AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SEPTEKH — “TREASURES”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Dec 052019
 


Photo by Kamil “Camkam” Janowski

 

You begin your life in a diaper. If you live long enough, you’ll end it in one too. You begin your life playing with toys, and if you live long enough you’ll be playing with toys again, maybe imagining yourself (again) an armored knight vanquishing sword-wielding foes. If you’re lucky, your treasured toys will include a tiny music box in the shape of a sod-roofed house, one in which Septekh are waiting to be wound up and brought to life, to delight your age-melted mind.

If you’re wondering what prompted these thoughts, you’ll find out soon enough. But perhaps you don’t even know who Septekh are? Perhaps you’ve never seen a Septekh video, or even glimpsed the magnificence of Nils GRZNLS Meseke‘s gravity-defying mustache? How tragic for you if such is the case. But soon enough we can fill those gaping holes in your life, too. Continue reading »

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

 LISTMANIA 2019  41 Responses »
Dec 052019
 

 

(Andy Synn‘s week-long round-up of metal in 2019 continues with this list of his picks for the year’s “Critical Top Ten” across a range of metal genres.)

Let’s be honest, most “Best Of…” lists aren’t really about identifying the “best” albums of the year.

Most of the time they’re either just a single writer’s personal favourites or, in the case of the major magazines, a wholly predictable round-up, written by committee, designed to confirm and reinforce the expectations of their readership and sell future ad space.

And, you know what? I get it. That’s fine. But I’ve always felt that it’s possible to do better, which is why I came up with the idea for the “Critical Top Ten” in the first place.

Rather than presenting these ten albums as a strict, authoritative list of the “best” albums of the year, the purpose of this article is to provide a representative sample of both the brilliance and variety of the underground Metal scene in 2019, at least as it stands from my perspective.

This year’s selection includes three albums from the USA, two from Germany, two from Spain, and one each from Australia, Switzerland, and the Ukraine. The earliest release is from February, the latest from just last month, and at least three of these records are making an appearance here at NCS for the very first time, so, hopefully, there’s still a few surprises in store for all of you! Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): XANTAM — “ALTERED STATE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Dec 042019
 

 

Altered State, the debut EP by the California project Xantam, creates dramatically contrasting sensations, but all of them seem separated from the familiar mundane world around us. The music hurls the listener into vortices of unchained madness and diabolical violence, but also pierces through into other haunting dimensions that seem extraterrestrial, or perhaps the nether realms of imagination. There is sweeping, hypnotic beauty to be found here, as well as tyrannical terrorism, but in all its manifestations the music is chilling (as well as exhilarating).

Xantam is the solo work of a California musician who has taken the name of a Beholder from the game of Baldur’s Gate. His first published work was the LifeDeathBeyond demo, reissued by Blood Harvest Records in 2016, and the same Blood Harvest will be releasing this new EP on Friday the 13th of December. We are pleased to give you a stream of the full experience today. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: RED MOON ARCHITECT

 Interviews  No Responses »
Dec 042019
 

 

(Comrade Aleks rejoins us with this interview of Saku Moilanen, the man behind Red Moon Architect.)

Red Moon Architect was started by Saku Moilanen as a melodic death doom project in Kouvola, Finland, in 2011. He recorded the debut album Concealed Silence (2012) with guest musicians, but after two more albums and the transformation of the solo project into a full band Saku returned in the spring of 2019 with a fourth album Kuura, which tends to a funeral doom sound. We’ve discussed with Saku the way Red Moon Architect grows. Continue reading »

2019 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GREAT

 LISTMANIA 2019  24 Responses »
Dec 042019
 

(This is the third part of Andy Synn‘s five-part reflections on the year in metal that’s about to end.)

Today’s list collates those artists and albums which I felt represented the top tier of this year’s metallic output, drawn from a variety of styles and sub-genres, and a multitude of different countries.

Certainly there’s some variance in their quality too, from absolute game-changers to albums which some of you might argue belong more on yesterday’s list (and vice versa), but these records are honestly the ones which I think deserve the highest praise (for various reasons) this year.

Of course if you don’t see something here, and can’t find it on yesterday’s list, then that just means I didn’t get a chance to listen to it.

In fact, I can tell you now that, despite my best efforts and best intentions, I never got round to listening to the new albums from Mayhem, Spirit Adrift, Falls of Rauros, Wilderun, The Drowning, Devourment, or Ossuarium, so sadly you won’t be seeing any of them appearing in the list below. I do hope they were everything you wanted them to be though.

Anyway, that’s enough rambling from me, let’s get to it, shall we? Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): FAWN LIMBS — “THEIR HOLES AROUSED BY THE SPLINTERS CARVED FROM THEIR TEETH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Dec 032019
 

 

This past June we premiered a song named “Pines” from the debut album, Harm Remissions, by a trans-oceanic noise/grind trio named Fawn Limbs (presented through a video that excerpted footage from the 1933 film White Zombie). Even just that one song made a stunning impact, one that we likened to “the thrill of witnessing destruction… like the excitement of being present at the implosion of giant buildings to create space for something new”, but combined with “other thrills within the mayhem of the music which derive not from chaos but from the almost machine-like precision of their otherwise freakish demolition jobs”.

Those impressions might have seemed paradoxical, but while the track did indeed have its berserker destructive components, there was an impressive degree of precision on display as the musicians rapidly morphed from one kind of demolition to another (and delivered some unexpected groove along the way). The album as a whole — experienced as a whole — was (and is) an even more breathtaking bombardment, one that plays nasty games with your mind as this trio maniacally shift gears without warning and engage in even more extravagant displays of seething and boiling fretwork lunacy and rhythm-section interplay (along with unexpected digressions).

As the year draws to a close, Fawn Limbs have decided to give us one last blast with which to properly bury 2019 beneath rubble — a new EP that will be released on December 6th under the nightmarish title Their Holes Aroused by the Splinters Carved From Their Teeth — and today we’re bringing you a full stream of it. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEATH WOLF — “IV: COME THE DARK”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  2 Responses »
Dec 032019
 

 

Why do noted musicians in well-established and well-known bands form side projects? There are many reasons, but certainly one of them is to pursue musical interests that lie beyond the stylistic boundaries of their main bands — sometimes far beyond them — often coupled with the chance to create and perform with different friends. Some side projects seem to vanish overnight, and some of them become such strong attachments for their members, or become so well-received by listeners, that they persist.

Death Wolf began as a side project, and it has persisted, and we are all the better for it. In this case, the project was started near the turn of the new millennium by Marduk guitarist Morgan Håkansson under the name Devil’s Whorehouse, and with his bandmates released two albums and two EPs under that name. After they changed the band’s name to Death Wolf, they released three more albums from 2011 through 2014.

Now a fourth one is at last ready for release on December 10th by Blooddawn Productions (distributed and marketed by Regain Records). Its name is IV: Come the Dark, and we’re proudly presenting a full stream of the album today. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: CULTURA TRES

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Dec 032019
 

 

(We’ve got a new interview from Comrade Aleks, and this time his discussion partners are members of the heavy Venezuelan band Cultura Tres.)

I try to watch for certain bands’ progress, but sometimes I miss something, as I did with Cultura Tres. Formed in Maracay, Venezuela, in 2006, they pay tribute both to South American cultural and historical legacy and to modern sludge metal. They speak of current problems of their land and of bloody shadows from the past — I believe it’s an important element of any band to keep their ideology actual and hard.

I lost track of the band after their fourth album La Secta, released in 2017, and when I decided to approach the guys a month ago, they appeared to be in The Netherlands to my surprise! May Third World sludge exist and develop in the conditions of the Old World. Let’s find out what’s happening with Alejandro Londoño (guitars, vocals) and Juanma De Ferrari (guitars). Continue reading »

2019 – A YEAR IN REVIEW(S): THE GOOD

 LISTMANIA 2019  13 Responses »
Dec 032019
 

 

(We dom’t publish a single “official” NCS year-end list of best releases. Instead, each of our staff members compiles his own individual list.Andy Synn‘s week-long series of personal year-end lists continues today with his list of 2019’s “Good” albums.)

 

It’s important to clarify, right now, that both today’s list and tomorrow’s are NOT in any way an attempt to rank (at least not in any detail) the various albums which I’ve listened to this year.

The purpose of these two lists, today’s “Good” and tomorrow’s “Great”, is simply to provide a round-up of the various new releases which have found their way into my eardrums this year.

Of course, even these two lists (which together total somewhere approaching 300 albums) don’t provide a comprehensive account of everything that’s been released in 2019, but I sincerely hope that every one of you reading this right now comes away from this article with at least a handful of new bands/albums to check out.

As always I’ve broken things up into various categories to make the reading easier/fun, and (where possible) I’ve included a Bandcamp link to the album in the full list at the end of the article. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2019: AN INVITATION FOR READERS’ LISTS OF THE YEAR’S BEST METAL

 LISTMANIA 2019  133 Responses »
Dec 022019
 

 

We have now entered the final month of 2019, and that begins the final countdown to the end of the year. In the world of metal, this month we’ll also start seeing more and more lists of the year’s best releases. In fact, today we began rolling out some lists of our own.

Back in 2009, when this site was just a few days old, I wrote a post about year-end lists and why people bother with them. The best reason still seems to be this: Reading someone else’s list of the albums they thought were best is a good way to discover music you missed and might like.

We don’t do an “official” NCS year-end “best albums” list. However, we publish the picks of each of our regular staff writers as well as a group of invited guest writers, in addition to lists that we re-post from a few print zines and “big platform” online sites.

Every year we also invite our readers to share their lists and we’re doing that again right here, right now.

If you’ve been pondering what you’ve heard this year and have made your own list of the albums, EPs, or splits released in 2019 that you think are the best of what you’ve heard, we invite you to share it with everyone in the Comments section to this post. And if you haven’t made a list yet but want to, there’s still plenty of time (read below). Continue reading »

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