OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 2): GÖDEN, HEAVEN SHALL BURN, VREDEHAMMER, BYTHOS, SLAVES BC, DUHKHA, THE RITE, DERANGED

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Mar 222020
 

 

I’m still working my way through that list of 80 potentially interesting new songs and full releases that I mentioned in Part 1 of this big round-up. Of course, not all of those 80 are going to pass my smell test, and I couldn’t write about all of them even if they did. But there’s still a lot I want to recommend, and so with the exception of the first item below, I’ll just be offering brief impressions along with the streams.

If all goes as planned, there will be a Part 3 tomorrow. A SHADES OF BLACK column will follow this one today, whenever I finish writing it.

GÖDEN (U.S.)

From 1989 to 1994 Winter released only one demo tape (Hour of Doom), one album (Into Darkness), and one EP (Eternal Frost), and nothing since then. But those recordings were enough to cement their place in the history of extreme metal and to become the jumping-off point for countless other bands in the doom and sludge genres for the last 30 years. And thus when Svart Records announced weeks ago that it would be releasing an album by a band it characterized as “a long-awaited continuation of what Winter would have been”, I sat up and paid attention. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1): KATATONIA, WOLFHEART, KRALLICE, OLD MAN GLOOM, MÉSALLIANCE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Mar 212020
 

 

After I finished today’s first post I spent almost two hours just going back through e-mails we’ve received over the last three days pushing new music upon us, and recent messages from some friends with their own recommendations, and then creating a list of links to everything that looked interesting. Some of these were new songs or videos and some were complete new releases.

When I counted up the number of links in that list, I found that there were 80 of them. Eighty of them, from just three days of new releases! I’m sure the Bandcamp thing on Friday (where they didn’t take their cut of sales) spurred a lot of this output, but even considering that it’s still insane.

Needless to say, I’m going to be resorting to the OVERFLOWING STREAMS format, in which I pare my own verbiage back to the bone (though I did include artwork this time). Also perhaps needless to say, I’ve barely made a dent in listening to those 80 items. But I’d like to get going with what I’ve found so far that I think is worth recommending, so here’s some of it now, and more will come in the next few days. (By the way, a ton of that new stuff was black metal, so I’ll have my hands full trying to figure out what to put in tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column).

KATATONIA

Who would not want a new Katatonia album in these dark, isolated times? The timing is indeed fortuitous, because a new Katatonia full-length will be released by Peaceville on April 24th. The title is also fortuitous: City Burials. Continue reading »

STAYING IN TOUCH (BUT NOT TOUCHING)

 Off Topic  42 Responses »
Mar 212020
 


downtown Seattle yesterday

 

Like hundreds of millions of people around the world, I have a lot more time on my hands than I did even a week ago. I spend a lot of that new-found time reading the news every day. This hasn’t been good for my mental health, but I haven’t stopped. I began today by reading this global survey by the Associated Press of what”s happening with Covid-19 around the globe. It reports that, as of now, according to a running tally by Johns Hopkins University in the U.S., more than 275,000 cases have been confirmed globally, including over 11,000 deaths — but at least 88,000 people have recovered. In Italy, the country now being hit the hardest, 5,986 new cases and 627 new deaths were reported on Friday alone, bringing their total to at least 47,021 cases and 4,032 dead.

To varying degrees, people in the U.S. (where I live) are staying at home more than they used to. Governors in California, New York, and Illinois — home to 70 million people — have ordered their citizens to stay at home unless they have vital reasons to go out. Other state governors will surely follow suit within days. In my state (Washington), it hasn’t come to that yet, but the governor has ordered the closure of schools and most businesses and restricted gatherings of people to relatively small numbers, and has pleaded with everyone to stay home even without being ordered to do so. That may change. As of yesterday, there were 1,524 confirmed cases of the virus in Washington and 83 deaths, most of all those in the Seattle area where I live.

The economic toll of all these preventive measures has already been extraordinary, and will get much worse (on that subject, this Washington Post article today is sobering, to put it very mildly). The unemployment rate in the U.S. is spiking, soaring toward levels not seen since the Great Depression. Tons of small businesses have closed, and many will probably never reopen. Giant corporations are begging the government for stupendous sums of money. Vital medical supplies, hospital beds, and trained health-care workers are running short in most metropolitan areas, and the expected tsunami of Covid-19 hospitalizations hasn’t even hit yet. It’s all very depressing, and worrying.

I do intend to pull together a round-up of new metal later today, but since a large percentage of us are basically shut in now, with only limited face-to-face contact with other people (or no contact), I thought I’d start this Saturday by giving our visitors, both old-timers and newcomers, a chance to talk with us and each other here. This is what I suggest: Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MEMBARIS — “MISANTHROSOPHIE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 202020
 

 

On March 24th W.T.C. Productions will release the long-awaited fifth album by the German black metal band Membaris. Eight years is indeed a long time in between records, and that’s how much time has elapsed since their last one, Entartet. But holy hell, the return they have made with Misanthrosophie is nothing short of spectacular.

To crib from some of the many words to follow in an introductory review, there is a theatrical quality to the album as a whole, like a fantastical Baroque pageant that seems to put the richness of humanity, in all its wildly swinging emotions — its madness and its never-ending grief, its joy and absurdity, its soulful poignancy and heedless cruelty — onto a grand stage. And to do this Membaris have seamlessly incorporated a wide range of musical styles across many decades, from both metal and rock, into their thorned framework of black metal. Every song holds wondrous surprises and thrilling experiences, every one of them fueled with undeniable passion and executed with tremendous skill. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NOCTU — “ISOLATO DA UN MONDO SENZA SPERANZA”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 202020
 

 

Settle in. Prepare to lose yourself, to be excavated from the inside out and left in terrible emptiness, with a thousand-yard stare, shivering with the affliction of ghosts.

The song we’re presenting is 32 minutes long, far less than the flight-time to Jupiter’s moons or a journey to the entrance of Hades (either of which might be the source of these sounds), but long enough to sink you deeply into the chilling visions of Noctu, to the point of no return.

The song is “Isolato Da Un Mondo Senza Speranza” — which eerily suits the current day, as its English translation is “Isolated From A World Without Hope”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AVERSIO HUMANITATIS — “THE WANDERER OF ABSTRACT PATHS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Mar 202020
 

 

Within the ever-expanding realms of black metal there are bands who will always be content to follow the old, well-trod paths, from the grim sounds of cold northern darkness to the vicious, thrusting revels that are fueled by hate and inspired by the worship of demons.

But there are others whose ambitions are greater, who seem to extend their reach toward vistas beyond our time and outside our tangible plane of existence, who seek to manifest visions that can’t be put into words, to channel forces beyond our normal perceptions, and to up-end the minds of listeners at the same time. To be sure, this kind of music may also be spawned by disgust for humankind and hatred for the chains with which some bind others, or with which we bind ourselves. But the music seeks not only to capture the dystopian terrors brought about by our own deeply flawed natures but also to cast off and transcend such imprisonments.

Which brings us to the new album by Aversio Humanitatis, and the song from the album we’re presenting today. Continue reading »

A DOUBLE REVIEW (PART 2): WOMBBATH — “CHOIRS OF THE FALLEN”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 202020
 

 

(Yesterday DGR turned in a double-review, but in his own inimitable fashion he wrote so many words about each of the two albums — one by Berzerker Legion and one by Wombbath — that your humble editor decided to split it in two, and now we present the second one. It may make some sense to read the other review first (here), since these were originally packaged together.)

Over the many years that we’ve spent in our comfortable little corner of the internet, one of the things we’ve learned how to get real good at is identifying genre-fare: the sort of musical red meat where it is clear the crew behind them just want to add to the overall cauldron that is their music of choice. Not necessarily the most ambitious or ‘paradigm changing’ — though the times where a group lands on that sort of lightning-in-a-bottle formula is always great — but music that is enjoyable for what it is, well-executed within the blueprint of its chosen genre.

One of the examples of this which practically fuels this website is the sort of rock-stupid, pulsating thud of death metal that gets by purely by appealing to the early cave-dweller parts of our brain, and another is the type of music that is so predisposed to headbanging guitar work that you can’t help but want to tag along, whether or not you have the long hair for it.

In this case it’s weird that these two albums feel like catching up a bit, since these two projects share a vocalist whom we’ve written about numerous times before and both of them are right in that wheelhouse described above. One is more modern and melody-focused despite its overall insistence on how world-ending it paints its protagonists in the songs, and the other is flavored with apocalyptic flair but with the chainsaw guitar aimed at a more old-school crowd. And thus we find ourselves catching up with Berzerker Legion and a crew more familiar to our site’s readers, Wombbath. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: XENOGLYPH — “MYTHARC”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 192020
 

 

The world seems to be going to hell in a hand-basket, with thoughts drawn inexorably to the demands of mere survival, all eyes cast down toward emptying streets and shelves, more aware of spatial distances and less aware of time passing, and no clear view of the future. At times such as these, something could be said for music that boldly and triumphantly unfurls into the cosmos — while also expressing the harrowing potentials that may lie ahead.

And that brings us to Xenoglyph, an anonymous futuristic black metal duo with a taste for the avant-garde and a talent for creating music that’s both transportive and unsettling, both mind-bending and “physically” ravaging. Their debut album Mytharc will be released by Oregon-based Glossolalia Records on April 17th, and today we present its stunning title track. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SKAM — “SHIT OUT OF LUCK”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 192020
 

 

This is not a scam. It is Skam, a one-man Swedish band whose name (we’re told) means “great dishonor, shame, or humiliation”. It is (we’re further told) “an act of catharsis through music” whose “main purpose is the releasing of stress while lamenting the world’s declining mental health and the obscene amount of suicides caused by it”.

This is not idle talk, because the band and their label Redefining Darkness Records are making digital copies of Skam‘s album Sounds Of A Disease available for $1.00 “as a means of therapy for those who may benefit from it”. And upon the album’s April 3rd release date the digital version will be free.

The characterization of the music as “an act of catharsis” isn’t idle talk either. As a means of exorcising your own demons, this amalgamation of grindcore and death metal (with influences from d-beat punk) is absolutely explosive, as you’ll discover through today’s premiere of a track called “Shit Out of Luck“. Continue reading »

DEATH METAL DISCOVERIES: AFTERBIRTH / APEP / CLIENTS / KONVENT / PESTIFER / PURNAMA

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Mar 192020
 


Afterbirth

 

(In this post Andy Synn provides reviews of six recent albums, all of them leaning in different deathly directions.)

As a companion piece to last week’s Black Metal Bonanza, and a follow-up to Monday’s Death Metal focussed “Short But Sweet” article, here’s a bunch of Death Metal artists/albums to help keep you all sane during these unsettled times. Continue reading »

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