length. Bearing the title Transmutations, it’s calendared for release by Transcending Obscurity Records on July 30.

Long before this new album it was evident that Riddick’s songwriting wasn’t going to stagnate with the passage of time. Instead, it has become increasingly exploratory and inventive, and those tendencies are in full bloom on the new album. While it may be true that classic death metal heaviness and ferocity are still at the core of the music, it wouldn’t be wrong to call Transmutations a progressive death metal thrill-ride.

As proof of that we’re presenting today “Breath of Thanatos“, an amazing song that’s a genuine kaleidoscope of sound, as elaborate and enthralling as it is punishing and frightening. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: BENIGHTED, BEYOND GRACE, THE BREATHING PROCESS, BURN IN HELL, CHOKE, DDENT, DEVIANT PROCESS, GHOROT, PREY FOR NOTHING

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jul 162021
 

 

As you can see, I had time enough yesterday to make my way through a lot of music that surfaced over the last week or so, and found a lot to like — even more than you’ll see here, because I decided to devote this round-up exclusively to songs with videos and leave the others for another time. The visual approaches are quite wide-ranging and so is the music. I decided to set them out in alphabetical order by band name, and that coincidentally turned out to make for an interesting sonic sequence.

Get popcorn, or whatever else you like to chew on while glued to a screen, and perhaps a preferred intoxicant, then sit back and get ruined or rapt or both.

BENIGHTED (France)

Benighted teamed up with Metal Injection for the premiere of a lyric video for a new digital single, “A Personified Evil,” which includes guest vocals by Francesco Paoli from Fleshgod Apocalypse. As if the song weren’t slaughtering enough without him. Continue reading »

MOANHAND – PRESENT SERPENT

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 152021
 

(Andy Synn travels to Russia once more and returns with one of his favourite albums of the year)

I know I’ve said it before, but it probably needs reiterating – June was so packed with releases that I feel like it’s going to take me all of July just to catch up with everything I/we missed.

Of course, that means that I’ll have to spend August catching up on July, and September catching up on August, so… maybe some hard decisions are going to have to be made regarding what does and what doesn’t get written about just so I don’t fall even further behind.

But there was absolutely zero chance that I wasn’t going to write about this one, as Present Serpent – the debut album from one-man “Blackened Dream Sludge” outfit Moanhand (aka Moscow-based multi-instrumentalist Roman Filatov) – has swiftly become, for me at least, one of the defining albums of 2021.

Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANGUISH — “HEREIN I BURN”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 152021
 

 

On August 4, 2021, Sun & Moon Records will release a new album by the “Necro Doom” band Anguish from Uppsala, Sweden. Entitled Doomkvädet, the album adds to a discography that includes a few shorter releases and the previous full-lengths Through the Archdemon’s Head (2012), Mountain (2014), and Magna est vis Siugnah (2018).

To help introduce the new album, today we’re presenting a lyric video for a frightening, soul-suffocating track named “Herein I Burn“, one that brings into play ingredients of traditional occult doom, but merge them with elements of death metal and other sonic elements that help create a truly unearthly and terrifying atmosphere. Continue reading »

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