BENIGHTED: “OBSCENE REPRESSED”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 022020
 

 

(We present DGR’s typically detailed review of Obscene Repressed, the new album by the French maulers in Benighted, which will be released by Season of Mist on April 10th.)

It probably doesn’t need to be stated that we’re fans of the French death metal crew Benighted and their brand of frantic mania, especially given that we’ve kept a pretty constant eye on the crew from release to release. Thus, we’ve been patiently waiting for the group’s newest album Obscene Repressed, a thematically twisted concept album that reads part horror story, part Pornhub top video statistics by State chart, and part gleeful exploration of insanity with the music stylings to back it up. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE AND REVIEW: DEATH WHORE’S SELF-TITLED EP

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Apr 022020
 

 

“Imagine a cross between the brutalizing grooves of Y2K-era Metal Hardcore greats like Terror, Xibalba, Nails or Rotten Sound, and old school Swedish Death Metal breakneck riffing”. That’s part of the introduction that Death Whore gave us to their self-titled EP, along with references to Harm’s Way and Entombed. That description of the band’s amalgam of punishing hardcore and bone-mangling, neck-wrecking Swedish death metal punched all sorts of pleasure-center buttons in our brains, and then it turned out that the music fully lived up to the descriptions. And thus we were eager to help spread the word by premiering a full stream of the EP today, in advance of its April 10 release on CD and digital.

Death Whore rampage through seven tracks in 20 minutes, and every one of those compact brawlers is explosively destructive and propelled by the kind of feral and filthy savagery that will light a fire under your pulse rate. Continue reading »

DARK FORTRESS: “SPECTRES FROM THE OLD WORLD”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Apr 022020
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new album by Germany’s Dark Fortress, which was released by Century Media on February 28th.)

This COVID-19 situation has really fucked with all of us in big and small ways.  That should go without saying, but it’s also my excuse for being so behind on NCS shit.  Quarantine prep, a tornado hitting close to home and putting me out of power for a bit, and other setbacks have kept me distracted from my NCS duties and it’s sucked. But now I’m back to full operational no-life quarantine activity and I can finally get to this.

I’m glad in the end that I’ve been held up, because it’s given me an absurd amount of time to spend with Dark Fortress in the interim.  They are definitely one of my personal favorite black metal bands, Old Mans Child and Keep Of Kalessin joining them in my top three.  Their dedication to doing a form of black metal that’s sort of amorphous while being incredibly disciplined, precise, and unafraid to consistently dive into other sub-genres of extreme metal is the kind of thing I love, just in principle.

Spectres From The Old World is a record in particular that I find fascinating, because if anything, it points to a band who are moving away from black metal as the foundation of their sound and want to re-purpose it as a flourish. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SALTAS

 Interviews  No Responses »
Apr 022020
 

 

(In this new interview for our site Comrade Aleks spoke with both members of the Swedish death/doom band Saltas about their new album, which was released two weeks ago, as well as the status of the members’ other projects.)

Despite this crazy situation all over the world the metal industry still works, and this month, due to the efforts of Nuclear War Now! Productions, the two-man project Saltas of Gothenburg, Sweden has just released their debut full-length Mors Salis: Opus I. This macabre death doom metal straight from the underground catacombs was created by C.J. (vocals, drums) and N.R. (vocals, guitars).

C.J. succeeds in keeping his personality a bit anonymous though N.R. is Leif Nicklas Rudolfsson himself, founder of the Swedish grim bastion of the extreme doom front Runemagick and half a dozen other bands and projects like Domedag, Necrocurse, and The Funeral Orchestra, just to name few. I bet you have a clue what you may expect from Saltas, we’ve talked with both of the band’s’ members. Here you see result of this conversation: Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ZAN — “HOUSE OF SPLENDOR”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Apr 012020
 

 

Man, this video makes me so fucking nostalgic, amped-up by the memory of being in the midst of a packed crowd and in the presence of a band on stage kicking our adrenaline into collective overdrive, and longing for the day when that can happen again.

But beyond the intense nostalgia for happier times that this new video provokes, it’s also a tonic for all the other mental and emotional ailments many of us are experiencing these days, because both this new song by Zan and the way they kick it out in the film of this live performance is exhilarating on a bunch of different levels. That song, “House of Splendor“, is the kind of thing that does indeed transform a shoulder-to-shoulder venue into a house of raucous splendor. It comes from Zan’s new album Behold the Key, which was just released last Friday by Blackhouse Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ASTARIUM — “SNOW STORM”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 012020
 

 

If you’re unfamiliar with Astarium’s creative impulses, the name of the song we’re premiering in this post may mislead you. Coming from a black metal band whose music is often characterized as “symphonic and ambient BM”, the name “Snow Storm” might make you expect one thing, and you might find something else instead — something much more intriguing and alluring than what you might expect. And we’ll say further that those characterizations of Astarium’s music as “symphonic black metal” (which you will see on Metal-Archives, among other places) may also prove to be a bit of a mis-direction, at least in the case of Astarium’s new album.

But before explaining what we mean, we should note that the name of the new album is Hyperborea, and it will be co-released on April 18th by GrimmDistribution (Ukraine) and Gravações Tunguska (Portugal). It is the eighth album since 2008 by this one-man project from Novosibirsk, Russia, and (we are informed) it was inspired by “the sagas of northern lands about honor and valor, about blood and revenge, about beauty and gloom, about glory and dishonor”. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH: BEGGAR / CALLIGRAM / VIDEO NASTIES

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 012020
 


Beggar

 

(Andy Synn returns to a series in which he extols the virtues of new or soon-forthcoming releases by bands from the UK, and does that for three records here.)

Well, well, well… what do we have here then?

Ahem, cough, sorry, I turned into a nineteenth century cockney flatfoot there for a second.

Anyway, today’s edition of “The Best of British” features three albums which are bound to make quite an impact (and, in some cases, have done already) in the Metal world, both at home and abroad, and it’s my distinct pleasure to be able to do my small part to help raise their profile (even if just a little bit). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AL-NAMROOD, ARSAFES WITH ANILA RAJEEV, PERCHTA, GHOSTS IN GOLD, ÄKTH GÁNAHËTH

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Apr 012020
 

 

I was gearing up to do another one of those gigantic Overflowing Streams posts for today, but then something unexpected and serendipitous happened. I had an enormous list of possibilities to check out, assembled  from an hour and a half spent crawling through our e-mail and other sources. And as I began checking out that stuff it happened that I listened to music from five bands right in a row that just seemed to fit together really well — mainly because all the music struck me as exotic, albeit in different ways (and some are justifiable exceptions to our rule about singing).

I thought the unusual effect of listening to them together would be lost if I scattered them among a dozen (or more) other music streams, and so I decided to just stop and put them together here, and leave a larger round-up for another day (hopefully tomorrow).

Al-NAMROOD

Al-Namrood is an anti-religious Saudi Arabian black metal band, which no doubt continues to be a dangerous way for its understandably anonymous members to spend their time in that Kingdom. Their music, insofar as I’m familiar with it (and I’m mainly familiar with their more recent releases), has always been remarkably distinctive, and remarkably good. In the past I have been moved, in fact, to call their music “pitch-black magnificence”. And therefore I felt a thrill when I saw that Shaytan Productions will be releasing their 8th album on June 22nd. Continue reading »

WAKE: “DEVOURING RUIN”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 012020
 

 

(We present DGR’s detailed review of the new album by Canada’s Wake, which was just released on March 27th by Translation Loss Records.)

If you’ve been following the site recently you might’ve spotted the massive review collections fellow NCS writer Andy Synn has kicked out. Among the many groups covered (here) were Seattle black metal newcomers Izthmi and their disc The Arrows Of Our Ways. The Arrows Of Our Ways is a rare album, one amongst a packed genre that somehow manages to encapsulate the entirety of its current scene within its track list. The music presents a perfect snapshot of where their scene was at that exact moment — slight hints towards the future but mostly a perfect picture of the hive of activity and creativity that currently exists within their own spectrum, as if the band had shot an arrow of their own right through the center of it, as if competing in a musical archery event.

There are certain bands who have become masters at performing this specific act, adding to and molding their musical core to often reflect where the band members’ heads are at that exact moment, as well as providing the musical snapshot discussed above. If Izthmi managed to do so for their specific subset of black metal, so too have Canada’s Wake. They have become experts at providing deep musical looks into their world at the specific moments when each of their five albums has been released, including their newest album Devouring Ruin — a disc that captures much of the current crust, grind, and overall underground metal scene by adapting and molding it to their own noisy purposes, and in the process releasing an album almost twice as long as its noise- and grind-heavy predecessor Misery Rites. Continue reading »

A PLAYLIST OF SCUZZY VILE ABRASIVE MUSIC

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Apr 012020
 

 

We have SO MUCH planned for your enjoyment at NCS today, but I made a last-minute decision to begin with this interactive post (at least I hope it will become interactive).

Last night a metalhead friend sent me a Facebook message asking: “If you happen to have some scuzzy, vile, positively abrasive new music that you can put up or recommend my way, I’d certainly appreciate the fuck out of it.” I have my own plentiful stockpile of such stuff, but I thought I’d reach out for other ideas. So I posted his request on FB and asked for recommendations. I mentioned that I didn’t think my friend was a big black metal fan, so suggested that BM should probably be filtered out of the suggestions. Other than that, I asked people to open up the sewers on me.

And I did get suggestions, which I decided to leave below. And I further decided this morning to make an open call to anyone reading this post to leave your own recommendations in the Comments for our mutual benefit (but here there’s no need for you to filter out black metal). So go ahead, open up the sewers on me — and remember that the subject of the request is for scuzzy, vile, positively abrasive that’s NEW (or at least new-ish). Continue reading »

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