AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLDEN LIGHT — “SACRED COLOUR OF THE SOURCE OF LIGHT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Apr 202020
 

 

Golden Light are a new band formed by E. Henderson (also of Njiqahdda), who handles all instruments and sounds, and vocalist Meghan Wood (Crown of Asteria). Their debut album, Sacred Colour of the Source of Light, will be released by Iron Bonehead Productions on April 24th. William Blake‘s painting “The Great Red Dragon and the Woman Clothed in Sun” makes for a perfect cover, given the nature of the music.

Regarding that nature, Iron Bonehead’s publicist has written of these four songs (three of which are of significant length), “their spectral sorrows shoot a brilliance that’s blinding and bellicose in equal measure: a mystical, sun-drenched swarm of sound that embodies and defies black metal simultaneously, orthodoxy UN-done and recast”.

The tendency to portray the music in words used mainly for visual experience is irresistible (as you will see), but the music also has a near-relentless physical momentum that in itself becomes a method of creating a trance, as well as a multi-faceted effect on the emotions. Continue reading »

IRIST: “ORDER OF THE MIND”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Apr 202020
 

 

(Andy Synn recently wrote a three-line haiku of the new album by Irist, but now we have a second (and lengthier) opinion by Seattle-based writer Gonzo. The album is out now via Nuclear Blast.)

Atlanta sludge/prog unit Irist may be only one album into their young careers, but one listen to their ferocious debut Order of the Mind would have you believe otherwise. Both satisfyingly brutal and tastefully melodic throughout, the album displays the precise technicality of Mastodon and Gojira mixed with the savagery of early Soulfly. The result is something that scratches an itch you might not even realize you had.

Boasting thunderous riffs, head-nodding grooves, vocals that blast like sandpaper on balsa wood, and a rhythm section that sounds determined to use your head as a snare drum, Order of the Mind pummels its way through its 10-track length like it has something to prove. Given that it’s a major-label debut, maybe that was intentional. What it proves, though, is something bigger — it sees Irist obviously paying homage to the influences of the aforementioned bands, but it adds a layer of originality that’s markedly harder to pull off. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: “LEVIATHAN III”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 202020
 

 

The German band Bait (whose three-man line-up includes a member of Der Weg einer Freiheit) embarked on its musical journey in 2013, and it has indeed been a journey. Embracing bruising metallic hardcore as its focal point, the band has moved in other directions, principally blackened ones but also incorporating ingredients of sludge and doom, with an increasing atmospheric content, without completely abandoning the animating spirit and iron-hard grooves of hardcore, or the scraped-raw fury and anguish of the vocals.

For the moment, the band’s journey has reached a culmination in their intense new album Revelation of the Pure, which the releasing label Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions describes as “a piece of shear nihilistic and utterly destructive music”. This new record will be digitally released on May 22nd, with physical editions to follow, and what we have for you today is a lyric video for a track from it called “Leviathan III“, which as its name suggests is linked to tracks from the band’s first two releases. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: WORM

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Apr 202020
 

 

(In this new interview Comrade Aleks spoke with the principal creator behind the Floridian extreme metal band Worm, whose latest album Gloomlord was released by Iron Bonehead this past January.)

Being born amidst the swamps of Florida as a solo project, Worm was a black metal outfit run by Phantom Slaughter, a.k.a. Wurm. He recorded two demos on his own — The Deep Dark Earth Underlines All (2014) and Nights In Hell (2016), and then he met a like-minded person.

Since 2017 Phantom Slaughter has worked together with Equimanthorn, and their collaboration has resulted in two full-length albums, Evocation Of The Black Marsh (2017) and Gloomlord (2020). Both albums were released by the famous Iron Bonehead Productions and both demonstrate Worm’s tendency towards a new direction – dirty and savage blackened death doom in its most nihilistic form.

How is it there in the Floridian underground? Let’s take a look together with Phantom Slaughter himself. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): CARPE NOCTEM AND ÁRSTÍÐIR LÍFSINS — “ALDRNARI”

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Apr 192020
 

 

Earlier today I promised a second installment in this weekly column, and this is it, though it focuses on only a single release — but it’s a big one, album-length in size and featuring the work of two bands who have always made a big and very favorable impression: Carpe Noctem and Árstíðir lífsins.

The name of this new split is Aldrnari and it’s set for release by Ván Records on April 24th. It features cover art by Artem Grigoryev and is said to explore “themes of death and war, fire and life”. Each band contributed one song to the split, each of them more than 22 minutes in length, and both are now up for listening on YouTube. We’ll briefly consider them one at a time. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): IMPIETY, AKATECHISM, SLIDHR, EAVE, GOLDEN LIGHT, HEILUNG

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
Apr 192020
 

 

You may have noticed that I didn’t post anything yesterday, a rare missed Saturday opportunity. I participated in three virtual happy hours on Friday afternoon and evening and somehow didn’t understand that I wasn’t required to drink straight through all of them. Saturday taught me that lesson, brutally.

I’ll try to make up for lost time today with two installments of this usual Sunday column.

IMPIETY

Versus All Gods is the ninth full-length by this famous Singapore band, and the first one since 2012’s Revenge & Conquer. In those seven years two new guitarists joined the line-up, and something happened to the song-writing as well — something that seemed to convey rejuvenation, a return to the thermonuclear energies that fueled earlier releases, coupled with the mastery that comes with experience, sort of like a barbarian horde that has learned through decades of successful conquest how to decimate even more powerfully and brutally. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: GORLVSH — “SHEPPARD ONE IS DOWN”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 172020
 

 

When DECIBEL premiered “Wait For Me“, the first single off the forthcoming debut album of Montreal’s Gorlvsh (pronounced Gore-Lush), they compared the band’s music to a combination of Converge, Death from Above 1979, and Lightning Bolt, “an amalgam of math rock angularity, crushing metallic riffs, off-kilter rhythms and a few catchy hooks in there for good measure”. Gorlvsh themselves described the song as “our attempt to rip off NAILS and be heavy AF”, and as “the song where we finally nailed down the tone we wanted from the unconventional bass rig”.

The bass tone is maybe more important than you realize, because Gorlvsh don’t use a guitar. It’s just bassist Nick Boucher slinging the riffs in ways that provide a lot more than groove, drummer Noah Baxter working in an exhilarating amount of intricacy to go along with a lot of skull-busting, and vocalist Isaac Ruder adding both bleeding-edge intensity and melodic hooks. The result is music that’s sometimes bizarre and mentally unbalancing, sometimes gut-slugging, and sometimes downright enthralling — and rarely follows a straight line.

To go along with that first single, today we’re presenting “Sheppard One Is Down.” This time the band told us the track was their “attempt to rip off a tune from Converge’s last record, but diverged immediately and became something totally different, far slower and more atmospheric than the average Gorlvsh tune.” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: IMPAVIDA — “GRAM”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Apr 172020
 

 

On May 8th Prophecy Productions will release a stunning album-length split by two formidable atmospheric black metal bands, the Dutch trio Vuur & Zijde (“fire and silk”), which features members of Laster, Nusquama and Terzij de Horde, and the enigmatic duo, one German and one American, who call themselves Impavida .

The three songs by Vuur & Zijde mark the recording debut of this new formation, while the two tracks by Impavida add to a discography that includes two full-lengths on Ván Records since 2008, the most recent of which (the astonishing Antipode) we premiered and reviewed here last year.

What we have for you today is the premiere of one of Impavida‘s two songs, one named “Gram“, as well as an impressionistic linguistic preview of what the band’s monumental second track holds in store for you (at a later time we’ll have something to say about the music of Vuur & Zijde). Continue reading »

NCS PREMIERE: AFSKY — “TYENDE SANG”

 Premieres  4 Responses »
Apr 172020
 

 

The second full-length album by the Danish black metal band Afsky is entitled ofte jeg drømmer mig død, which translates to ”often I dream myself dead”. The songs are based on a number of old Danish poems and texts by artists such as H.C. Andersen, Jeppe Aakjær, and Emil Aarestrup, and could be viewed, at least in part, as a tribute to a history of Danish lyricism and poetry.

The cover image for the new album is a painting by H.A.Bredekilde named “Udslidt”, which means “worn out”. We’re told that Afsky selected the painting because it “fits well with several of the selected texts for the record, which are precisely about the little man, who must work until he dies, for the higher classes in society”.

Consistent with the lyrical inspirations and that attention-grabbing cover art, there are also qualities in the music of Afsky that are poetic, even elegant in their own way, and also deeply sad. Yet as you’ll discover in listening to the song from the album we’re premiering today — “Tyende Sang” — there is also tremendous visceral power in the music as well as turbulent emotional intensity and sweeping melodic grandeur. Continue reading »

ANDY SYNN PRESENTS: REVIEWS IN HAIKUS (GHOSTS OF THE SUN, IRIST, LUCTUS, MAIASTRA, ORANSSI PAZUZU, SOLOTHUS)

 Reviews In Haikus  6 Responses »
Apr 172020
 

 

(Nineteen months after the last time he did this, Andy Synn has brought us another collection of three-line album reviews.)

I have to thank our buddies over at the Toilet Ov Hell for inspiring this brand new edition of “Reviews In Haikus”.

After all, if they hadn’t recently tried to steal my thunder then I probably would have forgotten all about this particular column (it turns out I haven’t done one since September 2018).

It’s good timing too, as there’s been a bunch of newly released (or newly discovered) albums from the past couple of months which I’ve been itching to write about, but which I simply haven’t found the right time (or right format) to cover properly.

So, without further ado, here’s a collection of reviews/critiques/comments all delivered in the form of the ageless haiku. Continue reading »

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