AN NCS PREMIERE: LARES — “GREY HAZE”

 Premieres  6 Responses »
May 052020
 

 

Berlin-based Lares made a striking first impression with their 2017 debut release, Mask of Discomfort. Induced to explore it by a description that recommended the music “for people who like dark doomy and sludgy riffs with a touch of black metal covered in clouds of psychedelics”, what we found was a big juggernaut of sound that took us on a hellish road trip, with slower detours that were both staggeringly crushing and nightmarishly hallucinatory, and the music proved to be melodically memorable as well.

We’re told that since then Lares embarked on a new path of evolution that began in late 2018 with the formation of their current lineup, and that path led them to the creation of a new album named Towards Nothingness (adorned by the distinctive artwork of the great Polish painter Mariusz Lewandowski), and to a partnership with Argonauta Records, who will release the record on June 20th.

We have been eager to learn where the journey of Lares has taken them, and now we can share with you a signpost, a stunning first track from Towards Nothingness entitled “Grey Haze“. Continue reading »

UMBRA VITAE: “SHADOW OF LIFE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
May 052020
 

 

(This is Wil Cifer‘s review of the debut album by Umbra Vitae, which was released on May 1st by Deathwish Inc.)

Converge is one of my favorite bands. Yeah, I know they are not metal. Even their singer Jacob Bannon admits this and calls his band hyper-aggressive. But they are very influenced by metal, and on albums like Petitioning the Empty Sky you can hear Slayer dripping from the riffs.

Jacob might perform in a hardcore band, but he has a love for death metal that inspired him to put Umbra Vitae together. He enlisted guitarists from Hatebreed and The Red Chord, along with the ex- drummer from Job For a Cowboy and the bassist from The Red Chord.

So I went into this album with Converge as the bar by which I was going to be measuring it. It did not disappoint. This is not a love letter to Morbid Angel, though you can hear their influence in places. I would have been let down if this had been a color-by-numbers death metal album. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MEAN MESSIAH — “DIVINE TECHNOLOGY”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
May 042020
 

 

Mean Messiah‘s new album Divine Technology is over-the-top in nearly every way, from the full-tilt but machine-precise drum obliteration to the soaring vocal harmonies, from the riotously dismantling grooves to the swarming guitar savagery, from the sweeping symphonic layers to the vast panoply of unhinged vocal extremity. It’s a combination of theatrical spectacle and industrial-strength demolition job which at various times brings to mind Strapping Young Lad, Devon Townsend‘s The Retinal Circus, Fear Factory, latter-day Dimmu, Yes, and even Aborted.

The thing is, this Czech trio (who sound like their line-up is a 100-strong army) throw caution to the winds in a way that makes their explosive energy contagious. They revel in their bombastic excess, packing as much as they can into each of these seven tracks, bound and determined to leave their audience breathless, and with ruined necks and spinning heads, and it’s hard not to get caught up and carried away by both the sheer enthusiasm and the surgical execution.

Divine Technology will be released tomorrow (May 5th) by Slovak Metal Army, and we’ve got a full stream of the madness today, along with further notes about the experience. Continue reading »

KARMACIPHER: “INTROSPECTRUM”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
May 042020
 

 

(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by Hong Kong’s Karmacipher, which was released on April 30 by Infree Records.)

Before we go any further, please indulge me for a moment, if you will (or just skip on down to the “Continue reading” button) while I go off on a little bit of a tangent.

It’s undeniable that a lot of Metal writing/reviewing tends to focus on bands from Europe and North America. Sure, South America gets an occasional look-in, while isolated outliers like Iceland and Australia have been punching well above their weight over the last couple of years, but generally speaking bands from Africa and/or Asia in particular still tend to struggle to get wider coverage.

Heck, even when they do, they’re often either treated with patronising condescension or exoticised for having some sort of cultural “gimmick” (see every band who’s been given a 10/10 review just because they use native instruments or sing in a language other than English), and it’s always struck me as a little bit off  the way certain sections of the Metal media seem to insist that bands need to sound authentically “foreign” or “exotic” enough before they’ll cover them.

The truth is that great music, great Metal, can come from anywhere. And it doesn’t/shouldn’t have to fit into some preconceived notion of what music from a certain place “should” sound like.

Case in point, there’s nothing about the sublime second album from this Hong Kong trio which ties it to a specific location, nationality or culture. But that doesn’t matter. Because the only culture it’s trying to represent is Death Metal, and it does that phenomenally. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: VORGA — “CATARACT MIND”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 042020
 

 

The Germany-based multinational black metal band Vorga made a striking first impression with their February 2019 debut EP, Radiant Gloom. With a modern production approach that delivered the music with vibrant immediacy, razor-sharp clarity, and visceral power, the EP revealed a band capable of combining full-throttle ferocity, bone-bruising heaviness, and emotionally penetrating melodies with a sheen of cosmic mystery and menace but also well-shaded by the old northern darkness and a knack for revealing human frailty and resilience. Each song had its own character, and each one proved to be memorable (and if you haven’t heard it, get yourself here and do that).

Greeted with enthusiasm by both critics and fans alike, Radiant Gloom drew the attention of Transcending Obscurity Records, which signed Vorga for the release of their debut album, Striving Toward Oblivion. The disruptions of the Covid-19 pandemic have delayed the album’s release to some indefinite date later this year, and so to bridge the gap Vorga decided to release a stand-alone single, which will not appear on the new album. Its name is “Cataract Mind“, and we are privileged to premiere it today as it becomes available for download on Bandcamp. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SONGS FROM “PRISONERS OF THE SOLAR SYSTEM” — A SPLIT BY SATANATH AND STRIBORG

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 042020
 

 

Today we are presenting two tracks from a split, one by each band. They create a fascinating complement to each other. Both are mysterious, barely tethered to our material plane. Both of them are capable of provoking wonder, and both create trance-like reactions. But one is enlivened by a kind of eerie brightness, while the other is the stuff of nightmares.

That’s only one person’s impression, and you may take other sensations away from hearing them. But what’s undeniable is that both tracks nourish the imagination. The resulting visions will be highly personal to the listener, and maybe not even intersecting with the visions of the creators, but both are triggers for waking dreams.

The name of the split, almost 80 minutes in length, is Prisoners of the Solar System, and the participants are both one-person projects, Satanath from Russia and Striborg from Australia. All the songs are new. It will be released jointly by GrimmDistribution and Death Portal Studio on the 31st of May. Continue reading »

A DOUBLE REVIEW: HAVOK AND WARBRINGER

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
May 042020
 


Havok

 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli combines reviews of the new albums by Havok (released on May 1st by Century Media) and Warbringer (released on April 24th by Napalm Records.)

Thrash metal is in a funny place to me.  Ever since the resurgence of it, a lot of bands have desperately clung to the nostalgia bait of writing music that sounds like an authentic representation of what you would’ve heard in the ’80s or early ’90s.  What’s really kind of joke-worthy about this trend is that what we ended up seeing was a bunch of guys trying to sell you nostalgia and engaging in probably extreme metal’s most overt tailspin into cynical capitalist consumerism.  Most of the resurgence of thrash in the modern age has thus been pretty soulless and pretty meme-worthy.

As a consequence, the thrash metal that’s good nowadays shrugs off that nostalgia bait and moves forward.  The best of it embraces the evolution of the style up to its recession in 1992 or so and has then seen some of the best material written in the whole sub-genre in the 2010‘s.

So, we’re doing some shorter-length reviews today of two thrash metal records that embody this ideal.  Thrash metal that retains the foundation but has adapted to the times. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ASCENDENCY, BIESY, HELGAMITE, KENAZ, NEKUS, OMINATION, TITHE

 SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
May 032020
 


Ascendency

 

We’ve now entered the second full month of a government-ordered shutdown here in Washington State, with only minimal re-openings permitted before June, and maybe not even then. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the country communities are being encouraged to become human petri dishes by venturing out to movie theaters, gyms, restaurants, beaches, etc. Good luck to them. I’ll be interested to see what grows within their cells, or doesn’t.

Meanwhile I’ll try to suppress my own depression and anxiety over the prospect of another month within these walls, and continue to sift through the great mass of new metal in an effort to make my life, and perhaps yours, a little more harrowing and wretched. To that end, below you will find six individual tracks and one album to stream. I also have a collection of other complete releases I would like to recommend. Maybe tomorrow…. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: HOUR OF PENANCE

 Interviews, WAXING LYRICAL  2 Responses »
May 022020
 

 

(For this new edition of a column devoted to lyrics in metal Andy Synn obtained insights from Paolo Pieri, who for the last decade has been lyricist, vocalist, and guitarist in the Italian death metal band Hour of Penance.)

If you don’t know the name Hour of Penance, well, chances are you’re either new to this site and/or new to Metal in general, as we’ve been fans of these Italian iconoclasts (who celebrated twenty years of existence by releasing their eighth album just last year) for a long, long time now.

In my own case it was stumbling across a copy of The Vile Conception in my local (now sadly defunct) independent record store (remember those?) which first introduced me to the band and their brand of ultra-intense, hook-heavy Death Metal and which led, by a complex, convoluted route, to actually supporting them on a short run of dates in the UK at the end of last year!

As you might have gathered, this edition of Waxing Lyrical is particularly special to me, and so I’d like to send out a personal thank you to HoP frontman Paolo Pieri for taking the time to craft such an interesting and well-thought-out series of responses for us.

Now, without further ado… Continue reading »

ALTERNATIVE RELEASE DAY ROUND-UP: AZZIARD / BÂ’A / FROM THE VASTLAND / GRAV MORBUS / IRDORATH / NOCTRIULM / ORDER OF ORIAS

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
May 012020
 


Azziard

(On another day when Bandcamp is waiving its revenue share, Andy Synn provides a timely collection of reviews, focusing on seven new black metal albums.)

It’s been another busy week for me, both personally and professionally, which means I’m currently writing this article in a bit of a rush.

But, considering that the fine folks at Bandcamp Inc. have elected to once again waive their fees for the day, it seemed extra vital that I get this piece finished and published on time and under budget so that you’ll be able to support these artists in a way that benefits them even more directly.

Today’s feature, as some of you might have guessed, is focussed firmly on the Black Metal end of the spectrum, and covers a plethora of absolutely killer (in more ways than one) albums, some of which have only just been released, others which have been available for a little (or a lot) longer than that, but which are all more than worthy of your attention. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries