DAGON: “BACK TO THE SEA”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Feb 272018
 

 

(Michigan’s seafaring Dagon have set sail again after seven years ashore, and DGR follows along in their wake like a gleeful porpoise with this detailed review.)

 

Few albums out there start with a song quite as victorious as Dagon’s Back To The Sea does. Its title track is an anthemic opening number, leading off the lengthy excursion back into the world of nautically themed melo-death from the Lansing, Michigan based group after a seven-year absence. Holding more thinly veiled symbolism than one might expect from a band who’ve made their headway in the metal scene by pulling tales from mythology, the history of piracy, and general apocalyptic tales of the ocean, the song “Back To The Sea” quickly throws aside all pretention in favor of a quick-moving guitar part and a constant refrain of “going back, back to the sea!”, which is an event that has been a long time coming for fans of the band.

The comeback disc is a hard trick to execute, but after a succesful crowdfunding campaign (which we posted about here, mostly to get folks some foam shark fins because the merchandising opportunity amused us) the group, who had developed a bit of a cult following after the release of their 2009 album Terraphobic and its followup EP, 2011’s Vindication, have managed to do just that. Back To The Sea contains 13 songs of hydro-powered, lead-guitar-charged melodeath led by a combo of cat-shrieking highs from drummer Truck and hefty low growls from bassist Randall, and while it’s not exactly breaking the mold genre-wise, it proves to be a whole hell of a lot of fun. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): SIXES — “METHISTOPHELES”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

There’s no typo in the title of this post. Methistopheles is indeed the name of the debut album by the Southern California band Sixes. Think for a moment about such a union, about the scourge of meth joined to a conception of Lucifer not as a fallen angel but as the master of eternal tortures. Imagine desperation, derangement, and pain without end.

To be clear, I don’t know if that’s precisely the linguistic suggestion that Sixes had in mind when they coined the album title. My imagination could simply have fallen prey to the influence of the album’s music, which draws from poisoned wellsprings of sludge, stoner doom, and black metal to express abject misery in particularly devastating but perversely entrancing ways.

The music may turn your imaginings in other directions… none of them very pretty or comforting… but the best way to find out is to listen to the album. And you can do that now through our premiere of the record a few days before its March 1 release by Black Bow Records. Continue reading »

ANCST: “GHOSTS OF THE TIMELESS VOID”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by the German genre-benders in Ancst, which will be released on March 2, 2018.)

 

There are certain albums which hit you hard immediately, with a violent, whiplash-inducing punch right to the face. Then there are albums which deliver a slower, deeper, longer-lasting burn.

But the best albums are the ones which manage to do both, smacking you upside the head and knocking you flat on your ass, while also leaving the sort of heavy bruising which guarantees you won’t be forgetting the experience any time soon.

Now Ghosts of the Timeless Void, the second album by German blackened ‘core-collective Ancst, is most definitely one of the former… but only time will tell if it’s also the latter. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TOWARDS ATLANTIS LIGHTS — “GREETING MAUSOLUS’ TOMB”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

The debut album by Towards Atlantis Lights, Dust of Aeons, consists of four tracks thematically tied together in a narrative that plumbs the subconscious to reveal a magical remembrance of civilizations long dead and wisdom long forgotten, a discovery shrouded in the pain of loss and pointing toward the embrace of death. The music itself is as magical, as dramatic, and as heartbreaking as these tales brought forward from history’s depths in a dream.

The skill with which the album captures and conveys such powerful moods comes as no surprise, given the array of talents who have joined forces in this new group. The multinational quartet consists of vocalist/keyboardist Kostas Panagiotou (Pantheist, Landskap), bassist Riccardo Veronese (Aphonic Threnody, Dea Marica, Arrant Saudade), guitarist Ivan Zara (Void of Silence), and drummer Ivan Olivieri. Employing the tools of funeral doom and death metal, they’ve crafted music that’s beautiful, bereft, and wholly immersive.

The four songs on the album are significantly different in their durations. The opening song, “The Bunker of Life“, for example, exceeds 30 minutes, while the closer — which is the song you’re about to hear — is less than five minutes long. Yet although “Greeting Mausolus’ Tomb” is the shortest of the four tracks, it’s nonetheless spell-binding. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNBIRTH — “TUMULTS OF COLLECTIVE ANGUISHES”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

The connoisseurs of extreme metal brutality at New Standard Elite are poised to detonate an obliterating new destructive device, in the form of the second album by Italy’s Unbirth. Entitled Fleshforged Columns of Deceit, the album is projected for release in April, but we have an electrifying burst from the album today through our premiere of the record’s opening track, “Tumults of Collective Anguishes“.

This new song is a fine example of Unbirth’s capacity to mount sonic assaults that are both savagely brutal and technically eye-popping. Flying at rocket-fast speed and with razor-sharp precision, the band create a feeling of heartless, frenzied viciousness, combined with skull-fracturing explosions of power. Continue reading »

CULTHE FEST 2018

 Metal News  4 Responses »
Feb 262018
 

 

The fifth edition of Culthe Fest will take place on March 31, 2018, in the city of Münster, Germany. When the festival’s organizers invited us to help spread the word about the event as a co-sponsor, the answer was a no-brainer, based on one glance at the line-up. Feast your eyes upon these names:

UADA (USA)
THE GREAT OLD ONES (FR)
VERHEERER (DE)
HEMELBESTORMER (BE)
TURIA (NL)
ALBEZ DUZ (DE)
BELTEZ (DE)
VYRE (DE)

With only one exception, these are all bands whose music we’ve enthusiastically praised at our site — and the one exception (Vyre) are a band we’ve happily discovered for the first time as a result of their confirmed appearance at Culthe Fest 2018. So it wasn’t a difficult decision to lend our own putrid name to the event. The difficulty is that we’re far away from Münster and haven’t yet gotten the teleporter operational, because this would be a hell of a show to attend in person. If you can be there, you damned well should! Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ONIRISM, HECATE, MISANTHROPIC RAGE, ENDE, KOSTNATĚNÍ

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Feb 252018
 

 

I stared at my long list of recent black metal releases that I found appealing. My eyes drifted further down the list to all the releases and advance tracks from weeks past that I had wanted to say something about, but hadn’t. That daunted feeling that crept into my head like a bad old friend, it locked up my brain. To unlock it, I tried to allow instinct to take over, and speared these five names based on the thought that the flow of the music would provide some interesting twists and turns as you move through them.

ONIRISM

Upon encountering this one-man French band’s second EP, Sun, last year, I tried to sum up my reaction in these words: “Onirism isn’t the first band to combine utterly enthralling and transcendently beautiful sounds with the kind of savagery that makes you want to hide under your bed, but holy hell, they do it well.”

Later in the year I revisited Onirism through our premiere of a track from the band’s split with Pure Wrath, and left enthralled again. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: PRIMORDIAL, NOCTURNAL GRAVES, SECTIONED, BLOOD TSUNAMI, ORYX

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  21 Responses »
Feb 242018
 

 

Two nights ago on my way home from a late meeting in Seattle I hit a patch of black ice less than a mile from my house. My car skidded off the road, rolled over, and landed on its side in a deep ditch. I missed hitting a telephone pole by two feet, but did destroy a mailbox and probably my car as well.

On the other hand, I’m unharmed, just a bit sore in a few places. I spent three hours sitting in a police car with a very decent officer while we waited for and then watched some remarkable tow-truck guys figure out how to get the car on its wheels and out of the ditch, in 20-degree weather in the middle of the night. The cop finally drove me home at 4 a.m. yesterday morning.

That scary incident fucked up my plans for a round-up yesterday. I’m afraid to go back and read the premieres I wrote after a sleepless night and in an addled frame of mind, but I sure didn’t feel up to writing anything I hadn’t already committed to do.

Anyway, the past week was another blockbuster in terms of new metal, and I’ve left a lot of stuff out of this post — which is still pretty long. I picked the music of the following five bands to provide a wide spread of different genres.

PRIMORDIAL

So far, the Irish troubadours in Primordial have released videos for two singles from their new album, Exile Amongst the Ruins, the second one appearing last week. Both songs will likely be surprising in some ways to Primordial fans, although Alan “Nemtheanga” Averill‘s remarkable voice is still front and center in both. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SLUMLORD — “INTO BONE”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Feb 232018
 

 

Last month we ushered into the world a music video for a track named “Patiently Waiting”, which will appear on the new album by Slumlord from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. That album, Preview of Hell, will be released on March 7th, and now we have another Slumlord track to hurl at your head, this one for the album’s fourth song, “Into Bone“.

There wasn’t anything patient about “Patiently Waiting,” and Slumlord weren’t holding anything back either. The song is a take-no-prisoners onslaught of pure fury in which these metallic hardcore brawlers mixed blazing drumwork and heavy, harrowing chords; brute-force, stop-start jolts and ravaging riffs; vocals that are raw and rampant in their uncut rage; and a breakdown that’s hard enough to cause severe neck trauma. The new song doesn’t show any mercy either Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: AETRANOK — “OV PRECIPICE AND BESTIAL PURITY”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Feb 232018
 

 

The black metal band Aetranok was spawned in the high desert of New Mexico in the small town of Aztec, but from the sound of their music you’d think they dwell in one of the lower levels of Hell. Their second album, Kingdoms of The Black Sepulcher, is set for release on April 26th by Symbol of Domination (Belarus) and Death Portal Studio (U.S.), and today we present the premiere of a lyric video for the song “Ov Precipice and Bestial Purity“.

The lyrics of the song proclaim that “the mantra of ruined angels vibrates the heavens to rubble,” and they celebrate the advent of an immaculate oblivion. “Here lies the abyss,” the vocalist shrieks in scorching tones, and the music matches all these words. Continue reading »

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