A DUAL REVIEW: NAPALM DEATH (“LOGIC RAVAGED BY BRUTE FORCE”) / HUMAN SERPENT (“SHROUDS”)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Mar 042020
 

 

(In this column DGR has combined reviews of two EPs, both of which are out now, one by Napalm Death and a charitable endeavor released by the Greek black metal band Human Serpent.)

 

NAPALM DEATH: “LOGIC RAVAGED BY BRUTE FORCE”

It’s wild to think that we’re a little over five years since the release of Apex Predator – Easy Meat, Napalm Death‘s most recent full-length album, but here we are with something new.

It’s always a bit of a struggle to review a Napalm Death disc. The band have become such a weirdly monolithic cultural force in the grind substratum of heavy metal that at this point you can almost take the band in sight unseen (or rather, sounds unheard) and know that the ever-prolific crew are going to find some way to beat your skull in. Yet across their immensely vast discography there remains a healthy bit of experimentation as the group fling themselves from the now traditional high-speed blasting grind to chunky death metal to songs with a fairly defined sense of groove to the noisier and more industrialized chaos that Apex Predator started to hint at. Continue reading »

CREMATIONS / DAWN PATROL / LACASTA

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Mar 042020
 


Cremations

 

(In this post Andy Synn combines reviews and streams of three albums released in February.)

Sticking to the theme which I’ve already established this week, here are a few words (and pictures, for those of you with a less literary disposition) on some recently released albums that err more towards the Hardcore side of the spectrum than our usual Death/Black/Doom fare.

First up we’ve got some heavyweight Metallic Hardcore from Hanover quartet Cremations, then there’s the punky, abrasive attack of Dawn Patrol, and, last but by no means least, the bristling blackened assault of Italy’s LaCasta.

So, something for (almost) everyone really. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: STROMPTHA — “BRÛLE, PRAIRIE DE ROSES”

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Mar 032020
 

 

Those of us who have followed Icelandic metal (particularly black metal) have by now become used to seeing videos that incorporate that country’s dramatic and desolate landscapes, and the video we’re presenting today also features panoramas of equally dramatic and desolate terrains blanketed in snow and ice — but these scenes come from a different and lesser-known land. The video also includes a narrative, a surreal one in which a troubled man, hood up, searches for and encounters the undulating and eventually still form of a woman with roses for eyes.

The song accompanied by the video is also surreal and dramatic, one that creates an alchemy of differing ingredients — from atmospheric black metal to doom, from coldwave to industrial and dark folk — to fashion its own mysterious, dark, and desperate narrative. That song, “Brûle, Prairie De Roses“, appears on the new third album by Stromptha, which is the solo project vocalist/musician J, a native of Greenland who has returned there after a sojourn in France. Entitled Endura Pleniluniis, the record will be co-released by Satanath Records (Russia) and Pest Records (Romania) on March 24th. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TRAUMA — “OMINOUS BLACK”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Mar 032020
 

 

At a point in their long career when the Polish death metal band Trauma might be expected to slow down or even get stuck in their tracks, there is zero sign of malaise in their forthcoming eighth album, Ominous Black. Instead, they have created a record that’s explosively exuberant and persistently inventive.

To be sure, the music is unmistakably ferocious and fully capable of bludgeoning you black and blue, but what drives the album to heights of great fascination are all the head-spinning instrumental pyrotechnics and wildly mercurial permutations that mark the twisted path of each song. It’s almost tempting to call this music “progressive death metal”, except this album seems too weird and wondrous, and maybe even too malevolent, for that kind of label. On the other hand, just calling it “death metal” seems inadequate, because it’s so out of the ordinary in its ingenuity.

It’s our fiendish pleasure to throw a full stream of the album at you today, in advance of its March 6 release by Selfmadegod Records, and to imagine the looks on your faces when you figure out what’s happening to you. Continue reading »

MY DYING BRIDE: “THE GHOST OF ORION”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Mar 032020
 

 

(DGR prepared this review of the new 13th album by My Dying Bride, which will be released on March 6th by Nuclear Blast.)

 

Releasing “Your Broken Shore” in advance of My Dying Bride‘s newest album The Ghost Of Orion may be one of the shrewdest moves in music history. The “holy shit, they’re onto something with this release” comes early on during The Ghost Of Orion — during the first growled chorus of “Your Broken Shore”. While the shifting dynamic from gothic melodrama to the oppressive heaviness that My Dying Bride conjure during that section of the song may be an easy thing to sketch out musically, denying just how hard that section hits is an exercise in futility.

It’s indisputable just how heavy that moment is, and it grabs you as a listener and basically holds you in place for the rest of the song — making a near-eight-minute journey fly by as the My Dying Bride crew really hammer home why they’ve had a career as long as they’ve had and how they’ve maintained the miserable engine that has kept them going.

It’s also something of a revelation, in that “Your Broken Shore” is so strong a song that you almost wouldn’t believe you’ve got another fifty-or-so minutes of music to dive into after it. You could even say that My Dying Bride started The Ghost Of Orion with a show-stopper — if the band hadn’t left other weapons laying around in The Ghost Of Orion‘s track list. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: NAMTAR

 Interviews  No Responses »
Mar 032020
 


photo credit – Nadja Geskus Photography

 

(Our Norway-based correspondent Karina Noctum forges ahead with her series of interviews of drummers, and here presents a discussion with Namtar, former drummer with the Dutch symphonic black metal band Carach Angren.)

2020 started with several losses of both musicians and bands in the metal scene. So to join the row of sad news it was announced that Namtar from Carach Angren was going to leave his band, and so I took the opportunity to talk to him.

Carach Angren had a pretty well-conceived and interesting concept, both musically and image-wise, that will continue for sure, but no two drummers are the same. So it remains to see who is going to take his place and how it will turn out. A new album called Franckensteina Strataemontanus to be released on May 29 has been announced, but the news is taken with mixed feelings of course. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ULCERATE, NOMAD, LIKE RATS, HOT GRAVES, BOMBS OF HADES, CHURCH OF DISGUST, HOLY DEATH

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Mar 022020
 

 

At the risk of overloading our readers with new music in light of what we’ve already sent your way over the weekend and this morning (a risk that obviously means nothing to us), here’s a carefully curated collection of chaos to begin the new week. If death metal is your meat and potatoes, this will explode your gastrointestinal tract.

ULCERATE

It didn’t take long for a new Ulcerate song to cause a flurry of comments within our internal NCS group. Not long after the title track to the band’s new album surfaced this morning, my colleagues uttered such exclamations and opinions as “tasty”, “oh shit”, “this is probably the cleanest and least reliant they’ve been on recorded-in-a-cave-next-door style mixing they’ve had yet”, “it’s DEFINITELY more melodic, and the production is warmer, but those are GOOD things”, and “it’s a natural progression from what they were doing on Shrines of Paralysis“. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WARLUST — “I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 022020
 

 

“I Spit On Your Grave!” Those are fighting words, and in the song of that name which we’re premiering today through a lyric video, the German hellraisers in Warlust back that disgusted condemnation to the hilt, and simultaneously prove why their new album Unearthing Shattered Philosophies (forthcoming from Dying Victims Productions on April 24th) is such a savage yet multi-faceted thrillride.

Through their previous album, 2017’s Morbid Execution, Warlust amply demonstrated their prowess in discharging electrifying black/thrash, leavened with other ingredients that made it more than an assault of rip-roaring hellfire. But the new album reveals an even further spreading of the band’s dragon wings, demonstrating an elevation in the dynamism and diversity of their songwriting skills, and “I Spit On Your Grave” is a prime example of those achievements. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MAZIKEEN — “VEXATION THROUGH THE GOLDEN SUN”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 022020
 

 

After a scattering of short releases that mainly began emerging in 2017, the Australian symphonic black/death band Mazikeen has completed a debut album named The Solace of Death that’s now set for co-release by Satanath Records and Iron, Blood And Death Corporation on March 23rd.

From its beginning as a solo project, Mazikeen has been the brain-child of Andrew Shiells, but for this new album he was joined by a formidable line-up of allies. With Shiells on guitar and synths, he is accompanied by drummer Marco Pitrruzzella (Six Feet Under, Sleep Terror, ex-Brain Drill), guitar soloist Kris Marchant, pianist Aretstikapha (Plasmodium, Klavierkrieger), and vocalist James Edmeades (Claret Ash).

The album includes eight original songs as well as four cover songs, putting Mazikeen‘s spin on tracks by Mayhem, Dissection, Dimmu Borgir, and Darkthrone. It’s one of the original songs that we present today, a dazzling track named “Vexation Through the Golden Sun“. Continue reading »

REMISSION: “THE TETHER’S END”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 022020
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s enthusiastic review of the debut album of Australia’s Remission, which was released late last year.)

While I’ve enjoyed the stylistic turn to a degree, melodic death metal in recent years has become too fucking slow and has increasingly lost its sense of technicality.  Everyone who knows me after years on this site is aware that I’m as much of a fan of the melodic death-doom formula as anyone, but I must confess I miss what got me captivated by the style in the first place.  It was the ability of the music to hit a threshold of being fast and technical, yet remaining emotive all the same.

The olden-days bands wrote riffs that were basically 20-second hooks, where the entire passage stuck into your head while skank beats and the like pounded away at high speed.  If it wasn’t that, it was an extremely modern translation of British Heavy Metal into an even heavier context.  I really miss this about melodic death metal of the ’90s and early 2000s, and it’s a bit dismaying that the style has mostly seemed to die off in interest.

Until now. Continue reading »

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