SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): MEPHORASH, STELLAR MASTER ELITE, PA VESH EN, PHOBONOID, LODGE OF THE EMPTY BED

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Mar 042019
 

 

As explained in Part 1 of this post yesterday, I made some especially difficult choices about what to cover this week because I had found so much I wanted to recommend. Splitting the column into two parts in order to include more music helped some, but wasn’t a complete solution. The task was further complicated when I discovered even more yesterday. The first selection below is one of those late discoveries, but it turns out that it fits very well with the music of the first three bands I’d originally chosen to begin this Part 2, and that now comes after it.

MEPHORASH

Yesterday Mephorash released an official video for the third track to surface so far from their fourth opus, the 74-minute Shem Ha Mephorash, which is based on the Kabbalistic 72-fold explicit name of God and now has a release date of April 18th. Before yesterday the band had revealed “777: Third Woe“, which was released as a single last year, and “King of King, Lord of Lords“, which was disclosed last August. We’ve provided reactions to both of those, and now to this new third piece. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): NORDJEVEL, AKASHA, MURG, SORES, NEO NOIR

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
Mar 032019
 

 

Man, this was tough, trying to decide what to write about in this Sunday’s SOB. I mean, it’s always tough, but harder than usual this week. Maybe it was because I didn’t have time to prepare a round-up of new songs last week, which might have shaved a few black metal entries off my lists. Yesterday I narrowed it down to 18 choices (you see what I mean?).

Clearly, I needed to make this a two-parter, but still had to make hard choices. For example, I decided not to include the new album by Popiół (here), or the new Aoratos song (here), because I’ve written about both bands in other posts recently, and although I’ve been very impressed with the new releases by Aara (here), Ancient Flame (here), and Herzegovinian (here), I haven’t spent enough time with them to write even half-assed introductions.

I’m still wrestling with some other decisions I’ll need to make in order to keep Part 2 from becoming bloated. Whether I succeed or fail, you’ll see Part 2 at NCS first thing on Monday.

NORDJEVEL

The following video begins with a rape, followed later by the victim’s delivery of the horrid fruits of her violation. Much other nastiness ensues, all of it filmed and edited with skilled hands (by Grupa 13 Production). It has the look and feel of a mythic saga, but I haven’t recognized which saga it might be, nor have I found any info about the origins of the story in press materials we’ve received. Whatever is going on here, the visuals are riveting (and NSFW). So is the music. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY (PART 2): DAWN OF DEMISE, SÖNAMBULA, MAIRU, CHILDREN OF BODOM, THE KRONK MEN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 032019
 

 

This is the second Part of a round-up of new videos that I began yesterday. The usual Sunday SHADES OF BLACK column will be coming a bit later today.

DAWN OF DEMISE

We’re about 2 1/2 years down the road from the last Dawn of Demise album, and on April 19th we’ll get to see what these Danes been up to since then, because that’s when Unique Leader Records will release their fifth album, Into the Depths of Veracity. We have an early glimpse of what they’ve been up to through the first item in this collection, a lyric video for the first advance track from the album, “In Silence He’ll Arise“. Continue reading »

VIDEOGRAPHY (PART 1): TRUTH CORRODED, BESTA, BEWITCHER, MIST OF MISERY

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Mar 022019
 

 

I wasn’t able to post any SEEN AND HEARD round-ups of new music last week, mainly because of a work-related trip to Texas from Wednesday through Friday that barely left me enough time to post what you saw on our site over those three days. I did continue to make lists of new things I wanted to check out as soon as I had time, and I found that time this morning, due in part to the fact that I woke up at fucking 3:45 a.m. I guess I was still on Texas time, but that can’t be the only reason. Maybe those lists were calling to me in my sleep like sirens.

Anyway, I went on a big metal binge this morning. It turned out that a lot of the new music I liked came packaged with music videos, which themselves ranged from decent to very good. So I decided to prepare a two-part round-up that consists entirely of videos. Part 2 will come tomorrow, in advance of the usual SHADES OF BLACK column (I’ve got a shitload of ideas for that, too).

TRUTH CORRODED

I guess Australia must have its fair share of race-baiting right-wing political assholes, just like the U.S. does. That’s certainly the impression I get from the new video for a song by the Australian death/thrash band Truth Corroded called “Victims Left Lepers“, which includes the faces of certain political figures grotesquely morphing into Nazis and standard-bearers of the KKK. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 38): THE AGONY SCENE, OUTER HEAVEN, RITES OF THY DEGRINGOLADE

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  1 Response »
Mar 012019
 


The Agony Scene

 

As I explained in the preceding installment of this list, posted earlier today, I wimped out in deciding which songs to pick here at the bittersweet end by letting Andy Synn make the final choices. For that preceding installment he picked songs from three of the albums he featured in his “Best of British” series of reviews last year. The three you’ll find in this final Part of the list for 2018 are more “general purpose extreme and nasty songs”.

For those of you who’ve been following this seemingly endless (but now ended) list, we appreciate your support and your patience. On Monday I’ll post a wrap-up that includes the complete list and links to all the installments, and to a Spotify playlist created by one of our readers that also includes all of them. Continue reading »

MISERY INDEX: “RITUALS OF POWER”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 012019
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn‘s review of the new album by Misery Index, which will be released on March 8th by Season of Mist.)

Where exactly does one start with a band like Misery Index?

From their humble (well, relatively humble) Death-Grind beginnings, the band have grown into a veritable Death Metal institution, one with five (soon to be six) full-length albums and innumerable EPs and split releases to their name, not to mention a not-insignificant amount of critical and cultural influence under their belt, all of which makes it difficult to find something new to say about the ongoing work of Messrs. Netherton, Jarvis, Kloeppel, and Morris.

But while it may be difficult to find a new angle from which to approach the band’s music these days, that doesn’t mean that the band themselves have run out of things to say, and their newest album continues their long-established tradition of raising their fists and kicking against the pricks as loudly, and as angrily, as possible. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 37): BLACK TONGUE, HUNDRED YEAR OLD MAN, LEECHED

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  No Responses »
Mar 012019
 


Black Tongue

 

Today is the final day of the roll-out of this list. As I’ve said more than once, the closer I’ve come to this day, the more conflicted I’ve become about which songs to choose before reaching the end. To resolve that consternation, I took the coward’s way out: I let someone else choose for me.

My NCS colleague Andy Synn usually makes no recommendations to me for this list, perhaps because he usually writes an article about his own favorite songs from the preceding year. He didn’t do that his year, but he did agree to make choices for the final installment of the 2018 list after looking through what I had already picked in the preceding 36 Parts. So these are his three choices.

Actually, he made six choices. These three are “Best of British” picks, named after the series of reviews that he has traditionally written as the year goes on which focuses on releases by UK bands. The other three are just “general purpose extreme and nasty songs”. Without asking permission, I’ve decided to get all six of them on the list, and so there will be a Part 38 today, in addition to this Part 37. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 36): GOROD, MARSH DWELLER, ABRAHAM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  1 Response »
Feb 282019
 

 

In thinking about what to pick for the penultimate installment of this list I was kind of wildly scrambling through the hundreds of songs on my master list of candidates, nearing mental lock-up as I tried to figure out what to do. Despite how many songs I’ve already selected, the decision process has gotten harder, not easier… because time is about to run out.

As a result, there’s no organizing principle in today’s collection. The music is all over the place, stylistically. But I sure do like all three of these picks, and hope you will too.

GOROD

This year, as usual, the bands whose music I’ve chosen have been a mix of old favorites and newcomers. Gorod falls into the camp of old favorites because they’ve been so consistently good (and so consistently interesting) over such a long stretch of years. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SACRIFICIAL SLAUGHTER — “THE SEPARATION OF INNOCENCE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Feb 282019
 

 

Last November Horror Pain Gore Death Productions released an utterly decimating three-way split called The Hate Divide, which included a total of 13 tracks by Coathanger Abortion (Tennessee), Rottenness (Mexico), and the band that’s the subject of today’s video premiere — California’s Sacrificial Slaughter.

Sacrificial Slaughter‘s four tracks on the split (all of them new original songs) add to a discography that now includes three full-length albums dating back to 2002 and a collection of shorter releases, the most recent of which was the Generation of Terror EP in 2017.

What we have for you today is a lyric video for a breathtakingly ferocious track from the split entitled “The Separation of Innocence“. The subject matter deals with a horrid subject that has been dominating the headlines in recent weeks, and discharges the kind of explosive fury that the subject matter demands. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 106): ALETHEIAN

 THE SYNN REPORT  No Responses »
Feb 282019
 

 

(Here’s the February 2019 edition of THE SYNN REPORT, and this month Andy reviews the collected discography of the Pennsylvania technical death metal band Aletheian.)

Recommended for fans of: Death, Atheist, Extol

According to my most recent count I’ve got close to 100 potential entries for The Synn Report lined up, some of which deal with current bands whose back-catalogues I think deserve a second look, some of which look at bands who are no longer active but who are well worth checking out all the same, and some, like today’s entry, which feature bands whose situation is currently unknown.

For the February 2019 edition I’ve elected to go back in time a little bit and touch on the short, but oh so sweet, discography of one of Technical Death Metal’s most underappreciated artists, Pennsylvanian riff-wizards Aletheian.

Formed in 1997 under the name Crutch, only to change their name in 2003 following some major line-up changes, the band currently have three albums to their name, each of which err towards the more cerebral and progressive end of the Tech-Death spectrum, with a particular emphasis on complex song-structures and creative melody rather than frantic fretwork fireworks.

And while not much has been heard from the group since then, there were some rumblings a few years back that a new album was in the works, so while this may be the first you’re hearing about the band for some of you, hopefully it won’t be the last! Continue reading »

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