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 »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): HAEIRESIS, HALPHAS, MERZOTNA POTVORA, TØMHET

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
Dec 082019
 

 

There’s so much music here that I have divided this into two parts to make it more easily digestible. There’s a risk I’ll never finish part two. The all-or-nothing strategy might have been better (to be determined).

I will add that there are three bands in this collection that you won’t find on Metal-Archives, which I mention as a hint about the diversity of sounds you have ahead of you.

HAEIRESIS

Saulius Bielskis is a prolific creator, with a half-dozen active bands and solo projects to his name. Haeiresis is one of his principal endeavors, with four EPs, a split, and a 2011 album on the Haeiresis discography. The most recent of the EPs, Emanations, is a three-track effort released on tape on November 11th by an underground Lithuanian label named Ghia. It was developed and finalized at the same time as the 2018 Haeiresis EP, The Bleaking. If you listen to both EPs, it will probably become clear why the two were released separately rather than as a single album-length work. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY: SYLOSIS, TOMORROW’S RAIN, THE SHADELESS EMPEROR, THE SPIRIT, ZARRAZA, LIBERATIA

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Dec 072019
 

 

I wasn’t sure I would write anything for this Saturday. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t leave you enough music to explore through the 18 posts we made during the last five days, especially the 1,000 or so albums that Andy Synn recommended in his week-long year-end lists. But as I made my way through some new songs that appeared last week, it turned out that six of the tracks I enjoyed (some of which include a portion of clean vocals) were presented through better-than-average music videos, and so I couldn’t resist the temptation to pull those together here.

SYLOSIS

Sylosis are returning with their first new album in five years. Entitled Cycle of Suffering, it will be released by Nuclear Blast on February 7th, and includes the work of new bassist Conor Marshall. The first advance track, revealed through the first video in today’s collection, is “I Sever“. Continue reading »

2019 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE PERSONAL TOP TEN

 LISTMANIA 2019  17 Responses »
Dec 062019
 

 

(This is the last installment in Andy Synn‘s week-long series of essays about metal in 2019, closing with a Top 10 list of personal favorites.)

In many ways today’s article, the last one of my seasonal “Listmania” (which is a lot like Hulkamania, only with better hair), is the easiest one to write.

After all, it’s not making any big claims about being “the best” albums of the year, nor is it trying to achieve any similarly lofty goal like my “Critical Top Ten” was. It’s just a list of the ten albums I’ve listened to most and/or which have connected with me most strongly, over the last twelve months.

But precisely because this is such a personal and subjective list, it’s been the one most constantly in flux, with the positioning and ordering of what bands/albums were included switching and changing right up until the wire.

Still, I think (I hope) a lot of you are going to discover (or rediscover) some cool new artists and albums here. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KVAEN — “THE FUNERAL PYRE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Dec 062019
 

 

Kvaen is the solo project of Swedish musician Jakob Björnfot, whose resume includes membership in The Duskfall and Autumn Death, as well as live performances with other noted bands. In this new project, he turns his talents to fast-paced black metal with Pagan and Viking Metal influences, drawing upon both Norwegian and Swedish traditions from the ’90s and upon inspirations emanating from deep mountain forests and cold valleys of the northland.

Kvaen’s debut album, The Funeral Pyre, will be released on February 28th by Black Lion Records, and today we’re presenting the album’s absolutely thrilling title track. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: NIGHT CROWNED — “UNHOLY PATH”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 062019
 

 

“Unholy Path“, the song we’re premiering through a lyric video from the debut album of Sweden’s Night Crowned, is a veritable tapestry of sound, and a sumptuous feast for the senses and the imagination. Through its richly embroidered and dynamically changing contours the music is mystical and marauding, sweepingly grand and physically jolting, brooding and bombastic. It summons visions of unearthly magnificence as well as chaotic savagery. It hammers the skull and lunges for the throat with teeth bared, and it’s also spellbinding.

That’s a lot to accomplish in a single song, particularly when all the changes are so well-integrated into a cohesive experience. It’s more than one might expect from a relatively new band, but less surprising when you realize that the members of Night Crowned, combined, have been playing metal for well over 60 years, with over 15 albums in their collective catalogue through participation in such other groups as Dark Funeral, Nightrage, and Cipher System.

This new album, Impius Viam, follows the band’s 2018 debut EP, Humanity Will Echo Out (for which we premiered a great song called “Nocturnal Pulse”), and it will be released on February 28th by a new label founded by ex-Nuclear Blast veterans called Noble Demon. Which makes sense, because “Unholy Path” is a noble demon of a song. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SVART CROWN, REGARDE LES HOMMES TOMBER, SKAPHOS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 052019
 

 

Time is short, and always fleeting, so I’ll dispense with further introductory comments and get right to these three new songs (and a new video) that caught my attention.

SVART CROWN

We’ve been writing about the music of Svart Crown at NCS since the fall of 2010, when we got the chance to hear and review their second album Witnessing the Fall in advance of its release. Since then they have released two more terrific albums, 2013’s Profane (reviewed here) and 2017’s Abreaction (discussed in part here). And now Century Media has announced that it will release this French band’s fifth album, Wolves Among the Ashes, on February 7th next year. The first song in today’s small collection is the first track made public from that new album. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DEATH. VOID. TERROR. “(- — -)”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Dec 052019
 

 

In 2018 the mysterious Swiss collective Death. Void. Terror. released their first album, To the Great Monolith I, through Iron Bonehead Productions. It consisted of two tracks, identified by dashes rather than words, which together created a 41-minute out-of-body experience that was completely unnerving. As recounted in our interview of the band, their objective was to serve as vessels for what was bestowed upon them by an entity they called the Great Monolith, and to do that they sought to purge themselves of all traces of human thought and experience, to achieve the kind of “purity” that would make them receptive to what might become manifest through their performances.

Of that first album, our reviewer Grant Skelton wrote: “Not a trace of what could be called ‘humanity’ is left in this album…. Confronting To The Great Monolith I is to delve beneath pretense, beneath cultural normativity, beneath our waking personality…. To disengage from the world, to shut off the mind and allow it to wander, to blatantly refuse to hurry — these are necessarily a part of listening to Death. Void. Terror.“ Continue reading »

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