DGR’S GRAND YEAR END ARCHIVE OF EVERYTHING HE ENJOYED IN 2020: THE YEAR THAT WAS A DECADE TOO LONG (PART 4)

 LISTMANIA 2020  2 Responses »
Dec 252020
 

 

(Today we arrive at Part 4 of the 5-part countdown for DGR’s 2020 year-end list, with the albums he ranked 20-11.)

So, here’s the thing about day four of my personal list (not the site’s list, of which there’s no such thing): This is one of those days where there are some gigantic albums. Not big in brand name, but big in terms of musical stature. This was a year where I was drawn to the ambition of certain groups. If they were making music that seemed much further-reaching than their lineup would suggest, then I was probably there with bells on for a bit.

I think thematically in this installment you have some of the most cerebral and refined acts that I listened to this year. I could also imagine that for a lot of you this segment of my list might resemble a good chunk of your own top tens. I understand that completely because these are albums I was absolutely impressed by, ones I felt proud to have heard and ones I often had to prepare to listen to. There are multiple hour-plus releases in this section, and if you like your ‘variations on a theme’ style of death metal, then except for a couple of oddballs this section of the list makes a grand tour through those styles.

We do go to warp speed for a bit, and I actually had a few black metal releases land with me here, which was a pleasant surprise given how most of the time I feel like I include two or three total in my year-end lists. Number eleven – I think – will feel like a given to a lot of people, but I really do think they earned it.

As I have every day during the rollout of this personal archive, I highly recommend you take the time and give all of these a listen if you get the chance. I’m sure you’ll find something to love here. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2020: A YEAR-END LIST FROM PROFESSOR D. GROVER THE XIIITH (PART I)

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Dec 232020
 

 

(After a hiatus, we welcome back our old friend Professor D. Grover the XIIIth (founder of The Number of the Blog, which helped spawn NCS so many years ago), who again brings us his year-end lists of favorite releases, both metal and not. Today the focus is EPs and singles, and tomorrow it’s albums.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. It’s been a bit since I’ve done a year-end list, but to be fair 2020 has not been your average year. Now, at this particular moment while I’m writing this introduction, I have not actually decided on my album of the year, which is a rarity for me. Ordinarily there is an album that, at some point during the year, asserts itself as the favorite and maintains that position for the remainder of the year, but in the true spirit of 2020, there hasn’t been a specific release that has distanced itself from the pack.

Now, that’s not to say that there aren’t any releases worthy of the top spot; honestly, there are a number of albums in the list to come that have made a case for number one at various points throughout the year. I assume that by the time I finish this list, I will have decided on one. But we’ll see. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DIRA MORTIS — “ANCIENT BREATH OF FORGOTTEN MISANTHROPY”

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Dec 232020
 


photos by Marcin Studzinski

 

Whoever scheduled the release of Dira Mortis‘ new album on Christmas Day 2020 had a wicked sense of humor. The album, whose title is Ancient Breath Of Forgotten Misanthropy, will be discharged that day by Selfmadegod Records. It has many interconnected themes, but one of them is the use of religion by powerful forces to dominate, intimidate, and divide the masses, and in their hypocrisy to use it as a cover for evil. Lyrically, the album also calls for resistance, lest we be led deeper into an abyss of misanthropy in which humanity continues to be a plague of hate unto itself. Merry Christmas.

On the other hand, in many respects this new album is a great way for many of us (and we mean died-in-the-wool metalheads for whom Christmas has no religious significance) to celebrate the day, particularly this year, when gatherings of friends and family are downright dangerous (or outright prohibited) and when the year as a whole seems like such a godforsaken mess, and offers such powerful proof that people have become dangerously alienated from each other in more ways than simply physical distance.

What the album provides, in addition to particularly relevant lyrical themes, is the work of a veteran band whose talents give death-metal-heads other reasons to rejoice. Continue reading »

DGR’S GRAND YEAR END ARCHIVE OF EVERYTHING HE ENJOYED IN 2020: THE YEAR THAT WAS A DECADE TOO LONG (PART 3)

 LISTMANIA 2020  No Responses »
Dec 232020
 

 

(We’ve now reached Part 3 of the 5-part countdown for DGR’s 2020 year-end list, with the albums he ranked 30-21.)

After the blistering as hell way I sent out the previous edition of this, I felt that a change of musical pace would be nice. It’s right about at this specific grouping that I think my year-end list can be considered a little more formalized. I tend to refer to everything in the higher numbers as being very fluid and kind of anarchic with rankings popping in and out of existence at random. That’s because I enjoy all of those releases, but it isn’t until you hit the lower numbers that we really land on the albums I was listening to constantly.

Hilarious, given that today marks the first appearance – of a handful – of what I refer to as “Abrasive block”, which is the collection of albums that when all grouped together will likely sand your face down to a very smooth surface by the time you’re done listening to them. On top of that, I found room for some real hopeless and melancholy-filled doom, as well as a little black metal and some impressively tight death metal acts.

I even close things out with one of the few releases I genuinely considered ‘fun’ this year, if only to break up the absolute hammering you’re going to absorb by the time you reach twenty-four through twenty-two. You’ll even catch an appearance by albums that made Andy’s “Great” list so I can pretend to be some sort of refined critic instead of my usual surfing the web lookng for a decent big red honking nose that’ll fit my head.

We’ve only got a few days left and, reliably, things will only get nuttier and the writing more navel-gazy from here on out. Continue reading »

CORRUPT MORAL ALTAR: “PATIENTLY WAITING FOR WONDERFUL THINGS”

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Dec 222020
 

 

(We welcome NCS guest contributor James Parry-Smith , who brings us his review of the new album by Corrupt Moral Altar, which was released in late November by APF Records.)

In a year as irreversibly horrendous as 2020 has been for most of us, a short, sharp injection of white-hot anger and riff-heavy grindcore is exactly what is needed to spruce up the terrible day you may very well be having. Liverpudlian group Corrupt Moral Altar have previous experience in the aforementioned areas, with a pair of EPs and full-lengths to their name over the past decade that have established them as one of the UK’s preeminent grind bands and, with a penchant for delving blithely into sludge metal realms and the battering distortion that characterises such a sound, one of the most interesting to boot.

With 2014’s Mechanical Tides and 2017’s Eunoia both allowing space for the band to stray off the beaten, grinding track and fully explore their collective creative vision, their EPs are by no means one-dimensional in comparison – something that is as clear on latest release Patiently Waiting for Wonderful Things as it has ever been. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SEPULCROS — “HECATOMBE”

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Dec 222020
 

 

Yet another instantly recognizable painting by Mariusz Lewandowski has appeared on the cover of a metal album, this time the debut full-length by the Portuguese band Sepulcros. But as imposing and chilling as the painting is, it only hints at the immense, terrifying power and world-ending majesty of the intensely atmospheric music that Sepulcros have created within Vazio.

Harnessing the soul-shaking forces of death and doom metal, and adding the ferocity of black metal, Sepulcros have created an experience that makes a deep impression, though one that most definitely is not for the faint of heart.

Vazio is set for release by Transcending Obscurity Records on March 12th (assuming humankind lasts that long), and as a spine-tingling sign of what it holds in store we are today premiering a video for a ravishing album track named “Hecatombe“. Continue reading »

DGR’s GRAND YEAR END ARCHIVE OF EVERYTHING HE ENJOYED IN 2020: THE YEAR THAT WAS A DECADE TOO LONG (PART 2)

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Dec 222020
 

 

(Like the title says, we’re now at Part 2 of the countdown for DGR’s 2020 year-end list, with albums in the 40-31 positions.)

Day two is where things start to get a little more varied.

Welcome back to the patented DGR analyzes his next ten albums for interesting patterns and weird quirks section of this writeup. We’re still pretty thick in the midst of some grooving death metal here but there’s a couple of one-off appearances that I think hint at some of the grander themes that carved paths throughout the year. You’ll start seeing some really dark atmospherics take over during this phase of the list, and if some of the music here seems to be nihilistic and bleak, well congrats, that’s been the overarching theme for a lot of the year, and for me it just happened to hit a little early. Shit, I don’t think I ever got the chance to recover from last year. Continue reading »

UNSUNG HEROES OF 2020: GROWTH / OBSIDIAN MANTRA / YASHIRA

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Dec 222020
 


Growth

 

(As the year limps to the finish line Andy Synn continues to recommend 2020 albums we haven’t yet covered in detail, bringing us three more reviews today.)

For today’s edition of “Unsung Heroes” we’re looking out towards the edges of the nascent (and slightly controversial) “Post-Death” scene, with three bands who – each in their own way – have taken a sound rooted in the firm foundations of Death Metal and nurtured it, cultivated it, in a much more expansive and progressive direction, cross-breeding it with outside elements and influences in an attempt to produce a new, hybrid-strain of heaviness which is more than just the sum of its varied parts.

Have they been successful? Well that, to an extent, is in the eye of the beholder, but I’d say that each of the three bands featured here shows a lot of promise and potential (in some cases a frankly incredibly amount), to the point where some of them (perhaps even all of them) may one day become future leaders and trailblazers in this slowly evolving sub-scene. Continue reading »

DGR’S GRAND YEAR END ARCHIVE OF EVERYTHING HE ENJOYED IN 2020: THE YEAR THAT WAS A DECADE TOO LONG (PART 1)

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Dec 212020
 

 

(Today we begin counting down NCS staffer DGR’s year-end list, with records “on the bubble” and then numbers 50 – 41.)

Every year I find myself making the same problem for myself. I love doing it, but kicking out these gigantic lists will take a lot out of you and in a year where there wasn’t a lot to be taken, this one truly felt like a work of passion. It took me a bit, but coming to slowly hammer away at this year-end list was something of a comfort. I got to look back at the year as a whole and kick myself in the head multiple times for outright forgetting releases. And I’m not going to lie, the yearly panic attack of ‘oh shit, did that come out in 2019?’ is always good enough to keep me awake for a few hours.

2020 proved to be an interesting year overall and it saw an absolute flood of releases once it became clear that there fucking wasn’t going to be much else going on for music. Cities around the world fucking failed their live venues and have let many close, effectively murdering any sort of live scene and a potential reason to live within those cities’ bounds. At first when we were all hopeful this would blow over in about three to four months, because we were relying on people to ‘do the right thing’ ™, we rescheduled all our shows for fall or early 2021. Boy, that was cute, wasn’t it? Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SCEPTER OF ELIGOS — “REABSORBED”

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Dec 212020
 

 

Denver-based Scepter of Eligos describe their punishing amalgam of death, doom, and psychedelic sludge as “psychedelic metal of death”, and based on the song we’re premiering today from their debut album Inverted Illusions, you can understand why. When you hear it, you can also understand why the press materials for the record make references to the likes of Crowbar, Incantation, The Black Angels, Acid Bath, Celtic Frost, and Grave.

But as this listener did, you might also be tempted to imagine the mind-mutilating “Reabsorbed” as a monstrous hell-beast dotted with weeping sores, stinking of death, staggering across a landscape of skulls — and undergoing spasms that transform it into a high-speed thresher of flesh, all gnashing fangs and ravaging claws. In other words, it’s a nasty, evil, mutating piece of work. Continue reading »

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