LISTMANIA 2019: ROLLING STONE’S LIST OF THE 10 BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2019

 LISTMANIA 2019  9 Responses »
Dec 122019
 

 

Here’s another entry in the part of our annual LISTMANIA orgy where we re-post lists of metal from “big platform” web sites and print zines — the kind of places that get a lot more eyeballs on them than festering little metal-only hovels like ours.

Rolling Stone magazine should need no introduction, so I’m not going to provide one. Not long ago they published their list of The 50 Best Albums of 2019. The sub-headline for the article reads as follows:  “From ‘Lover’ to ‘Cuz I Love You,’ ‘Death Race to Love,’ and beyond, here are the records that defined the year”. The list didn’t exactly define the year for metal. In fact, I didn’t spot even one metal album on that list. Not one.

However, more recently Rolling Stone published a separate list of The 10 Best Metal Albums of 2019 (presented by Mercedes-Benz, because of course that’s the brand preferred by most metal bands when they’re throwing around their big piles of cash). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEAD WOMAN’S DITCH — “HRAEFN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 112019
 

 

Time dims memories. Two-and-a-half years is not an eon, but long enough that I managed to lose track of where the name Dead Woman’s Ditch came from. It was that long ago that we premiered a song from this UK band’s debut album, Seo Mere Saetan, subsequently released in August 2017 by Third I Rex. When I re-read that earlier post, the explanation chilled my skin all over again. To repeat: Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: SOLOTHUS

 Interviews  1 Response »
Dec 112019
 


Solothus 2019 – Photo by Jami Kallioväli

 

(Today we present a new interview conducted by Comrade Aleks, and this time he has talked with Kari Kankaanpää, vocalist of the Finnish band Solothus, who have a new album coming our way in 2020 via 20 Buck Spin.)

Usually I try not to bother bands with questions about the origins of their names, and use Google to find the answers. It was a hard task to dig out what Solothus means, so their vocalist Kari Kankaanpää has explained it to me: “In ancient Finnish folklore there is this creature called “solothus” which comes in the darkest winter nights to bring diseases to households. Only way to satisfy the spirit is a blood sacrifice.” Nice story for a start!

The band itself has performed macabre yet quite epic death doom metal since 2017. They weren’t that fast –their debut Summoned From The Void was released in 2013, about six years after they started — and you could skip it indeed, but no one could ignore Solothus’ 2016 sophomore work No King Reigns Eternal, a healthy example of the band’s development towards thicker and more thoughtful sound. The gents finished their third album a few weeks ago, so let’s try to find out from Kari more details about Solothus’ career. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SLAVE ONE — “LIGHTLESS PERSPECTIVES”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Dec 102019
 

 

The old year is fast rushing to a close, and the new one will be upon us before we know it. 2020 will be given an explosive start thanks to Dolorem Record‘s January 24 release of a new album by the French death-dealers in Slave One. This new full-length, which adds to a discography that already includes a pair of well-received EPs and the band’s impressive 2016 debut album (Disclosed Dioptric Principles), is entitled Omega Disciples, and today we present an album track named “Lightless Perspectives“.

References to such bands as Cynic, Pestilence, and Gorod may help prepare you for the experience of this music, but the song’s obliterating brutality and its mind-exploding instrumental mania are so riveting that it’s unlikely you’ll be capable of thinking about anything else but becoming rapidly enslaved to Slave One. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ARKONA — “AGE OF CAPRICORN”

 Premieres  9 Responses »
Dec 102019
 

 

Three years ago we had the privilege of premiering a complete stream of Lunaris, the sixth album by the long-running Polish black metal band Arkona. Today we’re fortunate to host the premiere of Arkona‘s seventh album, Age of Capricorn, in a career that’s now more than a quarter-century long. If this were to become a tradition, we would be quite happy, because Arkona have once again demonstrated, in astonishing fashion, that the fires which set them ablaze so long ago have not diminished in the least, but seem to be reaching new heights of extravagance

The band’s particular formulation of black metal is by now well-established, and their devotion to it is unswerving. Their music, as manifested so powerfully in this new record, set for release on December 13th by Debemur Morti Productions, disdains the mundane and the commonplace. Delivered with dominating supremacy, it combines unchecked ferocity, emotionally powerful melody, and an atmosphere of terrible, otherworldly grandeur and shattering bleakness. It seems to embrace death and to manifest visions of what lies beyond the pathetic scrabbling of daily existence. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BLOODTRUTH — “INNER RESURRECTION”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Dec 092019
 

 

In August of last year, little more than one month before the release of the new album by Bloodtruth (entitled Martyrium), we had the good fortune to premiere a scorcher of a track from the new record — which we introduced in this way:

“As a general rule, generalizing is fraught with risk. For every sweeping statement, someone will come up with a hundred exceptions. Yet there’s more than a kernel of truth in the observation that Italian death metal tends to live in the fast lane. It often seems like the Autobahn of death metal, in which bands with adrenaline for blood race so fast and furiously that the wheels leave the ground, trailing flames. Bloodtruth is a prime example of this phenomenon — and the explosive extravagance of their highly accelerated attack is indeed phenomenal. Witness this new song we’re bringing you today through a lyric video.”

And now here we are, more than a year onward from the release of Martyrium by Unique Leader Records, and we again find ourselves in the fortunate position of hosting the premiere of a new Bloodtruth video. This one, handsomely crafted by filmmaker Guglielmo Sergio, is for a song from Martyrium named “Inner Resurrection“. Continue reading »

UNSUNG HEROES OF 2019: CARONTE / IAPETUS / NAGA

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Dec 092019
 

Caronte

 

(Andy Synn prepared this collection of reviews, covering three excellent 2019 albums to which we haven’t previously devoted sufficient attention.)

Despite promising to take some time off after last week’s orgy of lists here I am, back again, with more bands/albums for you to check out.

My plan, as it stands right now, is to spend the next week or two, if/when I can, catching up with a few bands who either missed out on last week’s year-end round-up, or who made the lists but haven’t received a full write-up here as of yet.

The reviews themselves may be a little shorter than usual, simply due to time constraints on my end, but hopefully they’ll prove just as insightful as ever. Cough…

Anyway, today we’ve got some groovesome Satanic Doom, some progressively inclined Melodeath, and some nasty Blackened Sludge, so there should be something for (almost) everyone to discover. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: STEREOGUM’S LIST OF THE BEST METAL ALBUMS OF 2019

 LISTMANIA 2019  8 Responses »
Dec 092019
 

 

Stereogum easily qualifies as one of the “big platform” web sites whose year-end lists of metal we perennially include in our LISTMANIA series. Of course, the site appeals to an audience of music fans much larger than devoted metalheads (they have, for example, a list of the “50 Best Albums of 2019“ across many musical genres — which includes only two albums that I think would qualify as metal), but its staff includes a talented and tasteful group of metal writers who among other things are responsible for the site’s monthly “The Black Market” column, which has been a great source of discovery for extreme music for seven years running now.

It follows that Stereogum‘s annual metal list is one I especially look forward to seeing every year, and the 2019 edition appeared last Friday. It consists of only 10 entries, collectively assembled by Ian Chainey, Aaron Lariviere, and Wyatt Marshall (and perhaps the ghost of Michael Nelson). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ISRATHOUM — “ARROWS FROM BELOW”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 092019
 

 

In wrestling with how to put impressions of Israthoum’s new album into words, the phrase “dead reckoning” popped into my disoriented mind. As a navigational technique, it’s a method of estimating where you are based on where you began, taking into account variables such as speed and direction over the course of the journey. In some circumstances, it might be the best you can do in determining your present position, but it’s prone to the accumulation of errors, and may leave you not knowing accurately where you are, or how to find your way back.

It’s a very “loose” metaphor, and one that applies more to my efforts to introduce the album stream than to the album itself. Arrows From Below is most definitely a journey — and a harrowing one at that, a journey of hellish upheaval and frightening revelation, both ruinous and numinous — but of course you can easily find your way back to the beginning, and re-trace the journey. On the other hand, from the experience of a listener, that journey is likely to leave you in a very different place emotionally than where you began, and at least in my case, also with only error-prone methods of trying to describe that end-position and what happened over the course of the album to produce the change. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): AARDLING, THANATONAUT, DOPAMINE

 Exceptions to the Rule, SHADES OF BLACK  8 Responses »
Dec 082019
 

 

Hallelujah! I managed to finish Part 2 of today’s column. Whether you finish listening to all the music is a different question, because between Part 1 and this installment there’s quite a lot to be absorbed. Hopefully you’ll discover something (or several somethings) worth the effort.

AARDLING

I mentioned at the outset that today’s collection would include bands whose names you won’t find at Metal-Archives, and Aardling‘s debut album Transmit To A Distance is one of them — not that this bothers me, nor should it bother you. Continue reading »

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