BEST OF BRITISH: ANTE-INFERNO / BURIAL / PATRONS OF THE ROTTING GATE

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 222020
 


Ante-Inferno

 

(Andy Synn delivers another installment of his occasional series devoted to reviewing releases by bands from his UK homeland.)

So how’s everyone doing? Going a little stir-crazy? Trust me, I know the feeling.

While I’m lucky enough to still be working right now (and my foresight of buying up an entire home gym’s worth of equipment over the years is really paying off) the days are definitely starting to all blur together… heck, I’ve got a four-day weekend coming up starting tomorrow, but I’m not really all that sure what I’m going to do to try and differentiate it from the rest of the week, apart from maybe (hopefully) getting to sleep in.

One thing that’s helping me to maintain my always tentative grip on sanity, however, is music, and I’ve uncovered, discovered, or re-discovered, a whole host of bands during the lockdown period which I’m eager to share with you all, so today I’d like to direct your attention to the recently released albums from Ante-Inferno, Burial, and Patrons of the Rotting Gate. Continue reading »

AN NCS SPLIT PREMIERE: CHAOS CASCADE / KAPALA — “CONTAMINATION ALLIANCE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 222020
 

 

You listen to this new split by Chaos Cascade and Kapala and you get the sense that they don’t think the viral plague is acting fast enough. They’ve formed a Contamination Alliance to accelerate the extermination, aided by a conspiracy with Dunkelheit Produktionen who will release this audio warfare on vinyl (July 18) and digitally (May 23rd).

Germany’s Chaos Cascade, ever-prolific, returns to the slaughter grounds after two other splits and an EP also released this year. The Chaos Cascade track on this new split is “Wreak Havoc“, and that’s exactly what it does. Continue reading »

RANNOCH: “REFLECTIONS UPON DARKNESS”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
May 212020
 

 

(We present Andy Synn’s review of the astonishing new opus from the genre-bending UK band Rannoch, which is set for release on May 25th.)

How does one measure ambition?

How do we quantify it and qualify it? How do we analyse and assess it? How do we judge whether one band’s ambition to be the heaviest/fastest/most technical is somehow inferior/superior to another band’s desire to cross-pollinate multiple styles and sub-genres to create something entirely new?

And what of those bands whose central ambition is simply to be the best that they can be and to write the best songs possible? Are they any less worthy than the band who just wrote an hour long, single-track, Prog-Metal odyssey?

All these questions, and more, were floating around my head while listening to the exceptional new album from Rannoch. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: FELLAHIN FALL — “ROVER”

 Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  No Responses »
May 212020
 

 

Fellahin Fall‘s unusual musical formulation amalgamates earth-quaking heaviness and ethereal sounds of astral mystery, somber yet beguiling intonations and soaring vocal extravagance, futuristic electronic accents and vast, panoramic soundscapes that wondrously shimmer and shine. Their melodies are entrancing (both chilling and soulful), their rhythms viscerally powerful, and the atmosphere of the music seems to transport the listener across time and space into altered realms.

Fellahin Fall‘s debut album, Tar a-Kan, was just released on May 15th. As the band explain: “It’s narrated by a man in the near future who is ravaged by the change in time, technology, and himself. Tar a-Kan struggles to come to terms with his ever-changing state and the crushing urbana that surrounds him.”

The music has been described as “gothic-industrial” and as “dark-wave industrial”, and those descriptions refer to the band’s significant use of synths and keyboards, creating gleaming cascades of sound as well as darting vibrancy, and to the weight and potency of the body-moving percussive undercurrents, as well as the resonance of the singing. But those shorthand descriptions don’t fully encompass the range of sensations the music presents, or the ways in which it kindles the imagination to produce unearthly visions. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: STYGIAN CROWN

 Interviews  2 Responses »
May 212020
 

 

(On June 26th Cruz Del Sur Music will release the debut album of southern California’s Stygian Crown, whose music conjures thoughts of Candlemass and Bolt Thrower melded together — “Candlethrower” sounds. And in this new interview Comrade Aleks spoke about the music and the band’s origins and processes with three of its members.)

Rhett A. Davis stood at the roots of the Amercian doom-death scene. He’s one of Morgion’s founding members, he took part in the practices of Crimson Relic/Divine Eve, and he had the Keen Of The Crow band, who also followed a similar musical direction. Besides that, since 2001 he has performed drums in the death/black/thrash band Gravehill.

So in around 2018 he and two of his Gravehill companions Jason Thomas (bass) and Nelson Miranda (guitars) started the traditional doom band Stygian Crown, and the band got a real push when Melissa Pinion (keyboards, vocals) and Morbid Eclipse’s man Andy Hicks (guitars) joined their ranks.

How hard could the doom metal be when there are three men in the band from such an extreme crew as Gravehill? Let’s find out with Andy, Melissa, and Rhett, who are going to tell us a few details about Stygian Crown‘s forthcoming self-titled release. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: DKHARMAKHAOZ, WĘDROWCY-TUŁACZE-ZBIEGI, SEER, SORGE, SECTARIAN BLOOM, BEDSORE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  15 Responses »
May 202020
 

 

Maybe it’s the mental discombobulation that comes from being basically stuck at home for two and a half months, but I’ve noticed that I’ve started inserting things into these round-ups that don’t fit in with our usual musical interests and that sometimes violate our general (yet historically porous) rule about singing. I don’t want anyone to worry too much about this drift, because extreme underground sounds are always going to be my lodestar, but in today’s collection I’m once again indulging some musical interests that diverge from main lines of NCS.

And yes, there will again be a lot of singing. But just so you don’t get too freaked-out, I’m bookending the collection with some harsher recommendations.

DKHARMAKHAOZ

I found out about this first song just this morning, thanks to a timely message from Rennie (starkweather), who wrote: “Guitar tone is almost like early Portal, but, the bass has far more clank and clatter and then there are chord choices that are more informed by conventional black metal and folk melodies… vocalist sounds like a deadite.” Which made me lament the fact that I haven’t been clever enough to compare vocalists to deadites before. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: DEVIL WITH NO NAME — “DEVIL WITH NO NAME”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 202020
 

 

(Andy Synn introduces our premiere of the self-titled debut EP by the western U.S. black metal trio Devil With No Name, which is set for release on May 22nd.)

Unlike most Black Metal bands, Devil With No Name take their inspiration not from the chilling heart of winter but from the burning heat of the Arizona desert, whose desiccated desolation is, in its own way, just as bleak and inimical to human life as the icy vastness of the frozen wastes. Continue reading »

SYPHILIC: “EMPTY NEST”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 202020
 

 

(This is Vonlughlio’s review of the new album by Detroit-based Syphilic, which was released on May 15th.)

Today’s subject is a project that in my honest opinion is one of the sickest bands, in terms of of shock value, due to the cover art for their albums throughout the years (we’ll talk more about this in a bit). That band is Syphilic and it was formed back in 2005 in Detroit, Michigan by Brian Forgue, and to this day has released nine albums. We are going to talk about Syphilic’s latest effort Empty Nest, which from the cover to the titles and the lyrics tells a story that is not for the faint of heart. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MRTVI — “MACHINE GUN” (PORTISHEAD COVER)

 Premieres  5 Responses »
May 192020
 

 

So far, the experimental black metal band MRTVI, which is the solo project of Serbian musician Damjan Stefanović, has released two albums — Perpetual Consciousness Nightmare (2015) and Negative Atonal Dissonance (2017). Both are fascinating, and well off the usual beaten paths of black metal. As we wrote around the time that the second album was released (by Transcending Obscurity Records), MRTVI “makes a determined effort through this music to fracture reality into a shower of sharp shards and splinters, to plow madly through the constrictive channeling of experience through our perceptions, in search of an inner cosmos”.

MRTVI is at work on a new album (and you can listen to a track from it via a Transcending Obscurity label sampler HERE), but in the meantime has decided to release two cover songs, and we’re premiering one of those today in advance of its release by MRTVI’s label, Life Is A Dream Records. As you can already see from the title of this post, it’s a surprising choice — Portishead’s song “Machine Gun” from their 2008 album Third. Continue reading »

EP REVIEW PARTY: BOMBS OF HADES, TRIBE OF PAZUZU, TOMBS, KATHOLIK, SUTRAH, OVARYROT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
May 192020
 


Bombs of Hades – photo by Susan Wicher

 

(DGR prepared this collection of reviews, focusing on six 2020 EPs across a range of metal genres.)

If you’ve been reading the site recently you might’ve caught fellow writer Andy Synn doing a deep dive on six EPs that had seen recent release (here). Well, that wasn’t the only one of those on the docket, and what you’re looking at is a second collection of EPs: Stuff that I’ve noticed we haven’t dived into in print, stuff that might’ve glanced by us, and one or two that are basically on the DGR radar by proximity alone.

Musically, we’re all over the map – hell, Ovaryrot’s presence alone was likely to have that effect – as we travel through crusty death metal realms, thrashier-death and black hybrids, to black metal itself and all of its post-genre cousins, even making a trip to the tech-death world to say hi to those over-complicated goofballs and their tendency to try to write everything and the kitchen sink into five-minute chunks, before finally winding up on the doorstep of some nightmare music, because who the hell needs to sleep?

So if you saw the previous six EPs and thought, “Wow, what a fantastic idea”, then settle in my oddly specific friend because do we have a treat for you, another six EPs of music that have hit over the past few months for you to check out and bang your head to. Continue reading »

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