SHADES OF BLACK (MISCELLANY EDITION): IN VACUO, MOROKH, CONSTANT NAUSEA, AKANTHA, NĀV

 MISCELLANY, SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Sep 202020
 

 

I mentioned in the first Part of today’s column that I overcame the usual brain-freeze brought about by the overwhelming volume of interesting new music by separating the attractions into advance tracks and complete new releases. Today’s earlier post was devoted to advance tracks, and I mentioned that I had an idea for how to handle the new complete releases.

In the early days of NCS I began a recurring series called MISCELLANY, which got up to 78 installments before it died away from neglect. The self-imposed rule for that series was that I would pick bands I’d never heard before and listen to one (or maybe two) songs from something new they’d released, record my immediate impressions, and then leave it to readers to decide whether to explore further. That strategy allowed me to sample from albums and EPs that I didn’t have time to review in full, without knowing in advance how the music would strike me (or you).

And that’s almost the same strategy I’ve used in this post — almost, because some of what you’ll find below came to me via recommendations from people I trust. So it’s not quite the shot-in-the-dark of the old MISCELLANY series.

IN VACUO

To begin I picked “Pavlína Kováříkov“, the lead-off track from this Hungarian band’s just-released third album, Urbain Noir — and man, I love it. The guitar leads have a kind of yowling but spooky and sorcerous sound, and the way in which In Vacuo introduce and then twist the central melody is ingenious. The song as a whole proves to be a twisting (and twisted) experience – heavy and battering, deep and drilling, moody and murmuring, jolting and groaning, thrilling in its maniacally glittering tremolo’d vibrations and blood-curdling in the hostility of its varying vocals. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: KYRIOS, HORNCROWNED, GUIGNOL NOIR, DEVOURER, ODIOSIOR

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Sep 202020
 

 

When I began to think about what to include in this week’s column I had the usual brain-freeze brought about by the immense volume of choices. This week I decided to deal with that by herding all the singles and advance tracks from forthcoming albums into one stockade, and filling another one with full-lengths that have already recently been released.

From the first herd I picked the tracks included below. I have an idea about how to deal with the riot in the second group, all viciously clamoring for attention, but I won’t say what that is in case I’m not able to follow through. Onward!

KYRIOS

I would like to create a sub-genre called Queasy Black Metal, reserved for music that roils your guts like food that’s gone bad, and messes with your mind like a demonically conceived hallucinogen. I would put this first song under that heading. Its squirming dissonance, freakish angularity, and unstable rhythms are intestinally upsetting and mentally disorienting. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: DØDSFERD, AUBE GRISE, ARKHERON THODOL, OVTRENOIR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Sep 192020
 

 

When I woke up this morning I thought there was no way I would be doing something as seemingly inconsequential as listening to music and writing about it. The awful confluence of events in the country this year — the rampant disease, the hundreds of thousands of avoidable deaths, the economic collapse, the vivid reminders that systemic racism still thrives, the burning of immense swaths of Western forest and the immersion of millions in a miasma of toxic smoke — just got worse again because of a single death, one that will give a mentally defective tyrant and his sycophantic enablers the chance to finish the job of tearing the country apart. Can we not get even one tiny fucking break from 2020?

And then I thought, we do get tiny fucking breaks every day. Every good new song is a break, maybe tiny in the grander scheme of things, but if 2020 has taught us anything it’s that hopes for bigger breaks are likely to be dashed without mercy.

So, I listened to some new songs, just a few, but enough to get a bit of a break. Maybe I picked them because they express (and perhaps reinforce) my current dark mood of rage mixed with despair, but I guess that’s often what musical catharsis is all about. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: DYATLOVE — “DIE!KILL!PIG!”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Sep 182020
 

 

“I feel my throat tightening. It’s not the coronavirus or smoke. It’s rage—rage radiating up from my belly and my heart. We’re trapped inside because of the pandemic and because of the fires, but ultimately we are most confined by the inequality, selfishness, and greed that created this moment. Even in the wide-open West, we’re still stuck in the United States of America.” — Emma Maris, The Atlantic, Sept. 10, 2020

Unlike Emma Maris (and me), Dyatlove aren’t stuck in the United States. But they’re from the West, albeit the Canadian West (Vancouver BC, to be precise), and like Emma Maris (and me) they’ve probably been breathing what used to be forests in Washington and Oregon during the last week (and counting). They also sound plenty pissed-off, about some of the same things.

The band’s music isn’t the kind of extreme metal we usually cover at this site, but I’d say they’re “adjacent” — and there’s an explosive emotional fury in the song and video we’re presenting today that’s so cathartic (and so demolishing) that it’s more than welcome here. Continue reading »

NEW MUSIC FRIDAY: TOMORROW’S RAIN, DARKENED, WAYFARER, CARCASS

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 182020
 

 

(Here’s another Friday round-up of new music compiled by Seattle-based NCS contributor Gonzo.)

I, for one, am looking forward to cooler weather.

Not only will cooler temperatures bring about an overdue ending of the wildfires currently making life miserable for the Northwest, but also an ideal environment for listening to your audial brutality of choice.

And while it’s certainly kvlt as fuck to stand in the middle of a Norwegian forest in corpse paint and spiky gauntlets while cranking up the lo-fi black metal, it’s by no means required. Some of this week’s new releases may inspire it, though. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: HEADS FOR THE DEAD — “AT THE DEAD OF NIGHT”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Sep 182020
 

 

Roughly two years after the release of their Serpent’s Curse debut album, Heads For the Dead have risen from whatever moldering, lightless tomb where they’ve been hibernating, and they’re hungry… for your flesh. Or at least they certainly sound famished for the delights of crunching bones, rendered entrails, and gushing ichor based on the new song we’re about to present.

That debut album was a massive-sounding exposition of Swedish death metal with an attraction to the tropes of old-school horror, and an addictive work of mauling terror it was, as exemplified by our dropping of one of its tracks into our list of Most Infectious Extreme Metal songs that year. Based on this new song — “At the Dead of Night“, which we’re presenting through a lyric video — they’ve lost none of their ability to crush, rend, and frighten in the intervening time.

But before we get to it, that image at the top of this post isn’t the cover of their forthcoming sophomore album Into the Red — this is: Continue reading »

KUNSTZONE: “EXIT BABYLON”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 182020
 

 

(Kunstzone released a new album last week, and so, like clockwork, we of course have a review of it by DGR, who spares no words.)

I’ve often pitched the Kunstzone project around here as sounding like the results of an ongoing battle between Anaal Nathrakh and Fear Factory. Each disc successfully blurs the lines between the two, in differing ratios depending on how the duo of multi-instrumentalist Alex Rise and Khaozone artist Andy felt at that particular recording session.

Thus, with four discs and a scattering of remix EPs and singles lying in their collective wake, you have a project whose debut release Eschaton Discipline splits about 60/40 in favor of Nathrakh’s brand of madness, and the following releases The Art Of Making The Earth Uninhabitable and Solarborn splitting about 70/30 and 80/20 in that same general direction. Which brings us to the group’s newest album Exit Babylon, which saw release on September 11th of this year. Continue reading »

DRIPPED: “PUTRESCENT OMNISCIENCE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Sep 182020
 

 

(Here’s Vonlughlio’s review of the debut EP by Dripped, which was released in August by Ungodly Ruins Productions.)

So it’s been a while since I’ve done a small review, but life (work and family) has taken a lot of my time, not leaving much to do something I like (writing and promoting music) but overall can’t complain. Anyway, I’m taking the opportunity now to talk about a new project called Dripped (Australia/Ukraine) that was formed back in 2019 with members of Corpseflesh, Septik Piggery, and Cranial Osteotomy.

The band signed to Ungodly Ruins Productions and this past August released their debut EP, Putrescent Omniscience, which consists of six songs that introduce what this new project has to offer — and I have to say that I am loving these 15 minutes of pure force with no fillers. This is an EP that just blew me away at first listen and should get more recognition in the scene. Continue reading »

SUNKEN: “LIVSLEDE”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Sep 172020
 

 

(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the Danish black metal band Sunken, set for a September 18 release by Vendetta Records.)

The term “categorical perception” refers to a psychological phenomena whereby human beings tend to separate stimuli – sounds, colours, etc – on a continuum into discrete, distinct categories, as well as how the learning of these categorisations influences our ability to perceive them as we grow up.

It’s a fascinating area, and one I can’t go into fully here (for obvious reasons), but let’s just say that CP is why you sometimes hear people from different countries struggling to differentiate between |r| and |l| sounds, and why different cultures sometimes even see colour differently.

As the smart ones among you might already have guessed, this phenomenon is pretty active in music too, especially when it comes to genre classifications.

For example, where you draw the line between Death Metal that’s “technical” and so-called Technical Death Metal, where you decide that something becomes brutal enough to be called Brutal Death Metal, etc, may be an individual choice on the surface, but it’s also heavily influenced by what you’ve learned, what you’ve been taught by others, and what you’ve been exposed to.

It’s particularly noticeable on the Black Metal spectrum, especially when it comes to asking people to define at what point Black Metal becomes Atmospheric Black Metal becomes Post-Black Metal… with the usual answer being defined more by personal preference than any actual sonic or stylistic properties of the music itself.

But there are always artists/albums who transcend or defy easy categorisation, and whether you like your Black Metal to be “Atmospheric”, “Post-” or pure as the driven snow, Livslede is likely to be exactly what you’re looking for. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DYSTOPIA — “RAZERNIJ: III”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 172020
 

 

Three years after the epic opus Chaos Philosophorum, the Dutch band Dystopia are returning with a remarkably multi-faceted new album named Geen Weg Uit, which will be released by Wolves of Hades on September 25th. It consists of three songs, two of which are divided into multiple parts.

Trying to sum up the album’s kaleidoscope of musical sensations is a daunting task. At its core, the music is black metal, but the band also incorporate elements of death metal, ethereal ambient music, prog-rock, and psychedelia — and they give a prominent role to a brass section. You might wonder how in the world all these moving parts could be joined together into something that makes sense, but banish any doubts you might have, because they do — with spectacular results. Continue reading »

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