AN NCS INTERVIEW: WRATHRONE

 Interviews  No Responses »
May 232018
 

 

(Latvian music writer Evita Hofmane re-joins us with the following interview of members of the Finnish death metal band Wrathrone, whose new album, Reflections of Torment, was released last month.)

Wrathrone strike hard with their sophomore album, fittingly titled Reflections of Torment. It’s safe to say that these Finnish death dealers have really found their rotten groove and sound on this bestial offering! Rumbling double guitars, low-grinding bass with blasting drums, topped with unearthly growls. Uncompromising cover art by Pierre Perichaud of Business for Satan depicts the horrors and defiled themes of the album perfectly!

Reflections of Torment was recorded during the autumn of 2017 at V. R. Studio in Turku and mixed/mastered at Wolfthrone Studios. It was released by Satanath Records with The Void Records in CD and digital formats in April 2018 and will be released by Cimmerian Shade Recordings in vinyl and tape formats in September 2018.

I dropped the band a line to find out more about it. Continue reading »

ROADBURN 2018, A PHOTO RECORD: DAY 2

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
May 232018
 

 

The 2018 edition of Roadburn Festival is in the history books. From April 19th through April 22nd at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands, metal fans got the chance to choose from among performances by more than 100 bands across four stages and a fascinating array of musical genres. NCS was fortunate to be represented by the fantastic New Orleans-based music photographer Teddie Taylor, who made a visual record of the event for us.

We left it to Teddie to decide which bands to see; no doubt she had a lot of difficult decisions to make — and we had difficult decisions of our own in determining which of her images to share with you (they’re all really damned good!). We’re dividing this collection of pics into four parts, one for each day of Roadburn 2018. You can find her photos from Day 1 here. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): GHOSTBOUND — “ALL IS PHANTOM”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Premieres  1 Response »
May 222018
 

 

Given our usual proclivities at this site, perhaps it’s best to begin by paying attention to the elephant in the room: Roughly 99% of the vocals on Ghostbound’s debut album All Is Phantom are clean. And there’s another elephant standing in our room, too: Metal is only one ingredient in the music, and not even the dominant one. Nevertheless, we’ve agreed to present the full streaming premiere of the record here today despite the fact that it goes well off our usual beaten paths — because it goes off our usual stamping grounds so very well, blazing its own trails in such remarkably vivid and memorable ways.

The band’s name was well-chosen, and so is the album’s title. The music wears its passionate and very human emotions right out on its extravagant, embroidered sleeves, to the point of becoming theatrical at times, but almost none of it sounds completely earthbound. Ghost-bound, indeed it is — edged with angst, shadowed by sorrow, haunted by death. And it’s also beautiful, inspiring,  even joyous. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: OUBLIETTE — “THE PASSAGE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 222018
 

 

Not for the first time, I’m grateful we have Metal-Archives, because it provides evidence that this Tennessee band is the only active one on the planet with the name Oubliette. And why is that worth noting? Because Oubliette is one of the most metal band names I can think of.

It’s an old word, a French one, its earliest recorded use dating back to 1374. Although another old French word — donjon — seems to have been the source for the English word dungeon, the oubliette was the true dungeon, at least as that latter word has come to be understood. The donjon was instead a castle tower, or “keep”. The oubliette was the dark, claustrophobic hole underground, often accessed only by a trapdoor or hatchway from the room above, where doomed wretches were imprisoned or tortured, some of those cells so small that lying down or even turning around was impossible. In time, as we are told, oubliettes became symbols of hidden cruelty and tyrannical power. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: CURSE UPON A PRAYER — “THE THREE WOES”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
May 222018
 

 

(Wil Cifer wrote the following review of the new three-track EP by the Finnish black metal band Curse Upon A Prayer, which will be released by Saturnal Records on June 21.)

Saturnal Records is releasing an EP from this Finnish band who couldn’t give less of a fuck about the polite society of metal. On The Three Woes they lash out at Islam. People have complained for the last decade that Christianity is too easy a target. So they are taking aim at another religion. Strip this theme away and it boils back down to one question… What are these guys doing different that we’ve not heard other black metal bands do a hundred times?

The first song (“Let Thy Kingdom Come”) doesn’t give a clear-cut answer. It seems to be their level of hateful aggression. The standard tools of the black metal trade are all in place. Thundering double-bass, blast beats, and tremolo-picked guitar do their part to make this black metal as fuck. Hints of melody haunt the sometimes thrash-influenced guitar riffs. The passion with which they throw themselves into their music compensates for any time when they might not be the most original band on the planet. Continue reading »

ROADBURN 2018, A PHOTO RECORD: DAY 1

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
May 212018
 

 

The 2018 edition of Roadburn Festival is in the history books. From April 19th through April 22nd at the 013 venue in Tilburg, The Netherlands, metal fans got the chance to choose from among performances by more than 100 bands across four stages and a fascinating array of musical genres. NCS was fortunate to be represented by the fantastic photographer Teddie Taylor, who made a visual record of the event for us.

We left it to Teddie to decide which bands to see; no doubt she had a lot of difficult decisions to make — and we had difficult decisions of our own in determining which of her images to share with you (they’re all really damned good!). We’re dividing this collection of pics into four parts, one for each day of Roadburn 2018. We asked Teddie to introduce herself first, to those of you who may not be familiar with her work:

“I am an Alabama transplant currently residing in the glorious swamp that is New Orleans. Growing up, I regularly went on adventures to photograph the flora and fauna of the Gulf Coast and thought I’d eventually pursue nature photography. I’ve always been involved with the arts, whether it be attempting to dance or taking vocal lessons, and fell hard and fast into music photography during a college internship at the local rock radio station. A few years and seemingly hundreds of deafening nights in small bars later and I am an intern at Relapse Records and Earsplit PR and travel regularly to interview and take photos of musicians I adore. I apologize in advance if my tall, camera-hauling self blocks your view or whacks you with a camera during a show.”

And with that preamble, here are some of Teddie’s photos from the first day at Roadburn 2018: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SAHON — “FAITH OF SAVAGERY”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 212018
 

Visions of mushroom clouds seem to shroud the headlines about North and South Korea these days. We fervently hope that all the trans-Pacific “fire and fury” lunacy turns out to be just overblown but ultimately empty rhetoric, but we have absolutely nothing against irradiating detonations if they come from speakers blasting the music of Sahon.

This South Korean thrash metal band kick up a righteous fury on their new album, Chanting For the Fallen, which will be released by Transcending Obscurity Asia on July 15th. But as you’ll discover through the song we’re premiering today (and another one that debuted previously), this long-running power trio are doing that in a way that isn’t a formulaic re-treading of what a long line of other thrash bands have done before them. Continue reading »

THE KONSORTIUM: “ROGALAND”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
May 212018
 

 

(Agonia Records will release a new album by The Konsortium on June 1st in Europe and June 8th in North America, but you can read Andy Synn’s review of it today.)

Cast your minds back, if you will, to the heady days of 2011, which is when Islander stumbled across (and reviewed) the debut album by the mysterious Norwegian collective known as The Konsortium, in what would prove to be this site’s first (though by no means last) encounter with this group of memorable metallic misfits.

In the years since then we’ve covered the band a handful of times, whether it be appearing at Inferno Festival in 2012, or being picked out as one of my “Most Anticipated Albums of 2018”, but the truth of the matter is that pickings have been remarkably slim over the last seven(ish) years or so, as the various members of the band have all been busy with other projects and priorities.

Thankfully, Rogaland quickly makes it clear that all this time spent waiting has not been in vain, as it’s one hellishly addictive, ruthlessly aggressive, slab of Black/Thrash brilliance. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ROTTEN SOUND — “SUFFER TO ABUSE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 212018
 

 

(The Finnish grindcrushers in Rotten Sound released a new EP via Season of Mist on May 18th, and DGR gives it a detailed review here.)

Rotten Sound’s 2016 album Abuse To Suffer is one of the better examples of a neatly packaged album of grind out there to date, with the band having seemingly found a near-perfect length for their latest vitriolic blast-beast to unleash upon the world. Like many of their songs, Abuse To Suffer ends almost as suddenly as it begins with an almost perfunctory pop of the snare to finally send things off, neatly tying off the near half-hour you get with the Finnish speaker destroyers. Which means that the group’s latest EP — Suffer To Abuse — makes for an interesting proposition, arriving nearly two years after its predecessor and picking up right where the band left off, as if the Rotten Sound crew just couldn’t let go of that disc just yet and so dished out another eleven minutes (spread across seven songs) of hyper-fast and ultra-precise grindcore, leaning heavily on the circle-pit aspect of the -core sound.

The limited edition EP, which saw a staggered release between Europe and North America (for whatever nightmarish reasons, and not the first group this has happened to this year — Centinex also had a month between continents with their disc Chaos Manifesto), can be neatly summed up as exactly what you want you from the group — another quick expulsion of sound that remains relentless throughout, with just enough sludge around the edges to add a little dirt to the group’s latest sweat-fest. Continue reading »

DUNGEON SYNTH: A LIST BY NEILL JAMESON

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
May 212018
 

 

(In Part II of his 2017 year-end list for NCS, our friend Neill Jameson (Krieg, Poison Blood) devoted attention to reissues of music from the realms of dungeon synth, but here that genre is the sole focus of the following recommendations.)

 

I’m sure you’re tired of hearing about the various synth subgenres that have popped up all around metal the last few years because they don’t have guitars or whatever excuse you give when confronted with something outside of metal. I know that kept me out of checking a lot of this shit out and gave me a lot of preconceived notions (mostly true when it comes to synthwave). I’ve been a longtime devotee of early (now Era 1) Mortiis but around the time he decided to try different genre pastures I was burned out by overly symphonic and honestly overly fucking melodramatic dark ambient and really only revisited the more ambient side of things when I put on old Mortiis records or if some black metal band had a good instrumental track (i.e., Lugubrum’s earlier stuff — totally underrated and mandatory band). That was until I listened to Old Tower out of curiosity, which caused a twelve-month binge on dungeon synth. I tend to obsess over these kinds of things and dungeon synth is a genre that’s constantly expanding so I always have something to check out. Like most genres, I don’t like 75% of it but what I do like, I really dig into.

Anyway thanks for sticking around for that needless exposition. The cliff notes version for anyone wanting to skip ahead is here’s another list I’ve submitted, this time with some dungeon synth you might not be too aware of and might be interested in checking out. Unlike most times I make these lists I’d actually love for readers to post suggestions for me to check out.

The best resource I’ve found for the genre is The Dungeon Synth Archives on YouTube, which seems to update every day. I’ve also noticed that Tour De Garde, Hollow Myths, and Out of Season generally knock it out of the park with their releases in the genre, plus Tour De Garde constantly releases black metal of high quality, which is a bonus if you have money to burn on something you won’t hate. Continue reading »

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