SHADES OF BLACK: NIGHTFELL, UNMENSCH, ORM

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jul 162019
 

 

This is a rare mid-week edition of a column that usually appears on Sunday. This didn’t happen by design. I was trying to select some new songs for a SEEN AND HEARD post, and by chance it happened that three of them — these three — were shades of black metal. So I decided to collect them today, and try again tomorrow for a cross-genre round-up under the SEEN AND HEARD banner.

NIGHTFELL

A Sanity Deranged is the third album by Portland’s Nightfell, a duo (Tim Call and Todd Burdette) whose music I’ve enjoyed from the beginning. It will be released on Friday the Thirteenth of September by 20 Buck Spin (who are having another great year of releases), and the first song in today’s selection is from that new album. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VHS — “DEATH AND CARNAGE COMING IN WAVES”

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Jul 162019
 

 

Thunder Bay, in the northwest of Ontario and across Lake Superior from the northern coast of Wisconsin, is home to the metal band VHS. So far as we know, Lake Superior is devoid of deviant sea monsters, killer whales, and ravenous giant sharks, but perhaps the band’s proximity to vast waters had something to do with their attraction to such submarine killers. Whatever the cause, VHS have fully embraced their attraction to ’80s films devoted to seaborne horror and their love of punk and death metal (among other musical interests, as you will soon discover) on their new album, We’re Gonna Need Some Bigger Riffs (get it?).

The new album is set for release on July 26th by Horror Pain Gore Death Productions (U.S.) and Rotten Roll Rex (Europe). The album features guest appearances on two of the songs. Trevor Strnad of The Black Dahlia Murder lends his snarl to the previously premiered “Rooting For the Villain“, and the song we’re presenting today through a lyric video — “Death and Carnage Coming in Waves” — includes guest vocals by none other than Exhumed’s Matt Harvey. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SOLACE OF THE VOID — “THE FATED PROPHECY”

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Jul 162019
 

 

There are places in music, as there are places in the world around us, where we are surrounded by visions that are both glorious and cloaked in air almost too cold to breathe, where the ice shines magnificently like a blanket of crystal across endless, hostile expanses. In the night skies above, in the cascades of an aurora or in the brilliance of compass stars shining in the unimaginable vastness of the void, we might experience a similar feeling of magical wonder and daunting isolation, and there are places like that in music, too.

Canada’s Solace of the Void aren’t the only band who’ve sought to create such sensations in their music, but in the song we’re presenting today (and in their new self-titled album as a whole, which is set for a July 26 release by CDN Records)) they’ve really nailed it beautifully. They’ve located their sound beneath Polaris, creating a fusion of cold atmosphere, symphonic grandeur, blackened ferocity, and mystical folk-influenced melodies to create music that (in the accurate words of their advance press) is “northern, luminous, and majestic” — “rooted in the permafrost of creation”. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THE NEGATIVE BIAS — “NARCISSUS RISING (A METAMORPHOSIS IN THREE ACTS)”

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Jul 162019
 

 

The new album by the Austrian alchemists The Negative Bias is so ambitious in its conception, so extravagant in its composition, and so tremendously powerful in its execution that it merits the often-overused term “visionary”. It becomes a form of breathtakingly dramatic musical theater that seems calculated to create shock and awe, to assault and bedazzle the senses, forcibly shattering commonplace perceptions in order to make the mind more receptive to new and unexpected visions.

The name of this monumental work is Narcissus Rising (A Metamorphosis In Three Acts). It follows the band’s debut album Lamentation of the Chaos Omega (2017) and a 2018 split with Golden Dawn. It will be released on July 26th by ATMF, and today we premiere a full stream, preceded by further thoughts about this stunning experience. Continue reading »

AN NCS TRIPLE PREMIERE — “DEMO DAZE OF SUMMER”: EFFIGY, SCULPTED HORROR, MORBUS GRAVE

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Jul 152019
 

 

On July 26th Redefining Darkness Records will release a trio of demos that feature recordings both old and new by three death metal bands, grouping them together under the banner “Demo Daze of Summer“. To help spread the word we’re presenting premieres of music from all three.

The first is a never-before-heard demo of songs originally written in 1992 by the Kentucky band Effigy. The second is a re-press (with a bonus instrumental track) of a demo originally self-released in 2018 by Sculpted Horror from Athens, Georgia. And the third is a brand new EP from the Italian death-mongers Morbus Grave.

EFFIGY

The back-story about Effigy begins in 1992, when Craig Netto and Dillard Logsdon (formerly of Sarcoma) first traded musical ideas at a mutual friend’s home in Kentucky and formed Effigy. As Redefining Darkness explains: “Effigy completed four songs within a few months before getting the offer for their first and only show. Not long after the show two of the members joined Abominant and went on to release a number of albums with the band. While a few of the guys had some underground success in Abominant, Dillard Logsdon didn’t pursue a band after Effigy’s early demise.”

“In mid-2016 the core of the band re-connected and decided to resurrect Effigy with the intention of giving their original songs from 1992 a chance to be heard and, if all went well, continue to play together and maybe even write new material”. Continue reading »

ARCTIC SLEEP: “KINDRED SPIRITS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  3 Responses »
Jul 152019
 

 

(This is Andy Synn‘s review of the 7th album by the solo project Arctic Sleep from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, which was released on July 12th. It is a significant exception to our “rule” about singing. The cover art was created by Jennifer Weiler.)

Some of our readers may not be aware of this, but the Metal blogosphere (of which we are but a small part) is kind of like its own separate ecosystem, with all the various sites and zines and writers sharing and interacting within the same digital space, by turns feeding, and being fed upon, and occasionally coming together to copulate, exchange information, and (hopefully) create something new.

This doesn’t mean we’re all “in cahoots”, by any means. I’ve questioned and criticised the work of others just as much as I’ve been questioned and criticised in turn. But it does mean that, sometimes at least, the circle of life – or the circle of riffs, as it were – moves us all in similar ways.

Case in point, I have to give full credit to those brave lavatorial adventurers at The Toilet ov Hell for introducing me to the music of Arctic Sleep, whose latest album I’ve been listening to pretty much non-stop over the weekend. Continue reading »

NEAR BLACKOUT (AND THE MUSIC OF EZOV)

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jul 142019
 

 

I’m in the midst of a two-day outdoor event with co-workers and other friends that happens every summer. It tends to leave me very little time for NCS, and that has proven true again this year. I also failed to ask someone else to take over SHADES OF BLACK for this Sunday.

But I didn’t want to have a complete blackout of the site today, which might leave some of our visitors wondering if some disaster had befallen us, or if that Manhattan power outage had decided to leap the continent and send us into a different kind of darkness than what usually descends in these weekly columns. So I have one song to share with you, and unfortunately only one. As it happens, a notice of it arrived in our in-box only this morning. Lacking the time to listen to any other candidates on my list, I took a chance and listened only to this one. If it had not been good, we might have had a total blackout. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: ZAO

 WAXING LYRICAL  6 Responses »
Jul 132019
 


Zao 2018 – Photo by Jered Scott

 

(For this week’s edition of WAXING LYRICAL Andy Synn questioned Dan Weyandt, lyricist/vocalist of the long-running American metal band Zao.)

It’s no exaggeration to say that Zao are one of my all-time favourite, most-listened-to, bands.

I first came across their punchy, endearingly scrappy form of Metallic Hardcore/proto-Metalcore early on in my transition towards heavier music, and immediately liked what I heard.

By chance, however, I actually lost touch with the band for a while, only to rediscover them a few albums later, by which point, to my great pleasure, their sound had metamorphosed into an even more aggressive and metallic form.

Not only have a I been a major fan ever since, but the biting vocals and cathartic lyrics of Dan Weyandt have been a major influence on me as a singer/writer myself, so I am doubly-pleased to be be able to speak to him for this latest edition of Waxing Lyrical. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PHOBIA — “IMBECILE”

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Jul 122019
 

 

The line-up of Phobia has been in flux. As compared to the crew that pumped out 2017’s Lifeless God tirade, vocalist Shane “the Pain” Mclachlan, guitarist Bruce Reeves (who was there at the beginning along with Shane), and bassist Calum Mackenzie have now been joined on their new album by guitarist Jason Robert and drummer Ray Banda (who also performed on various Phobia recordings in the 2000s).

But it’s not like anyone should expect these changes to throw Phobia off-course, and they clearly haven’t. It’s hard to imagine that anything could do that, except maybe a massive asteroid strike on southern California, and you wouldn’t even want to bet on that derailing these “undisputed kings of the grindcore underworld” (PR verbiage, but not an exaggeration).

Phobia’s fury has never been in doubt, and the current sociopolitical environment of course provides zero reason for them (or anyone else with a functioning brain) to calm down. There’s certainly no retrenchment in the band’s explosive power and brutality on their new album, Generation Coward, which is now set for an August 9 release by Willowtip Records. As proof of that, just listen to this song we’re premiering: Continue reading »

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