DISSENTIENT: “PORTAL III”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 282019
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Dissentient from Ottawa, Canada, which was released on August 23rd.)

It’s very easy these days to become jaded and cynical when one is confronted by the sheer amount of music out there, much (if not most) of which offers only the slightest variation on the same old tired themes.

It sometimes seems that, instead of the proposed “infinite variety, in infinite combinations” which the future once promised, we are instead assailed by an endless array of copycats and sound-alikes whose entire purpose seems to be simply regurgitating things we’ve already heard in ever more dumbed-down and easily digestible forms stripped of all their subtlety and nuance.

But, every once in a while, if you’re very lucky (or very persistent), you stumble across an album which reminds you that, sometimes, all it takes is a slight tweak, or a slightly different perspective, to make something otherwise familiar feel utterly vital and vibrant once again.

Thus, Dissentient. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THE FIFTH ALLIANCE — “THE DEPTH OF THE DARKNESS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 282019
 

 

In mid-July the Dutch genre-benders in The Fifth Alliance released a single named “Black”, the opening track on their new album The Depth of the Darkness. It made a stunning first impression on this writer (only a first impression, because I hadn’t encountered the band’s previous two albums, Unrevealed Secrets of Ruin (2013) and Death Poems (2015)).

“Black” amalgamates gigantic, heaving, low-end tones and bone-cracking drum beats; glinting guitar notes and wailing clean vocals; haunting atmospheres of shivering moodiness and building tension; and a thundering eruption of blackened ferocity that takes the seeds of pain in the music and makes them flower in thorns. In that eruption, the guitars buzz and boil in a grim torrent of sound as the rhythm section leaves wreckage in their wake, and the vocals vent scarring torment. After that storm of sound the music becomes spectral and chilling (the vocals even more insane), but seductive as well as disturbing. Those ringing notes you hear at the end don’t go away even after the silence falls.

Of course it is true, as most parents teach their obstinate children, that first impressions matter a lot. But what you do afterward can either undermine a brilliant opening gambit or prove instead that it was no fluke. So the question here becomes, did The Fifth Alliance build on “Black” across the remaining four substantial tracks on The Depth of the Darkness or deflate the lofty expectations created by that first single? You’re about to find out. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CEMETERY LIGHTS — “THE UNDERWORLD”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Aug 272019
 

 

The debut album of Cemetery Lights is a bewildering experience, and a magical one. The sound is earthy, in fact so organic in its tones and so stripped-down in its elements that it brings to mind garage-band rock recordings from many decades past. At the same time it sounds unearthly, so sinister, mysterious, and exotically arcane that it fogs the mind and chills the skin — and conjures visions of otherworldy splendor. Those weirdly perilous and wondrous aspects of the music are in keeping with its conceptual inspirations, which are rooted in the Homerian epics of ancient Greece, in Hesiod’s Works and Days, and in several other complementary texts

This album, The Underworld, is the solo work of The Corpse, a Rhode Island-based musician who began his endeavors under the name Cemetery Lights with a pair of 2018 EPs, Lemuralia and The Church on the Island, which themselves drew inspiration from the history and mythologies of the ancient Mediterranean region — and also sounded like a throw-back to an earlier age of black metal from the same region. Written between 2009 and 2014, the eight songs on the album were recorded at the same time as those EPs, but unlike them include live percussion. Continue reading »

KILLSWITCH ENGAGE: “ATONEMENT”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 272019
 

 

(In this post NCS contributor Gonzo reviews the new album by Killswitch Engage, which is out now via Metal Blade Records.)

Perhaps no band in modern American metal has been able to pull off what Killswitch Engage have in their 20-year career: Ascend to the Billboard charts with one vocalist (Jesse Leach), then weather the storm of his departure with a serviceable replacement (Howard Jones), then weather the storm of his departure with the return of Leach, all while never relinquishing their crown as one of the genre’s stalwart kings.

With Atonement, released on August 16th, the band have shown no sign of slowing down. This is the third installment in Leach’s return, and the combination of its blazing riffs, masterful songwriting, and standout individual performances on every instrument might make it the best of the three. Continue reading »

ENTOMBED A.D. : “BOWELS OF EARTH”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 272019
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by Sweden’s Entombed A.D., which will be released on August 30 by Century Media.)

There are a LOT of albums being released this week, from underground underdogs like Witch Vomit to mainstream monsters like Tool.

But, what with time being both limited and linear, we’re unlikely to be able to cover everything in the next few days, which means some difficult choices need to be made.

If there’s one album I wasn’t going to let pass by without comment though, it’s the new Entombed.

You’ll note that I said “Entombed” and not “Entombed A.D.” there because, despite all the ongoing legal shenanigans, I still consider this version of the band to be the legitimate one.

Put it like this, you don’t get to leave a band and then decide to reclaim the name later on (in some cases decades later) just because someone offered you some of that sweet, sweet reunion money.

Of course, you may not agree with me on that, which is your prerogative. But, after listening to Bowels of Earth you might just change your tune… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WHITE WARD — “DEAD HEART CONFESSION”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Aug 272019
 

 

In 2017 we devoted significant attention to Futility Report, the debut album of the Ukrainian iconoclasts White Ward, hosting the premieres of two songs and then of the album as a whole. It was (and still is) brilliant in a way that few albums are in any year. In its extravagant inventiveness and unexpected stylistic juxtapositions it could have been a train wreck, mangled bodies strewn about like broken toys, and fractured machines burning in a jumble of warped iron and splattered diesel. Instead, like mad scientists who are in fact visionaries, White Ward produced something through their unorthodox splicing of diverse musical genres (which included black metal and jazz) that was as enthralling as it was deviant.

In the abstract, contemplating how White Ward might have improved upon Futility Report in a second album is an odd exercise, because it assumes the possibility of gauging greater or lesser degrees of success when there is no objective measuring stick at hand for their kind of bohemian rhapsodies. At a minimum, however, it’s possible to say that the band’s second album, Love Exchange Failure (due for release on September 20 by Debemur Morti Productions), is still non-conformist, still surprising, still electrifying. And while it’s obvious that White Ward still have no inclination to follow any straight and narrow path, their new compositions seem more cohesive, and more powerful in their capacity to evoke strong emotional responses, without at all repressing the adventurous spirit that drove the first album from beginning to end. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ZEIT – “DRANGSAL”

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Aug 262019
 

 

“With frustration in their hearts, green lungs and Sternburg on their lips, ZEIT try to find their way through the great gray – The distress known as city: Inspiration, coercion, freedom and jail. In dark alleys full of delusions, doubtful souls roam, lost in addiction. No hood, no cult – no collective.”

With those words the Leipzig band Zeit introduce their second album, Drangsal (“distress”), which will be released this coming Friday, August 30th. Through a changing amalgam of black metal, sludge, and doom, they’ve created an album that’s relentlessly intense and brutally heavy in more ways than one, delivering music that captures the blighted urban existence described in those introductory words. Continue reading »

RIPPER: “SENSORY STAGNATION”

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Aug 262019
 

 

(Todd Manning wrote the following review of the new record by the Chilean thrash band Ripper, which is set for release on September 30th by Unspeakable Axe Records.)

For many, and myself included, Ripper’s 2016 full-length Experiment of Existence was a highlight of that year.  The songwriting on that opus was a deft combination of classic Teutonic Thrash and proto-Death Metal with hints of technical musicianship added in for flavor. Now these Chilean madmen are back with their newest release, Sensory Stagnation, once again with Unspeakable Axe Records. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MELAN SELAS, IMPERIUM DEKADENZ, BELENOS, NORDKVÄDE, MAZE OF TERROR

 SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Aug 252019
 

 

Yesterday some of you saw a skeletal version of this post because I hit “Publish” instead of “Save” and didn’t realize what I’d done until Andy Synn pointed it out hours later. By the time of my bone-headed goof I had picked the songs I wanted to write about and had uploaded artwork, added the usual links, put in the html codes for the music streams, and copy-pasted info about the releases from press releases, Bandcamp pages, or YouTube streams — but hadn’t actually written anything of my own about the music.

That’s the same process I follow every time I prepare one of these collections. Usually I don’t stop there, but I’m still on vacation and had some carousing to do, so I deferred the writing. Actually, I had already begun the carousing, which is most likely why I hit “Publish” instead of “Save”.

Anyway, hope you like the music I picked for today’s SOB. I’ve made selections for a second installment of the column, but don’t know if I’ll get that finished before the carousing begins again. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: LIGHT THIS CITY

 Interviews, WAXING LYRICAL  2 Responses »
Aug 242019
 


photo by Joe Ellis

 

(In this latest edition of his Waxing Lyrical series, Andy Synn posed questions to vocalist Laura Nichol of Light This City, whose comeback album Terminal Bloom was released last year by Creator-Destructor Records, and received the following answers.)

My relationship (such as it is) with Californian Melodeath crew Light This City goes back almost fifteen years now, and their 2006 record, Facing the Thousand, remains one of my go-to albums to this day.

Sadly, as many of you will know, the band went inactive for nearly a full decade after the release of Stormchaser in 2008, leaving behind them a trail of broken hearts and shattered dreams (as well as a bunch of kickass music).

Thankfully for all of us, however, last year’s comeback album, Terminal Bloom, wasn’t just a long-awaited return for the band, it also happens to be one of their best releases to date, which is why I’m so excited to be bringing some more attention to it, and the band in general, via this piece from LTC vocalist Laura Nichol. Continue reading »

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