SHADES OF BLACK: MERDA MUNDI, BLATTARIA, XANTAM, ATEIGGÄR, WITCHDEN, CRUSTY OLD TOAD

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Oct 272019
 

 

I would guess that there are more one-person bands in black and blackened death metal than in any other genres of extreme metal. I’m not sure why that is, though I guess it’s in keeping with the lone-wolf, outsider status that second-wave black metal can trace back to its roots.

Of course, there are a lot of mediocre or downright awful one-person projects out there, but some very good ones, too, and you’ll find four of them in today’s collection, along with music from a few more-filled-out groups, who are also very good.

MERDA MUNDI

The first of the one-person projects whose new music I’d like to recommend today is Merda Mundi (“shit of the world” — or maybe “shitty world”), the raw black metal vehicle of the prolific Belgian musician Déhà, whose resume at Metal-Archives includes participation in 19 active bands and previous roles in 17 others, spread across numerous genres, as well as guest/session work on two dozen other releases. The latest output of Merda Mundi is an album aptly named Hatred. Continue reading »

A DIRTY HALF DOZEN (SHORT BUT SWEET EDITION)

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 252019
 

 

(In this column Andy Synn compiles reviews and streams of six new EPs — by Engulf, Lvcifyre, Maladie, Ordeals, Phobocosm, and Ultha.)

Damn, today is a busy one for big releases isn’t it?

We’ve got Alcest, The Great Old Ones, Vastum, Leprous, Hour of Penance, Fit for an Autopsy, Vacivus (more on them soon), Dawn Ray’d, and about a bajillion others all coming out on the same day.

So, to address this overload of new albums… I’ve decided to write a piece covering a bunch of recently released EPs instead.

Who said I wasn’t helpful? Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GOLDEN BATS — “VII”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 252019
 

 

Roughly one year ago the distinctive one-man mauling machine known as Golden Bats, then located in the vicinity of Brisbane, Australia, released an album named Residual Dread, the first official full-length after more than a dozen demos, splits, and EPs dating back to 2011. As recounted in this review, it was a titanically heavy album, steeped in a kind of gothic gloom, and so haunting in its laments that it threatened to split the heart even as it was splintering bone. With both a persistently brutal punch and an emotionally devastating conveyance of grief and pain, the music repeatedly hit home with staggering force on multiple levels. The songs were mainly slow or mid-paced, and relatively simple in their composition, but the music was tuned like a Stradivarius of suffering, supremely well-calculated to deliver punishment with tremendous primal force, and the songs so well-written that they were very hard to forget.

Since then, Golden Bats‘ alter ego Geordie Stafford has moved to Rome, Italy (just a couple of months ago), and is nearing completion of a follow-up album. In the meantime, he has decided to release some of his older but previously un-released creations, the first of which we’re premiering today. Denominated VII, to place it in line with a sequence of earlier demos, it includes four tracks, two of which are covers, and all of which again demonstrate the crushing power and mind-bending, emotionally wrenching impact of Golden Bats‘ formulation of sludge. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PRAISE THE PLAGUE — “TORMENT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Oct 252019
 

 

We would like to offer two rounds of applause to begin this premiere. The first goes to Berlin’s Praise the Plague for the wrenching emotional power channeled by their song “Torment“. The second is for Sven Liebold, whose surreal video for the song is a nightmarish feast for the eyes, one of those ever-changing visual collages that you can’t look away from, and which in this case integrates frighteningly well with the music.

The song comes from a two-track EP by Praise the Plague that was released digitally, and on vinyl by Argonauta Records, on September 13th. Entitled Antagonist II, it follows the band’s debut full-length Antagonist, which was released last year. Both tracks are powerful mood-changers, amalgams of black metal and doom that have the capacity to make you forget about whatever you were doing or feeling before listening, and to transport you into the indigo-dark dimensions where this band dwell. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: UNFATHOMABLE RUINATION — “PROTOPLASMIC IMPRISONMENT”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 242019
 

 

Any time we see the artwork of Eliran Kantor on an album cover, it becomes an irresistible lure into the record. Here, his painting captures the inspirations for the music, depicting a solemn solitary figure, who “stands surrounded by demonic deformities which represent the inner turmoil that torments those with mental illness” (to quote from the press materials from the album). We can almost hear the “screams of anguish and vicious voices whispering of fear, violence and self-loathing”.

And these conceptions are indeed the animating forces behind Enraged and Unbound, the stunning new album by Unfathomable Ruination, with each song “plumbing the depths of the deepest mental illness and exploring the primitive violence that lies within us all”.

That description is no exaggeration, as you’ll discover when you listen to “Protoplasmic Imprisonment“, the song we’re presenting today through an official video in advance of the album’s November 22 release by Willowtip Records. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: XENO OOZE — “XENOLOGICAL WARFARE”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Oct 242019
 

 

Imagine what would happen if you could buy bags of death metal, crust, grindcore, and powerviolence at your local market, throw big handfuls of all that stuff into a blender, liberally lubricate it with alien blood fresh from the refrigerators at Area 51, spice up the mix with amphetamines and lysergic acid, puree the shit out of it, and then chug it straight down without breathing. Sound good?

Actually, you don’t have to tax your imaginations, you just have to listen to Parasligm Shift, the debut album by the deviant three-piece Phoenician band Xeno Ooze. You’ll have the chance to do that on November 1st, which is the day of its release by Last World Records. But in the meantime you can chug down “Xenological Warfare“, which is the opening track from the album that we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MUR — “BRUTALISM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 242019
 

 

With their self-titled debut EP released in 2014, the French band Mur (whose six-person line-up includes former members of Today is the Day, Glorior Belli, Mass Hysteria, Comity, and Four Question Marks) began feeling their way, searching for an identity for their music and beginning to establish one. When you listen to their new full-length record, Brutalism, which will be released on October 25th by Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions, it becomes apparent that they have arrived — at a place where their confidence is strong and their identity (albeit a multi-faceted one) well-defined. It isn’t so much a sea-change in sound compared to the EP as it is a giant, adventurous stride ahead on the path they began five years ago.

The album is a fascinating experience because it is such a dynamic one. It offers constant surprises, but does so without losing the bonds that forge all the experiences together into a whole, and without sacrificing the explosive, searing intensity that’s the main hallmark of the record. Previously we premiered a song from the album (“Third“) and separately reviewed another one (“I See Through Stones”), but today we have for you a stream of the complete album — and a few more impressionistic thoughts about the music (okay, more than a few). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THY CATAFALQUE, VOLTUMNA, TUSKAR, DRAEPT, MONOLITHE, COMANDO PRAETORIO

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 242019
 

 

We all have coping strategies for problems we can’t solve. You know you can’t make the problem go away, so you just… cope… the best you can.

One of my problems, which I’m sure you get tired hearing me whine about, is that I can’t keep up with all the new metal that emerges every day. I try to find time every day to make lists of what I want to check out, but am rarely able to listen to even a significant fraction of the entries.

One of my coping mechanisms for this problem, when I actually have time to do some listening, is just to focus on what I added to the top of the list most recently, and just make myself temporarily ignore how much is seething underneath — which is how I picked the songs in today’s collection.

THY CATAFALQUE

You can tell you’re getting close to the end of the year when you start finding music from releases that are planned for 2020. I’m pretty sure the song I’ve chosen to begin today’s collection is the first excerpt I’ve selected for a round-up that comes from a 2020 album (although the second one is just a bit further down this page). Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ODIOSORDO — “CON IL BUIO NEL SANGUE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  3 Responses »
Oct 232019
 

 

We’re told that “Odio Sordo” is the Italian translation for “Deaf Hate”, a phrase that connotes bitterness, fury, holding a grudge. And while the Italian trio Odiosordo have embraced those words in their name, and those sensations in their musical hybrid of hardcore and black metal, their new album Con Il Buio Nel Sangue becomes a musical journey in which different experiences also come to the surface. As they tell us, the name they’ve chosen represents internal struggle against personal challenges — “born by the need of merging a strong sense of discomfort, deep disorientation, but also the will of fighting back and finding a way through life.”

As you will have probably guessed by now, the music isn’t “easy listening”. It’s raw, bleak, and ravaging, stripped of pretense, authentic in its channeling of despair and rage, and of misery and defiance. Alternately bruising, oppressive, searing in its intensity, and soaring in its grasp for a way out of harrowing times, it proves to be a relentlessly gripping experience — and we’re giving you the chance to learn that for yourselves through our full-album stream today, before the record’s October 31 release by Third I Rex, VBMF (Italy), and the Third I Rex affiliate, Imperatrix Mundi Records. Continue reading »

ALCEST: “SPIRITUAL INSTINCT”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
Oct 232019
 

 

(We present Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by the French duo Alcest, which will be released by Nuclear Blast this coming Friday, October 25th.)

Back in the days of yore, it was commonly believed that the world we inhabit, the terrestrial sphere, was surrounded and permeated by an omnipresent, invisible essence called aether.

More fundamental than earth, more intangible than wind, more primal than fire, and more fluid than water, the search for this unseen fifth element (which, thanks to Luc Besson, we now know was actually “love” all along) consumed the lives of many of the most prominent scientists, thinkers, and philosophers of the time but, ultimately, was all for naught.

Of course, if they’d had access to the music of Alcest then the results might have been very different. Continue reading »

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