VARIED VOICES: AILS, SARASVATI, CAGE OF CREATION, MYKRAVERK

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  8 Responses »
Feb 212018
 

 

I don’t know if I’ll manage to follow through, but my plan for today is to post two round-ups of new music, this one being the first. As the post title suggests, I carved these songs away from the others and pulled them in here because the vocals in each of them aren’t solely of the kind that would suit the (demonstrably porous) rule in our site’s title. That’s right (gasp), there are some clean-sung melodies in these tracks… combined in each song with harsh ones.

Of course, to my ears the tracks have many other things to recommend them or I wouldn’t have asked you to listen. But the varied voices in these tracks are part of what made them stand out to me.

AILS

In April of last year I came across and wrote about a song from a two-track demo by a Bay-area band named Ails, whose line-up included two former members of the sorely missed Ludicra — vocalist Laurie Sue Shanaman and guitarist/vocalist Christy Cather — as well as guitarist Sam Abend (Desolation, Abrubt, Scurvy Dogs), drummer Colby Byrn (One In The Chamber, 2084, Aequorea), and bassist Jason Miller (Apocryphon, Cretaceous, Phantom Limbs). At the time, Ails was in the process of mastering their full-length debut and were seeking label support — and they got it, to no surprise of mine or anyone else who heard that demo. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: UNCOFFINED (KAT SHEVIL)

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

 

(In this new interview Comrade Aleks brings us an extensive discussion with Kat Shevil (ex-Blessed Realm), the vocalist/drummer of the British death-doom band Uncoffined.)

 

Uncoffined was raised on the ruins of the traditional doom metal outfit Blessed Realm in 2011. Blessed Realm existed as Tears from 1993 ’til 1994 and then the band acted under its blessed name ’til 2002. It was split without even a full-length album in its discography, but in July 2017 At War With False Noise released Doomography 1993-2002, a collection of demos and unreleased tracks.

Besides that, three ex-Blessed Realm members — Kat Shevil (drums, vocals), Gory Sugden (bass), and Jonny Rot (guitars) created the horror-movie-influenced satanic death-doom metal outfit Uncoffined together with guitarist G.Hall. Well, how much of death is in their doom? Do they still hold on to the traditions? Kat knows better, let’s give her the floor. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SIGNS OF THE SWARM — “NIGHTCRAWLER”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

 

Last November, Unique Leader released the latest album by Pittsburgh’s Signs of the Swarm, whose musical concoctions straddle intersecting lines of brutal death metal, slam, and deathcore. The seventh track on that 10-track release was “Nightcrawler“, and that song is the subject of the music video we’re premiering in this post.

There are chiming notes in this song that surface here and there. They sound like a child’s music box, one that has somehow continued to play in a mechanized war zone. It’s an eerie sensation, one haunting remnant of innocence in a landscape given over to violence. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: REBEL WIZARD — “GREAT ADDICTIONS TO BLINDINGLY DARK, WORLDLY LIFE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

 

The first track on the new Rebel Wizard EP, “The sickness of all knowledge“, begins with an excerpt from a recording of a public talk given in 1981 in Amsterdam by the philosopher, speaker, and writer Jiddu Krishnamurti (b.1895 – d.1986). It reads as follows:

So knowledge has become all important
but knowledge is never complete.
Knowledge about anything is still incomplete,
will always be incomplete.
Therefore knowledge always goes with ignorance,
knowledge always lives within the shadow of ignorance.

Except you never make it to the final word “ignorance” at the opening of this EP. The word is cut off by a shocking explosion of sound. It’s as if you were calmly unlocking the door to your home while thinking deep thoughts, and becoming immolated by a blast furnace upon opening it. Continue reading »

AFGRUND: “THE DYSTOPIAN”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 202018
 

 

(We present DGR’s review of the new album by the Swedish/Finnish trio Afgrund, which was released last month.)

 

There’s already been a couple of victorious return-from-the-ashes releases so far in 2018, and one of the earliest — after a long period of silence — was on January 5th, courtesy of Swedish/Finnish grind collective Afgrund.

Still somewhat embroiled in a dispute with others in their history over who owns the name has resulted in potentially two versions of the band existing. The three-piece group presented here consists of founding and long-time members Andy, Pat, and Panu, who among the three of them were with the band in one form or another from their first releases up to the 2012 album, The Age Of Dumb. On January 5th, this group returned under the Afgrund banner with a new album, eleven tracks jammed into a little over twenty-three minutes, delivering a dark and pessimistic fiery blast of grind-and-punk under the title The Dystopian.

The Dystopian feels like Afgrund returning home in more ways than one, not only because the lineup consists of founding members but also in the way The Dystopian moves and what it consists of. It sounds like Afgrund knocking down all of their old favorites all over again, reaching into a comfortably familiar bag of tricks in order to dispense high-speed blasts and yells about the world of today. The Dystopian is Afgrund performing a delicate balancing act, viewing the world through a current lens yet throwing themselves back in time in order to effectively restart the band. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WHEN BLOOD FALLS DOWN — “SERPENS CIRCULUM ALBIDUS”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Feb 192018
 

 

The wolven brotherhood When Blood Falls Down come our way from the city of León in Guanajuato, Mexico. Their debut album P A N D AE M O N I U M will be released later this year by Transcending Records, and today we have for you an official video for a song from the album called “Serpens Circulum Albidus“.

The song could be thought of as a manifestation of satanic blackened deathcore. While creating an atmosphere that’s persistently ominous and arcane — a feeling that’s enhanced by the shadowy, occult-themed video — the band mete out a serious beating capable of leaving welts, bruises, and more than a few loose teeth. Continue reading »

CYPECORE: “THE ALLIANCE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 192018
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new fourth album by the German band Cypecore, which was released on February 16, 2018.)

 

I’ve known about Cypecore since the debut of their third album Identity, released in 2016. I don’t know a lot about the history of the band, but that record came after a 6-year gap between albums. I’ve never heard anything from those first two albums, only Identity, and the subject of today’s review. This new release by them is The Alliance.

Cypecore are not some futuristic black metal band, despite what you might immediately assume from their attire. Rather, they are a brawny, massive melodic death metal band with a lot of industrial/electronic elements sandwiched in. It’s all about grooves, hooks, and atmospherics with machine-gun rhythms and grandiose melodic set pieces. I’d call them Heaven Shall Burn mixed with Fear Factory and Reroute To Remain/Soundtrack To Your Escape-era In Flames, all things I happen to be a fan of. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SENTIENT HORROR — “BLED DRY BY THE NIGHT”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Feb 192018
 

 

The cover art of the great Juanjo Castellano heralds the return of Sentient Horror from the crypts below, where they have been at work creating a ghoulish new five-track EP named… The Crypts Below. The vault will be opened wide on March 30, when the EP will be released through the conspiracy of Redefining Darkness Records (North America) and Testimony Records (Europe), but something abominable is escaping into our world today… a new song named “Bled Dry By the Night“.

Those of you who are familiar with this death metal band’s 2016 debut album, Ungodly Forms, will have a good idea what to expect, but may still not be fully prepared for the new terrors on this EP, which includes a cover of Edge of Sanity’s “Darkday” (from 1993’s The Spectral Sorrows) and four new original songs. As guitarist/vocalist Matt Moliti explains: Continue reading »

NECROPHOBIC: “MARK OF THE NECROGRAM”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Feb 192018
 

 

(This is Andy Synn’s review of the new album by Sweden’s Necrophobic, which will be released by Century Media on February 23, 2018.)

 

There was a time, way back in 2009, when the constant kvetching and complaining about what constituted “real” Black Metal – mostly fuelled by a bunch of obnoxious elitists online desperately trying to portray themselves as the true heirs to a half-baked ideology cooked up by a bunch of disaffected Norwegian teenagers – started to take a real toll on my ability to appreciate it.

More and more it seemed that, despite being long associated (in my mind at least) with creative freedom and primal emotion, the Black Metal scene was becoming just as ignorant, insular, and cluttered with impotent keyboard warriors and perpetual adolescents, as any other.

Thank God Satan for Necrophobic then, who swept in at just the right time to help reignite my passion for the genre. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: WIEGEDOOD, ATRA VETOSUS, JUBAL, AGRONA, LUSTRE, KALMANKANTAJA, BLUTVIAL

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  10 Responses »
Feb 182018
 


Wiegedood – photo by Stefaan Temmerman

 

Saturdays and Sunday mornings have become challenging times for me in the thinking I allocate to these SHADES OF BLACK posts. Having listened off and on to a lot of new black metal during the preceding week, I think I’ve figured out by mid-day Saturday what to include, and then, by coincidence or cunning, a whole bunch of new stuff lands in my lap.

Yesterday was a prime example. Having narrowed my choices, they suddenly ballooned again, thanks to late-breaking recommendations from friends and readers, and e-mails from bands and labels. The flood of communications into our chaotic command center usually dwindles dramatically on Saturdays, but those that persist tend to focus on music from the black realms, and I tend to pay attention to them more quickly because everything else has kind of cleared out.

What to do? Well, one thing I did was to expand the volume of music in today’s post. And given my renewed resolution to cut down on the number of premieres I agree to write during the week, another option will be to collect more new music in a blackened vein for a week-day edition of this series.

WIEGEDOOD

I do my best not to read comments about music on the internet (or comments about almost anything else) unless they were written by friends or respected musicians, or unless they appear at NCS. I can guess that if I made an exception to that resolution in the case of Wiegedood’s new song and video, the majority of them would be juvenilia about penises. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries