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 »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): BLASPHAMAGOATCHRIST, SAMMATH, APARTHIVA RAKTADHARA, AUCUN

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
May 202018
 

 

Black metal isn’t a two-sided coin — it’s more like a tetraplex. Yet I’m still thinking of the music in Part 2 of today’s SOB column as the other side of the coin from what was in Part 1. The music there was more cerebral, more emotionally complex, often more spiritual and atmospheric… and what’s here is more visceral, more violent, more inclined to take no prisoners. Or at least that’s how I think of the distinctions at a very high level.

I happen to like both “sides” of this “coin”; some may prefer one side to the other. Some, in fact, may recoil as the following selections apply a blowtorch to your eardrums.

BLASPHAMAGOATCHRIST

If you were members of Blasphemy, Goatpenis, and Antichrist, and you decided to join forces, what would you call your collective endeavor? Well, duh, you’d call it Blasphamagoatachrist! I mean, Phemypenisanti was probably already taken. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): PHTHISIS, ELYSIAN BLAZE, ATARAKTIKA, HIMELVARUWE

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
May 202018
 

 

If you haven’t listened to the new songs by Uada (here) and Gaerea (here), you should go do that. That’s all the attention I’ll give them here, because those tracks got plenty of attention when they debuted last week, and we’ll have some more things to say about the albums soon-ish. Today I’m going to focus on some music that could use more attention.

As you can see, I have enough music (and had enough time) to make two parts of SHADES OF BLACK this Sunday. Most of the music in the next part rips and tears, often at roughly 1000 mph (or 1609.34 kph). The music in this part is harder to sum up. Of course I’ll try, one by one, but not in a single introductory sentence.

PHTHISIS

The first item I’ve chosen is a four-song demo that has been buried a long time. The band no longer exists. It’s an example of music that in retrospect sounds ahead of its time, and sounds damned fine here in 2018, too. For reasons unknown to me, one of the members finally decided to share it after roughly 7 years. You never know, maybe some seeds are being watered, maybe something new will bloom. Maybe this post will add a few nutrients to aid the growth. But if not, this demo should still bring pleasure to more than a few ears. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: DAWN RAY’D

 WAXING LYRICAL  No Responses »
May 192018
 

 

(In this week’s edition of Waxing Lyrical, Andy Synn posed questions about lyrics to Simon Barr, vocalist of one of our own favorite bands, Dawn Ray’d.)

We’ve been fans of UK Black Metal three-piece Dawn Ray’d for a long time now, ever since we stumbled across their debut EP, A Thorn, A Blight (which I reviewed, eventually, a little under a year after it came out).

Mixing politics and passion, searing social activism and savage blackened invective, the band’s follow-up full-length, The Unlawful Assembly, quickly became one of the best-received and best-reviewed albums of last year (including here at NCS), which is why I’m pleased to have been able to corral the band’s vocalist (and occasional violinist) Simon Barr for this latest edition of Waxing Lyrical. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GATEWAY — “BOUNDLESS TORTURE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 182018
 

 

Within the more heartless and slaughtering corners of the extreme metal underground there has been a decades-long competition to reach the deepest, coldest caverns of devastation and despair, and to weaponize the horrors found within the crushing pressures of those abyssal chasms. The Belgian one-man death/doom band Gateway has been one of the more dedicated and successful combatants in that race to the bottom. Boundless Torture is Gateway’s latest offering, an EP that’s being digitally released today.

This is terrifying titanism, of the kind that spawns a reflexive cascade of metaphors from the more emotional and less analytical reviewers out there, such as yours truly. The sound is immense, dense, abrasive, blood-congealing, and (perhaps perversely) electrifying. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): COEXISTENCE — “CONTACT WITH THE ENTITY”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 182018
 

 

Contact with the Entity is the debut EP by the Italian progressive death metal band Coexistence, and it’s an enormously impressive first foot forward, displaying the kind of song-writing assurance, creative exuberance, and striking performance skill that one would expect from a band much further into their career. We’re very happy to be the bearer of a full stream of the music today, in advance of its release on May 21st.

The EP consists of four tracks, including a brief but disturbing interlude after the head-spinning rush of the first two songs. And those first two tracks, as well as the last one, really are the kind of kaleidoscopic experiences that open eyes wide. All the performers are technically adept; the music is atmospherically rich and wonderfully dynamic; it’s compulsively physical; and it’s loaded with wide-ranging progressive flourishes that include ventures into jazz-fusion-like mind-bending. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: THE FLESH — “SIREN’S CALL”

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May 182018
 

 

The Flesh don’t try to gild the lily in what they’re created through their debut EP, Dweller — or more accurately, gild the thorns and the meat cleavers.  From the putrescent, rotting abomination crafted by Mattias Frisk for the cover to the band’s proclamation that the songs were created “in praise of spiritual, physical and emotional erosion”, they put their motivations right up-front, without pretension: this is black-hearted, fury-pitched, bone-breaking music.

The members of this Dutch group come from the ranks of such other notable bands as Herder, Verwoed, and Blood Diamond. They allegedly joined forces after a night of heavy drinking; they drew the lyrics from themes that dwell on “the destructive drives of lust, disgust and (self)annihiliation”; they tracked these seven songs live; and they pulled no punches. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SEAR BLISS, NINE INCH NAILS, NABERUS, LUNAE ORTUS, LESSER GLOW, FLOOD PEAK

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 182018
 

 

Yesterday I exercised rare restraint and didn’t attend the annual Syttende Mai parade in Ballard, Washington, reportedly the largest celebration of Norway’s Constitution Day in the U.S. So, instead of doing what I’ve done in past years, i.e., getting pleasantly wasted in the company of hordes of actual and pretend descendants of Norwegian immigrants to the Pacific Northwest, I did what I try to do most nights: I crawled through the slag heap of the NCS in-box and scrolled the endless stream of my FB news feed looking for new music that might be worth sharing.

I added links to more than 20 new songs and videos to my ever-expanding list, most of those from albums or EPs that haven’t yet been released. That’s a sign of how much new metal is revealed every day, and that’s not counting stuff I omitted because I suspected it wouldn’t do anything for me. Then I started listening. Some nights that goes faster than you might think; if something doesn’t grab me pretty fast, I skip past it and move on.

Last night the first six songs I listened to are the first six songs you’ll find in this round-up, heard (and seen) in exactly this order (most of them are presented through music videos). And the last item here is an EP I heard right after those six. I never made it to the rest of the list. Obviously, all of this new music grabbed me — though in very different ways. Because it’s such a broad scattering of genre styles, I’ll be surprised if anyone else likes all of it as much as I do. But you might find at least one thing you like.

SEAR BLISS

I really, really, really like how this Hungarian band have evolved over a career that’s now roughly 25 years old. On the occasion of their last album, 2012’s Eternal Recurrence, Natalie Zed’s review at Angry Metal Guy included some lines that I thought were astute in capturing the band’s accomplishments on that album: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: FIRTAN — “SEEGANG”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 172018
 

 

The German black metal band Firtan will soon be adding to a discography that already includes a well-received debut album (2014’s Niedergang) and two powerful EPs (2013’s Wogen der Trauer and the band’s most recent release, 2016’s Innenwelt). On July 13th, AOP Records will release Firtan’s second album, Okeanos — a title that brings to mind the Titan god of the great world-encircling sea.

The new album includes six substantial tracks, and today it’s our pleasure to bring you the premiere of its opening song, “Seegang“. Continue reading »

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