SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): SVARTKONST, CROWS OVER BRÁVELLIR, WALSUNG, BLUTFAHNE, TATANHAMMER, WITCH KING

 SHADES OF BLACK  7 Responses »
Jul 152018
 

 

The four bands whose music I collected in Part 1 of this post don’t really sound alike, but I found all of the music explosive and emotionally intense, and that had something to do with why I packaged their music together in that opening installment. There’s probably even less connective tissue between the songs in this second installment, and I’m not sure I’ve even succeeded in organizing them in a way that would make for any kind of appealing flow from one to the next. But I really do like everything here a lot… a WHOLE LOT.

SVARTKONST

Devil’s Blood, released on June 29th, is the debut album of the one-man blackened death metal band Svartkonst, the work of Swedish musician Rickard Törnqvist, who mixed and mastered it as well as composing and performing all the music. It hooked me immediately with the opening track “Black Light Burning“, and I stayed hooked for the next nine tracks. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): DAUÞUZ, INSIGNIUM, LYKAIONAS, ILDARUNI

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jul 152018
 

 

It’s always difficult to choose songs for these Sunday columns, not because the pickings are slim but because of the constant abundance of music from the black realms that catch my fancy every week. This week I thought I might have time to make the choosing a bit easier by making more choices. I haven’t written Part 2 yet, and it’s conceivable that I won’t finish it in time for posting today before I have to turn to other activities. But if not today, then you’ll see it on Monday.

DAUÞUZ

Before we turn to the music of this German duo, let’s have a small lesson about the band’s name and its pronunciation. “Dauþuz” is a Proto-Germanic or Norse word for death. In its spelling it includes a letter (þ) from Old Norse called thorn, which (as The Font of All Human Knowledge tells us) originated from a rune found in Icelandic and Norwegian rune poems. That rune is called Þurs in Old Norse (“Thurs”) or Þurisaz (“Thurisaz”) in its Germanic variant, and it appeared in the old rune poems as a name for giants.

The letter thorn (or þorn ) survives in only one modern language — Icelandic — where it’s pronounced something like th as in the English word thick, but not exactly. And so now, when you tell your friends how amazed you are by this band’s music, you’ll be able to do so without mutilating the pronunciation of their name by sticking an unwelcome “P” sound in the middle of it. But you probably knew that already. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: HIDEOUS DIVINITY

 Interviews, WAXING LYRICAL  5 Responses »
Jul 142018
 

 

(In this week’s edition of Andy Synn’s series on the creation of metal lyrics, he elicits thoughts from lyricist/guitarist Enrico Schettino of the Italian death metal band Hideous Divinity.)

If you’re not already familiar with Italian blastmasters Hideous Divinity then stop whatever you’re doing now (which I suppose is reading this column) and head on over to their Bandcamp page straight away and listen to their facemelting third album Adveniens, which our very own DGR described as:

“…an atomic blast that never seems to stop expanding ever-outward from moment one, never losing momentum, and leaving nothing but ash, dust, and mutation in its aftermath.”

And then, once you’re done with that, make sure to come back here and read this new edition of Waxing Lyrical, where the band’s guitarist Enrico Schettino discusses where his lyrics come from, where they’re going, and the method behind the band’s particular brand of metallic madness! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DESCENT — “SKINWALKER”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Jul 132018
 

 

Have you ever wondered what it might feel like to plant yourself, chained to something sturdy, in the face of a Category 5 hurricane? Or to be caught defenseless in the path of a jet-propelled carpet-bombing campaign? Or to be scorched to a crisp by the blast of a military-grade flamethrower? Well of course you have — haven’t we all?

There’s no need to wonder any more, or to be left with the emptiness of fervent desires for self-destruction gone unanswered. You just have to listen to “Skinwalker“. Even a single solitary listen will do the trick.

“Skinwalker” is a track off the debut album by a band from Brisbane, Australia, named Descent, whose members come from the ranks of such bands as From These Wounds, Scumguts, Dire Wolf, Coffin Birth, The Fevered, and Siberian Hellsounds, most of whom we’ve written about here at one time or another. Entitled Towers of Grandiosity, the album is pegged for release by Redefining Darkness Records on August 31st. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SLOTH HERDER — “SACRED COWARD”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 132018
 

 

If you look at Sloth Herder’s Facebook profile, you’ll see that they’ve chosen “Power-slob” as the description of their musical genre, and “abandon pop sensibility” as the summing up of their band interests, which is pretty funny. And in a way, it kind of makes sense — because trying to pin down the band’s music is a bit like trying to pin a glob of mercury to the dashboard of a moving car. Elsewhere, I’ve seen it described as “demented avant-death/grind”, “blackened doom/grind”, and “a dynamic clusterfuck of seething brilliance”. Their debut album, 2017’s No Pity, No Sunrise, spawned comparisons to such wide-ranging acts as Antigama and Pyrrhon, Yautja and Gaza (among many others).

I myself have resisted the temptation to whip up some kind of genre descriptor in my previous writings about the band, because I don’t like the convulsions that happen when my brain knots up. I’m content just to whip up some adjectives in an effort to capture the convulsing effects of Sloth Herder’s music. Speaking of which, we do have some new Sloth Herder music to present. It’s a track named “Sacred Coward“, which is one of two tracks on a new single that the band will be releasing through their Bandcamp page on July 20. Continue reading »

CENTAURUS-A: “MEANS OF ESCAPE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 132018
 

 

(This is Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Germany’s Centaurus-A, their first after a nine-year absence.)

Is nine years a sufficient break between releases to call Means of Escape a “comeback” album? Answers on a postcard, please.

Whether it is or it isn’t though, it’s still a significant enough gap that I think most fans (myself included) had essentially accepted that Centaurus-A’s impressive debut, Side-Effects Expected, was going to wind up as one of those underappreciated underground classics whose impact and influence was destined to be appreciated solely by a few lucky listeners who just happened to have been in the right place, at the right time.

And yet, almost out of the blue, the Centaurus-A machine suddenly came back online in April of this year with the announcement that news of their demise had been greatly exaggerated, and that a brand new album was set to be released very soon… a new album which eventually dropped on the 13th of June, exactly one month ago today. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE: ENGULF — “GOLD AND RUST”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 132018
 

 

Today, the very lucky 13th of July, is the release date for Gold and Rust, the new EP by the one-man, New Jersey-based death metal project Engulf. It comes adorned with a wonderful cover created by Misanthropic-Art, which by itself should be an irresistible invitation to explore this music even if you weren’t already aware of Engulf‘s capabilities, as first revealed through last year’s Subsumed Atrocities EP (which also featured an eye-grabbing cover by the same artist). And those capabilities continue to be strikingly impressive.

All credit goes to Hal Microutsicos, who again proves himself to be a guitar wizard, but one who uses his sorcerous talents in the service of genuinely ferocious death metal onslaughts that get  pulses racing and skulls fracturing, even as they get eyes popping wide over his technical proficiency. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BONEHUNTER, HATE, HORRENDOUS, INFERNAL COIL, MESARTHIM, SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jul 132018
 

 

This is obviously a big end-of-week round-up. Today the size of the round-up will be in inverse proportion to the volume of words in my descriptions of the music, because I have three premieres to write and there would have been more except I exercised some rare restraint and started saying No.

What is it about this day that makes it so popular for premieres and releases? Could it be that there is only one other Friday in 2018 like it (and that one occurred three months ago)?

I arranged the music in alphabetical order by band name because I couldn’t think of a more logical way to stitch these sounds together.

BONEHUNTER

This time Bonehunter chose to keep the rampaging bear’s penis less prominent on the magnificent cover of their new album (rendered by Joe Petagno), to the disappointment of some and the relief of others (as long as they don’t look to closely at that tongue). But how does the music on Children of the Atom compare to the tunes on this Finnish band’s more prominently erect last record, Sexual Panic Human Machine? Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST 2018: A PHOTO RECORD (DAY 2)

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Jul 122018
 

 

For the second year in a row, NCS was proud to co-present Northwest Terror Fest, which took place this year on May 31 – June 2 in Seattle, Washington. Several of us in the NCS family helped organize and present the fest, and I guess that makes us a bit biased, but we’re not the only ones who thought it was a fantastic event. The feedback from bands, fans, and the venues has been uniformly very, very positive — so much so that we and our co-conspirators are already at work planning the third installment of NWTF for 2019.

We will of course be bringing you news about next year’s fest when the time is right, but we now want to take one more look back at NWTF 2018. And to do that, we’re fortunate to be able to present some of the amazing photos that New Orleans-based photographer Teddie Taylor took while the festival was in progress. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DRAWN AND QUARTERED — “RAVAGE THE CADAVER”

 Metal News, Premieres  2 Responses »
Jul 122018
 

 

I suppose I ought to confess at the outset that as a resident of the Seattle area for a couple of decades, I became a devoted fan of Drawn and Quartered long ago. Because they’ve been long-time fixtures in the Seattle underground for a couple of decades themselves, that means I’ve been able to watch them perform on numerous occasions, and have always left with a sore neck and a crooked, fiendish smile on my face. It therefore won’t surprise you to learn that I’ve had their new album The One Who Lurks high up on my radar screen since it was first announced — especially since six long years have passed since their last one, Feeding Hell’s Furnace.

That confession, by the way, wasn’t intended as an acknowledgment of any kind of bias. This band earned my loyalty (and that of many others, both here and around the globe) because they’re just really damned good. I say it only because I was prepared to like the album, based on history, before I ever heard it.

But I will say that, even with that history of enjoying records and performances, this new full-length still surprised me. It proves not only that Drawn and Quartered have plenty of gas left in the tank, but that they’ve tapped into some kind of eldritch fuel source that ups the octane even further beyond the premium juice that has driven the pistons of this savage death machine before. Continue reading »

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