(Todd Manning wrote this review of the new split by Baltimore’s Neolithic and the Swedish band Martydöd, set for release on February 15 by Deep Six Records.)
Does anyone want to burn down a city to kick off the new year? If so, the new split between Neolithic and Martyrdöd should provide the perfect soundtrack to the chaos. This is a short record, but goddamn if it isn’t raging. Continue reading »
My NCS time has been constricted by other activities this weekend, so I won’t have time to prepare the usual Sunday SHADES OF BLACK column, but to (sort of) make up for that I did decide to focus on black metal in this 15th Part of my Most Infectious Song list. And I also decided to pack five songs into this installment rather than the usual smaller number.
Hope you enjoy these choices, especially because it was so tough for me to pick just one song from each of the albums released by these bands last year. I think they make a pretty damned powerful playlist.
TAAKE
I delivered an impulsive though compact review of Kong Vinter very soon after listening to it for the first time, and proclaimed it one of my favorite albums of 2017. My impression now, two months later, is that it was under-appreciated in the froth of year-end lists, perhaps because it came out so late in the year and was preceded by the release of only one single (“Inntrenger”). Continue reading »
It’s a shitty situation. Here I am, posting more of this list on a Saturday, the weakest day of the week, measured by how may eyes alight on our site. But I’m doing my best to finish this list by February.
Still, the three songs here deserve a fireworks display more grand than what our Saturday traffic usually provides. Life isn’t fair, and it’s too damned short and miserable, too.
MAZE OF TERROR
I read through my list of candidates for this series every day, because I’m still trying to figure out what to include. When I come to this one, I see 10 asterisk marks next to it. I have a vague memory that I was trying to tell myself many months ago, “Your mind is a sieve, it loses important things every day, but don’t forget this one, you fractured motherfucker, this one you FUCKING HAVE TO REMEMBER.” And so I have. Continue reading »
This music is meaner than a junkyard dog, crazier than a shit-house rat, as grim as a lung cancer diagnosis, as brutal as a crowbar to the back of the neck. It screams murder, and then delivers. It’s a good thing it’s an EP; a full album might put listeners in the hospital.
I’m referring to In Hell, by a band of marauders from Edmonton, Alberta, who call themselves Feeding. The EP will be released on February 2nd, shortly before the band go out on tour, but we have a full stream for you today. Continue reading »
(We present Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Norway’s In Vain, which is being released today by Indie Recordings.)
If you’ve been paying attention to the Metal blogosphere over the last few months, chances are that you’ll have stumbled across either (or both) of the new singles from Norwegian Prog-Metallers In Vain, released in advance of their new album Currents (out today on Indie Recordings).
What might surprise you, however, is the revelation that these two tracks are. arguably, the worst on the album. Continue reading »
This is the last installment of a three-part post I began on Wednesday, focusing on new and recently discovered metal in a blackened vein. I packed a lot of music into this tripartite post — including a pair of video premieres today — in part because I failed to get a SHADES OF BLACK column finished in time to post in its usual place last Sunday, but also because I won’t get one done for this coming Sunday either. The weekend is going to be an unusually busy one for me, and if I can manage to get anything done at all for NCS, it will be a continuation of our Most Infectious Song list… because time is rapidly running out on that.
When I started this post two days ago I had a list that I alphabetized by band name before dividing it into thirds. I did say that I might discover something else to add that would screw up the alphabetic ordering, and so I have.
STORMBANE
Stormbane (from Melbourne, Australia) have explained that they recorded their debut album Eldritch Devotion in 2014 but only released it on January 1 of this year “due to explosive bowel movements and disagreements”. It also appears to be a posthumous release — Metal Archives now classifies the band as “Split-up”. Too bad. But at least the band decided to discharge this explosive movement before they themselves exploded. Continue reading »
Jupiterian
As you can probably tell, I’m beginning to feel the pressure of time running out. If I’m going to finish this list by the end of January I may have to do more of what I’m doing today — packing more songs into each of these posts than I’ve been doing. Although I doubt I’ll have time to add five each day, I’m able to do that today.
And the key word for today’s installment of the list is “crushing”.
JUPITERIAN
There’s heavy, and then there’s HEAVY. As metals go, Lead is heavy, but Iridium is twice as heavy as lead. As metal bands go, Jupiterian is the Iridium of heavy music. Continue reading »
Another day, another edition of our Most Infectious Song list, with a trio of black metal tracks and a song that might be a bit of a cheat.
ADVENT SORROW
With their 2015 debut album, As All Light Leaves Her, Australia’s Advent Sorrow made a beneficial change in their sound. As Andy Synn wrote in his review, they “shed the symphonic grandeur that permeated their debut EP in favour of an all-round darker and more desperate form of borderline DSBM-style sonic despair… resulting in an album of bleak, harrowing melody and torturous metallic agony that errs closer to the sound of Infestus or early Shining than it does the more dramatic Dimmu Borgir-isms with which the band first made their name”. Continue reading »
Cuba is home to the black metal band Skjult, through which its lone member Conspirator channels his dark and devilish creative impulses. 2016 brought forth Skjult’s first album, Within the Flesh, and on February 21st of this year Satanth Records and Black Metal Propaganda Deutschland will jointly release the second one, a 41-minute assault entitled Progenies Ov Light.
The new album, which consists of seven songs and a bonus track that appears as a tribute to Trond Alastor Nefas (Urgehal/Beastcraft), reflects changes in Skjult’s musical direction as compared to the first album. Two songs have appeared so far in the run-up to the album’s release, and today we bring you a third one: “Into the Void“. Continue reading »
It should be evident by now that many Italian death metal bands have undergone gene-splicing experimentation, introducing the speed of cheetahs and the ferocity of wolverines into their DNA, along with cybernetic augmentation that enables machine-like precision in the execution of their jet-fast musical assaults. But if more evidence were needed, we present for your consideration the debut self-titled EP of Spiritual Deception from Milano, which is being released today.
The EP’s eye-catching cover art by Chebakov (who also created the art for Hideous Divinity’s Adveniens album, among other works) ought to be sufficient inducement for you to lend the EP your ears, but I’ll try to provide further temptation. Continue reading »