AN NCS INTERVIEW (PART 1): DARK FORTRESS (MOREAN)

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Mar 302020
 

 

(Today we present the first part of an extensive two-part interview that our Norway-based contributor Karina Noctum conducted with Morean of Dark Fortress (and Alkaloid and Noneuclid), and we are grateful to him for devoting so much time and thought in furnishing the answers.)

The latest Dark Fortress album, Spectres from the Old World, released back in February, has gotten good reviews. This is not surprising and it is a natural consequence of the amount of experience the musicians that form part of this band have. Both Ylem and Venereal Dawn are on my playlist of favorite BM albums, and I must say the latest album made it as well, of course. It is not just more of the same though, it has a distinct touch, it stands on its own, and it fulfilled my expectations.

I took the opportunity to interview Morean, who I admire a lot both as a composer and as an excellent, multifaceted metal musician. His musical expertise makes all his bands and contributions truly interesting. In fact one of his orchestrations of the three parts of the Requiem performed by Triptykon and the Dutch Metropole Orkest at Roadburn Festival is coming out soon through Prowling Death Records / Century Media Records. There are many interesting projects and bands surrounding Morean but the focus of the first part of this in-depth interview is going to be Spectres from the Old World, its composition, its music, and other particulars surrounding its release. In the second part of this interview we will deal solely with the lyrical themes, which are complex and very interesting. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE AND REVIEW: CONSUMER (SELF-TITLED EP)

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Mar 302020
 

 

The Italian band Consumer make no pretense at all about what they’ve done on their self-titled debut EP. They confess that it is “ugly music”: “In this record we’ve put not only our musical influences, but the life-related ones as well. Its deformities and its horrors, its disharmonies and its incommunicability. We’re three different people who are united by the fact of being constantly disoriented in this world. We try to contain the problem with almost unplayable breakdowns, feedbacks and screams.”

There’s much more to the music than unplayable breakdowns, feedbacks, and screams, but what it all adds up to is mutilating punishment — maniacally destructive at times, noxious and diseased at others, and completely oppressive and hopeless at still other times. The impact is often electrifying, but just as often it threatens to beat you senseless and choke you lifeless. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: BALMOG, IRAE, SØRGELIG, LEBENSSUCHT, SYMBIOTIC GROWTH

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Mar 292020
 

 

After all the listening and writing I’ve done this weekend, honestly I’m out of gas. So let’s just go right to it….

BALMOG

We begin with a track that roams far and wide over its significant length. In the band’s own words, “18 minutes of oppression and mysticism”, but there’s more than that. The music is eerie and crushing, dissonant and disturbed, wailing and delirious, vicious and violent, spectral and sepulchral, swaggering and priapic, bombastic and bruising, grand and glorious — and also home to some head-hooking riffs and spectacular soloing. The vocals are wide-ranging as well, more often than not frighteningly insane, but also spine-tingling when they soar. In its cadences, it stomps, rocks, races, crawls, and drifts away into a rhythm-less ether. Continue reading »

(OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 3 OF 3): RALE, REEK, SICK SAD WORLD, SODOMISERY, SUMMIT, THE DITCH AND THE DELTA, UNMERCIFUL, VENTR

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 292020
 

 

At last, I’ve called a halt to my effort to pump so much new music into your ears that your brain drowns in it (though I still have plans for a SHADES OF BLACK column later today, so I guess I’m only pausing rather than stopping). Picking up from Part 2, the alphabetical ordering of bands continues here, R through V.

RALE (U.S.)

We begin with four tracks of roaring, howling, mind-warping death/grind courtesy of these North Carolina marauders. Veering between gargantuan roars and shattering screams, the vocals are truly ferocious; there’s a mountainous bass presence; and the riffing shifts from utterly crazed to sickeningly dismal and apocalyptically calamitous. The band inflict truly brutish, skull-flattening punishment; sometimes the distorted fretwork sounds like a giant excavation machine at work in a quarry; and they are equally adept at igniting conflagrations of ravaging chaos. Explosive and electrifying…. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 2 OF 3): ACÂRASH, AVOID HUMANITY, BLEED FROM WITHIN, BOLESNO GRINJE, NAGLFAR, NERO OR THE FALL OF ROME, O, OKKULTOKRATI

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Mar 292020
 

 

I did say in the abbreviated Part 1 of this round-up yesterday that there would be a lot more coming — so much that a Part 3 will be on its way later today. In these two Parts I organized the music in alphabetical order by band name, with Alpha through Omega in this installment and then picking up with letters after O in Part 3.

This is the stuff that stuck out to me as I waded through a big mass of new music and videos yesterday. I had to make myself stop, because this could have been a lot longer. I siphoned off some of the black metal I found, and they will be included in today’s SHADES OF BLACK column. Yeah, this is going to be a big NCS Sunday….

ACÂRASH (Norway)

This hard-rocking track is swaggering and sulphurous. It will rumble your guts and bob your head, and the pulsing energy of the riffs is highly infectious. With scorching black-metal vocals, a spiraling and shrieking solo, and occult lyrical themes, it’s a hellish — and hellishly good — song. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1): KREATOR, LIGHT DWELLER, DISROTTER

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Mar 282020
 

 

Thanks to the amazing Zoom service, I participated in a couple of virtual happy-hour celebrations last night, woke up woozy as a result of that, and then had to do a work-related Zoom conference for an hour and a half this morning. So I’m getting a very late start on this post.

I thought about just not posting anything this Saturday due to the lateness of the hour and my still-hungover condition, but then remembered this recent comment by a regular reader: “Especially now, when days morph into each other and life has slowed down considerably – and we have time to think about perhaps less pleasant facets to our lives – structure and regularity are important. New music, to me at least, is an important element to this….” I feel the same way. And so I decided to at least make a brief start on another giant collection of new music, and then finish it in a MUCH larger Part 2 of this tomorrow.

KREATOR (Germany)

I was helpless to resist beginning this collection with “666-World Divided“. It’s such a blood-pumping, neck-wrecking blast to listen to, with wonderfully vicious vocals, a glorious chorus (that puts me in mind of Scandinavian melodic death metal), delicious soloing, and a segue into very sinister territory with choral voices. The video for the song is also a blast to watch. Continue reading »

ALTERNATIVE RELEASE DAY ROUND-UP: AUTOMB / CHRONICLE / NOMAD / OMEGA INFINITY / WARP CHAMBER

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Mar 272020
 


Automb

 

(Andy Synn prepared this collection of reviews, all addressing fine albums that are being released today.)

It’s a very busy Friday for releases this week, both big and small. Some of them we’ve covered here already (Aodon, Perdition Temple, The Malice), some of them we’ll probably get to over the next couple of weeks… maybe… and some of them have already received significant coverage elsewhere.

The purpose of today’s column however is to highlight a handful of bands/albums which might not necessarily receive the same amount of attention and/or adoration as some of the bigger or more high-profile releases, beginning with… drum roll please… Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VITAM ET MORTEM — “LOS CUERPOS EN EL RIO”

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Mar 272020
 

 

With 18 years of continuous work and five studio albums behind them, the Colombian band Vitam Et Mortem are now returning with their sixth full-length, which is set for release on April 13th by Satanath Records (Russia) and Exhumed Records (Ecuador). Entitled El Río De La Muerte (River of Death), it is a conceptual work that functions as an exercise in historical memory — focusing on the armed conflict that has scourged Colombia for the past 60 years. In doing so, the album makes a comparison between the Magdalena River in Colombia and the Acheron river of Greek mythology, one of the five rivers of the underworld, known as “the river of woe”.

The band’s significant years of work and ever-evolving musical explorations have resulted in a truly fascinating listening experience, and an unusual stylistic amalgam that intertwines elements of black and death metal, ritual and folk influences, and the union of ravaging brutality and mesmerizing melody. As a great example of these achievements, we present today a lyric video for a song called “Los cuerpos en el río” (“The corpses in the river”). Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: ANTE-INFERNO — “OATH”

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Mar 272020
 

 

Fane is the forthcoming debut album of the British black metal band Ante-Inferno. In its inspirations and conceptions, it embraces a dark view of ancient and perilous mysteries hidden within the natural (and supernatural) world, its title representing a place where those eternal secrets persist:

“The Fane is a house of secrets, a house of stories, a vault of the treasured knowledge that mankind has forgotten; it is a chalice of truth in an age of lies. It stands within the great forest that covers this land from coast to windswept coast, its glades and glorious canopy unseen by blinded eyes. The way to its door is written between the notes of the old songs and behind the lines of the tales that reverberate with the honesty of the ages. Behind its many doors are many pathways and many are the eyes that watch from the shadows that gather around its blazing hearth. It teems with restless ghosts and creatures whose thirst for blood is as endless as the Fane itself. It is all your world is not – the eternal centre of what was and will forever be.”

In its music, the album is incredibly intense, but intense in different ways. To quote from the advance press materials, because this passage is spot-on, it combines “aching atmosphere and rabid ferocity, icy grandeur and raging flames against a midnight sky”.

No one song completely reveals all the sensations created by the album, whose songs flow into each other and represent steps along a winding path. But the song we’re presenting today through a stunning video — “Oath” — is certainly a compelling example of the album’s achievements. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: BYTHOS — “SORATH THE OPPOSER”

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Mar 262020
 

 

Although a new alliance, the Finnish black metal band Bythos boasts a seasoned line-up of performers who come from other groups whose names will be known to every fan of black metal — Behexen, Horna, Sargeist, and Ajattara. In this new formation they’ve combined their talents to create an album that is thematically “an interdimensional view of the underworld and its deities, emphasising strongly on the spiritual evolution to liberate the imprisoned powers, and make one with the outer darkness”.

As further described, The Womb of Zero deals with: “The resetting of the divine plans through destruction and rising above limitations of life. Beauty in destruction, destruction in beauty. A sonic interpretation of what once was, and our constant path of devolution towards the Luciferian dawn”.

We share these insights first, because the music within the album translates these lyrical themes so well, and so powerfully, creating sensations of both chaos and transcendence, of fury and exultation, of menace and magic. We have a great example of these achievements in the song we’re presenting today through an occult-themed video, in advance of the album’s April 24 release by the esteemed Terratur Possessions. Prepare for “Sorath the Opposer“. Continue reading »

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