AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ZİFİR — “DEMONIAC ETHICS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jan 202020
 

 

Rage and disgust fuel the music on Zifir‘s new album Demoniac Ethics, most of it directed at the calculated lies of religious institutions and the submissive delusions of their followers. Of course, within the realms of extreme metal such inspirations aren’t unique to this Turkish black metal trio. But how they have translated their intense convictions into sound is very much out of the ordinary, as you shall witness for yourselves.

Today we present a full stream of this new album, just days before its release by Duplicate Records, preceded by further impressions of the remarkable music. Continue reading »

CAVED: “THE PETRIFYING VACUUM”

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Jan 202020
 

 

(This is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the second full-length by the New Zealand project Caved, released on January 3rd.)

2020 is already off to an interesting start.  Anyone who has followed me since I started writing for NCS back in 2011 will probably hear this album after reading the review and be instantly like, “yeah this is TheMadIsraeli’s taste in metal”.

Caved is a New Zealand one man progressive technical death metal/thrash outfit that is VERY directly comparable to Martyr.  The vocal approach is even very similar, so if you’ve missed that frantic hyper-technical manic style of death metal with thrash vocals and attitude that Martyr brought to the table, Caved is the first time when I can say you can finally stop listening to “Feeding The Abscess” and hear something new in that vein.  The Petrifying Vacuum is the sophomore album of Caved and my first exposure to the project. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: ROTTENDAWN

 Interviews  No Responses »
Jan 202020
 

 

(Comrade Aleks has brought us this interview with Make Mäkinen, one of the guitarists and songwriters of the Finnish band Rottendawn. whose debut album is out now on the Saturnal Records label.)

Even though Rottendawn was lit in 2010, their first album Occult saw the light of day in September 2019 on Helsinki-based Saturnal Records. This death-doom band’s lineup is highly remarkable, but I have an impression that they don’t care about promotion too much. So you should know what Rottendawn is a brainchild of Pasi Äijö from Unholy (bass, vocals), Mikael “Arkki” Arnkil of Impaled Nazarene (drums), Sinisthra’s Make Mäkinen (guitars), and Joni Halmetoja (guitars) from… from… I don’t know where he came from. Why not find it out? I

welcome all fans of things heavy, distorted, and slow to join us in this compact and informative interview with Make Mäkinen. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): DARK FORTRESS, TULUS, YOTH IRIA, CULT BURIAL, KALT ‖ WEISS

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jan 192020
 

 

Five individual tracks. That’s what I’ve combined into this first installment of our usual Sunday expedition into the black realms. The second Part includes a few complete records, recently released, that I’d like to recommend. I haven’t written it yet, and may not finish it in time to post it today. Astonishingly, I have some other activities planned, and they may push Part 2 into Monday.

DARK FORTRESS

Last week brought another advance track from Spectres Of The Old World, the eighth album by Germany’s Dark Fortress. I’ve already provided some background details about the album when writing about a previous single, “Pulling At Threads” (here), and won’t repeat it. That previous song, although quite welcome, was a very short one for Dark Fortress, ending abruptly and without offering much in the way of unorthodox, progressive, or challenging permutations, which is what we’ve come to expect from the band as they’ve evolved. So, what of the new one, “Isa“? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): HECATE, WOMBBATH, SUTRAH, PUTRASCENSION

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 182020
 

 

This is the second part of a new-music round-up that I started here yesterday.

HECATE

Back in 2018, the first recommendation our supporter Speelie made to me, in a comment, was for Hecate’s Une voix venue d’ailleurs. That turned out to be a valuable recommendation, as I attempted to explain in my too-brief review of that superb album (here). Many other valuable recommendations by Speelie have followed, most recently his message to me about a new song by Hecate that debuted on January 12th, and a new album from them that’s set for release by Mourning Light Records (on CD) in March of this year. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): EARTH ROT, PURE WRATH, HUNTSMEN, IGORRR, THE HOLY FLESH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jan 172020
 

 

As you can see, I have ambitions to recommend quite a lot of new songs, enough to justify splitting up the collection into two parts. I can’t promise that Part 2 will arrive today, because I haven’t written it yet. Might be tomorrow before you see it, but trust me, it’s worth seeing (and mainly worth hearing) even if you have to wait until Saturday.

I confess that I chose to put these particular five songs together not only because I liked them quite a lot but also because I enjoyed the idea of giving you genre-whiplash as you move through them.

EARTH ROT

The first four songs in this collection all come from bands whose previous releases we’ve acclaimed here at the NCS hovel, and all of them now have new full-lengths headed our way in 2020. The first of those is the Australian blackened death metal band Earth Rot, whose new album Black Tides of Obscurity will be released on March 6th by Season of Mist. The first advance track, “Dread Rebirth“, is the album opener, and it arrived along with a video that’s full of interesting visual effects. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: LACASTA — “VULTURES”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jan 172020
 

 

In retrospect, we should have foreseen the surge of bands over the last five years and more who have brought elements of black metal into the traditions of metallic hardcore. Both genres have found their own ways of expressing rage and disgust, and combining them was a natural and potent means of pushing the cathartic intensity of those emotions further into the red zone.

The Italian band laCasta (from Monopoli) made their own furious foray into that hybrid musical soundscape through their 2015 EP Encyclia, and on February 28th they’ll follow that debut with an album entitled Æternvm on the label of Argonauta Records. laCasta mince no words and pull no punches. Their name itself, as the label explains, “was inspired by the system that surrounds us and controls the entire planet, where all the castes hold more power day by day”, and their music gives a powerful voice to their nihilistic world-view. We have a prime example today in our premiere of a video for a track off the new album named “Vultures“. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2019’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 10): IN MOURNING AND INSOMNIUM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2019  3 Responses »
Jan 172020
 

 

It’s a necessity to find some strategy for the selection of songs for these year-end lists because the universe of worthy candidates is so enormous. And so, as I’ve mentioned before, I make a conscious effort to present a mix of genre styles, and I also intermingle music from both well-known and much more obscure names.

For today’s installment, I’ve paired two very well-known and successful bands, both of whom have made their mark playing doom-influenced melodic death metal, but have also evolved in interesting ways. Not coincidentally, the songs I picked also include a mix of clean and harsh vocals, and both were presented through especially memorable music videos.

IN MOURNING

I was so happy that In Mourning‘s newest album Garden of Storms (reviewed by us here and here) was home to several highly infectious tracks because that allowed me, in picking one of them, to put one of my favorite pieces of 2019 cover art on our page again (credit to Necrolord). Continue reading »

OCEANS: “THE SUN AND THE COLD”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jan 172020
 

 

(Here is Andy Synn‘s review of the debut album by the Austrian-German band Oceans, released by Nuclear Blast on January 10th.)

Remember a few years back when the term “Black Metal” became so “hip” that pretty much every album released was getting referred to as “Blackened” this or “Post-Black” that… regardless of what the music actually sounded like?

Well it looks like it’s the turn of “Post Metal” to be 2020’s most wildly (and wilfully) misapplied label, as it’s only been a few weeks of the new year and I’ve already encountered numerous promo emails, press releases, and reviews touting anything with the barest hint of atmosphere or quiet/loud dynamic as being part of the resurgent “Post-Metal” zeitgeist.

Of course, you know what they say, never ascribe to malice what could be explained by ignorance (or laziness), and while this misguided (not to mention misleading) use of the term “Post Metal” by various writers/reviewers does little more than betray their lack of knowledge (or their desperation to jump on the latest bright, shiny bandwagon), some of the blame must also fall on the labels and bands themselves – including the subject of today’s review – for misusing the term in the first place.

All of which, I suppose, is just a long-winded way of saying that if you approach The Sun and the Cold expecting something in the vein of Isis, Neurosis, Cult of Luna, etc, then you’re going to be very, very disappointed (and probably a little confused too).

But if you go into it expecting some highly polished, hyper-modern (and ridiculously catchy) Melodeath then you’re far more likely to enjoy the experience! Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2019’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 9): THE GREAT OLD ONES AND POPIÓŁ

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2019  2 Responses »
Jan 162020
 

 

Welcome to the 9th installment of this list. I paired these two songs together because both of them are multi-faceted and musically elaborate, and because they’re both kind of frightening. And of course because I think they’re quite infectious.

THE GREAT OLD ONES

Lovers of Loftcraftian metal were rewarded for their devotion last fall by the arrival of Cosmicism, a new album from the great The Great Old Ones (that was not a typo). The album’s title refers to Lovecraft’s literary philosophy, summed up (in a press release we received) as the notion that “humans are godless creatures who are totally insignificant in the grand scheme of our cosmic universe”. The same press release also included this encouraging quote from the great man himself:

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” Continue reading »

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