SHADES OF BLACK: ÆNIGMATUM, ASEITAS, BLACK HATE, CAPE OF BATS, ULTHAR

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
May 102020
 

 

I spent hours yesterday trying to catch up on listening to new metal. I now have a giant list of things I’d like to recommend, including enough blackened sounds to fill up a four-part SHADES OF BLACK today. I haven’t figured out how to make that happen, and I don’t know how any normal person would be able to digest all of it even if I could. But I’m going to continue pondering how to deal with my desire to put it all out there. In the meantime, here’s the first installment.

I will say that the “shades of black” in this collection are often very faint shades, with other stylistic ingredients much more prominent than black metal. But I think all this stuff is outstanding, and fits very well together, for reasons you’ll figure out as you listen.

ÆNIGMATUM (U.S.)

“A wild ride full of twists and turns”. That’s how this Portland band describe Adorned In Wrath, a two-track demo that will be released on May 22nd, which they say will serve “to give a glimpse of our forthcoming sophomore full-length”. The first of those two songs, which is streaming now, is definitely a wild ride — in fact, that’s an understatement Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SINISTER DOWNFALL — “BEHOLD DARKNESS”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
May 102020
 

 

In 2018 the one-man German funeral doom band Sinister Downfall made its full-length debut with Eremozoic, which was the first release by the Armenian doom label Funere, in collaboration with the venerable Japanese doom label Weird Truth Productions. We premiered a song from that beautifully crafted debut, a song that was staggeringly bereft in its moods, and staggeringly heavy, too. Much like the album as a whole, it was tremendously evocative in its emotional resonance and persistently spellbinding throughout.

Sinister Downfall‘s sole member Eugen Kohl has continued to hone his craft since then, while remaining true to the vision of melancholic downfall that flowed through Eremozoic, and the result is a new album named A Dark Shining Light that will again be co-released by Funere and Weird Truth. And we again have been given the opportunity to premiere a song, the aptly named “Behold Darkness“, which is the track that ends the album. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: “ABYSMAL DAWN”

 Interviews, WAXING LYRICAL  4 Responses »
May 092020
 


photo by Terco Fredes

 

(In this new edition of Andy Synn‘s series of interviews focusing on lyrics in metal he elicited thoughts from Charles Elliott, vocalist/guitarist of California’s Abysmal Dawn, who have a new album out on Season of Mist.)

Since the release of their debut album, From Ashes, way back in 2006, Abysmal Dawn have gone on to become one of the most unrelentingly heavy, unfailingly reliable, and unrepentantly riff-heavy acts in Death Metal.

Hell, their most recent album, the fantastic Phylogenesis, recently received a glowing write-up by our own DGR, while its immediate predecessor, 2014’s outstanding Obsolescence, still remains in my regular listening rotation even now.

So, with all that in mind, what more is there left to say about the band?

Quite a bit, apparently, as you’re about to find out from vocalist/guitarist (and overall mastermind) Charles Elliott! Continue reading »

MEDIOCRITY ≠ MATURITY

 Mosh Pit  15 Responses »
May 082020
 


Facing Mediocrity by John Ransom

 

(Andy Synn wrote the following opinion piece.)

By good fortune I’ve got a rare day off from work today, which means I’ve finally got a little bit of time to dedicate to writing about something that’s been on my mind quite a bit recently.

So bear with me, if you will, and have those flaming pitchforks at the ready, as I go off on one of my signature rants… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: A WORLD WITHOUT — “IN EXTREMIS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 082020
 

 

Once upon a time deathcore took the metal world by storm, drawing in vast legions of fans through its amalgam of monster vocals, brutish atonal riffing, and more bunker-busting breakdowns than any militarized armory could possibly hold. Like most waves of popular music in any genre, it quickly became saturated and homogenized, and came close to drowning beneath a tide of cookie-cutter mediocrity. The elements of the music that didn’t seem to require instrumental skill spawned hordes of bands that also had no talent for writing actual songs either.

But it would be wrong to proclaim that deathcore is dead. Instead, it has evolved, as all living things threatened with extinction must. Rather than depending entirely on the old core elements (so to speak), the better bands have expanded their musical palettes, some of them moving more in the direction of pure death metal and others integrating elements of melody and atmosphere, along with increased technicality.

The Portland band A World Without, for example, has retained some of those core features but has intertwined them with other ingredients, and today we have an example of their musical amalgamations through the lyric video premiere of a song called “In Extremis“, which includes a guest appearance by vocalist Steve Tinnon from Within the Ruins. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEVANGELIC — “ERSETU”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
May 082020
 

 

We have already written extensively about the new album Ersetu by the Italian death metal band Devangelic, just as we did about their previous releases. In this case, in addition to praising individual songs that have been previewed in the progress toward the album’s release, we published an enthusiastic review by our friend Vonlughlio, who summed it up as “a mandatory release for every brutal death metal fan”: These guys know their craft supremely well and have taken the time to create something special in their music that will pass the test of time”.

And indeed, despite how impressive Devangelic‘s first two albums were (2014’s Resurrection Denied and 2017’s Phlegethon), they have managed to elevate their music to an even higher (and more nuanced) plane of brutality with Ersetu. We are thus very excited to present a full stream of the record for you now, in advance of its May 15 release by Willowtip Records. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: TABLEAU MORT, SXUPERION, WELL OF NIGHT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
May 082020
 

 

I’m hurrying to finish a couple of other NCS posts scheduled for today, but wanted to begin this Friday with something to occupy you while I do that. I’ve picked three new songs that I noticed over the last 12 hours, one of which comes with an intriguing video.

TABLEAU MORT

Within the last two hours London-based Tableau Mort (pictured above) released a professionally filmed video for “Ignorance (Tapestry Sewn Pt. II)“, which premiered at Antichrist Magazine. It follows their very impressive 2019 debut album Stigma Book 1: Mark of Delusion (released by Loud Rage Music), which drew symbolic and thematic influences from Romanian Orthodox Christianity, and embroidered their core framework of black metal with other stylistic ingredients, including Orthodox choral chants. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: BLIDVINTER

 Interviews  No Responses »
May 082020
 

 

(It is rare to read an interview that’s so endearing in its candor and humility as this one, brought to us by Comrade Aleks, with Joakim Lundbäck, the Swedish man behind the band Blidvinter, whose debut album Petrichor was released this past March.)

Blidvinter is a solo project of Joakim Lundbäck who chose to work in the direction of mixing progressive death and melodic doom metal. The EP This Solitary Creation (2015) turned out to be a good teaser to the debut full-length Petrichor, released only a month ago.

Joakim’s material is multilayered and rich with a wide range of moods, from temporary melancholy to blind fury, and this storm of emotions is clad in tight, dynamic sound. Petrichor offers you a 50-minute journey in this dark realm of Joakim Lundbäck, so why not to talk with its author about the things we meet on our way? Continue reading »

SECRETS OF THE MOON: “BLACK HOUSE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 072020
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the forthcoming seventh album by Germany’s Secrets of the Moon, which will be out on May 8th from Prophecy Productions.)

Like any tool the use of comparisons, comparing one band to another, can easily be abused (remember back when Deafheaven first started to get big and it seemed like every review had to find a way to reference them somehow?) but it can also be an effective way of connecting with readers and putting them in the same mindset as the writer.

Some bands, and some fans, seem to really hate it, however, and can respond with surprising venom and vehemence to any suggestion that their music isn’t totally unique and utterly incomparable…

Now, Secrets of the Moon may not have reacted that badly to the reviews of their previous album, many of which, my own included, included glowing comparisons to the likes of Alice In Chains, Fields of the Nephilim, The Cult, and more, but they clearly took a little bit of umbrage to the use of so many different references to describe their music, so much so that the PR materials for Black House make a big point about how the album can’t be defined with such reductive methods.

And so, in an attempt to respect the band’s wishes, I’ve decided to write the following review without making a single direct comparison to any other bands.

Well, maybe one… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SKELETAL — “BURNING HATRED”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 072020
 

 

Bitterness and Burning Hatred is the name of the new album by the Finnish death metal band Skeletal. The name also sums up the emotions that a lot of people are feeling these days — living under regimes that are leaving broke, hungry, and hopeless people to fend for themselves while gambling with their lives due to deceit and incompetence in dealing with the pandemic.

Those aren’t exactly healthy emotions, and a cathartic purging of them every now and then is probably a good idea. The Skeletal song we’re premiering today off the new album provides exactly that kind of experience. Rather than gloomily seething and poisoning itself with its own venom, the song is a tremendous thrill-ride, and the kind of music that makes you feel like you can hold your head up, bare your teeth, and survive anything. Continue reading »

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