AT THE GATES: “TO DRINK FROM THE NIGHT ITSELF”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
May 092018
 

 

(We present DGR’s review of the new album by some Swedish upstarts whose name will eventually be well-known if they keep doing stuff like this. It will be released on May 18th by Century Media.)

You’d be forgiven if, like your dear author here, the shock of At The Gates being an active band still hasn’t worn off yet. It’s been four years since the release of 2014’s At War With Reality, the group play shows and tour regularly, and yet every moment they’re around feels precious.

Recording an album that has transcended into a metal cultural landmark and leaving a near-twenty-year gap until the next one will do that to you, one guesses. Yet, here we are on the cusp of a second release from the group after that long hiatus in the form of their sixth album, To Drink From The Night Itself, and the first to feature new guitarist Jonas Stålhammar (whose own resume is pretty stacked and most recently played alongside vocalist Tomas Lindberg in their more old-school-focused The Lurking Fear).

In the lead-up to At War With Reality we all had a lot of fun pontificating on the many thought exercises of “What will a new At The Gates album sound like after the band has been gone for so long”, as the band had essentially watched and been part of a whole genre-explosion while its various members were involved in a slate of other projects. When the album was released, the answer was a pretty solid “it sounds like At The Gates” — which has to be one of the most frustratingly difficult things to pin down. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DISCHORDIA — AN EXCERPT FROM “BINGE”

 Premieres  No Responses »
May 092018
 

 

On June 15th the Oklahoma City progressive death metal band Dischordia will release a new two-track EP inspired by Dante’s The Divine Comedy, the title of which combines the names of the two songs: Binge/Purge. Each song is a long one; the two together provide just over 24 minutes of explosive and bewildering sound. The decision has been made to preview the music through excerpts of the music rather than through complete track streams, and today it’s our genuine pleasure to bring you the opening four minutes and nineteen seconds of the EP’s first track, “Binge“.

Dischordia’s last release, the Thanatopsis full-length in 2016, caught us a bit by surprise. As our own Andy Synn wrote in his review of the album: “With a sound reminiscent of both the old (Spheres-era Pestilence and Obscura-period Gorguts), and the new (Decapitated, Meshuggah) schools of Death Metal, the nine tracks which make up Thanatopsis find the band flexing both their mental and physical muscles more than ever before, while also curtailing some of the unfocussed ambition of their previous album and redirecting it down a darker and more progressive pathway”

Andy also proclaimed the album “undoubtedly just that much more ambitious – both in scope and in execution – and that much more vicious, than 90% of everything else that you’re likely to have encountered this year”. Little did we know that Dischordia’s ambitions and musical progressions weren’t anywhere close to being exhausted with that album. Binge/Purge takes what the band accomplished on Thanatopsis and pushes it to an even higher and wilder level. Continue reading »

DEADSPACE: “MOUTH OF SCORPIONS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
May 092018
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new EP by the Australian band Deadspace, released on April 11, 2018.)

One thing I’ve learned over the years is that, no matter how purportedly mainstream or well-known a band is, every review (or interview, or article, etc.) is going to be someone’s first exposure to them.

Of course there are always going to be those who are keen to brag about how they knew so-and-so or such-and-such before everyone else, and crap all over anyone who doesn’t share their intimate connection with what they consider the “true” underground… but I try not to let this discourage me from writing about music I think people might find interesting, regardless of whether it’s considered to be “big” or “cool” or “kvlt” (though I’m not sure if anyone even uses that last one anymore).

Because in the end, that’s what we’re all here for. To find new (and sometimes not-so-new) music we might have missed elsewhere. To seek out new bands and new recommendations, to boldly go… sorry, sorry, got a little bit off-course there… anyway, all this is just a long-winded way for me to say I hope that at least some of you enjoy what you’re about to read/hear. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: 夢遊病者 (SLEEPWALKER) — “NO PREMATURE CELEBRATIONS”

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 082018
 

 

If you managed to catch the 5772 record released last fall by 夢遊病者 (Sleepwalker), then you already know how difficult it is to describe the music of this band. I haven’t heard anything else like 5772… and I haven’t heard anything else like this band’s new LP either. They have boggled my mind again. “Visionary” seems like too pretentious a word, and “genius” might come off too strong, but it’s definitely ingenious — so bewilderingly creative that I’ve become transfixed by it.

The name of this new release is 一期一会 (Ichi-go ichi-e). That title is a Japanese idiom that can be translated as “for this time only, never again”. I’ve learned from The Font of All Human Knowledge that it is often associated with Japanese tea ceremonies, the characters often “brushed onto scrolls which are hung in the tea room”. “The term reminds people to cherish any gathering that they may take part in, citing the fact that many meetings in life are not repeated. Even when the same group of people can get together again, a particular gathering will never be replicated, and thus, each moment is always once-in-a-lifetime”. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: EYE OF THE DESTROYER — “VIOLENT BY DESIGN”

 Premieres  1 Response »
May 082018
 

 

New Jersey’s Eye of Destroyer describe themselves as “horror movie obsessed party slam-aholics”, the kind of people willing “to get wasted with anyone, anytime, anywhere”. Without questioning the accuracy of that reputation, they also seem to have a taste for inflicting enough blunt-force trauma to keep an army of orthopedic surgeons fully stocked with patients.

They’re a busy group of barbarians, too. In addition to rampant gigging, they’ve churned out five releases since 2014, including an album and four EPs, the most recent of which was 2017’s Starved and Hanging. And now they have another EP headed our way, this one named Violent By Design. It’s our sadistic pleasure to bring you a stream of the title track today; be sure to have an orthopedist on speed-dial before you listen. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: WAYFARER, ATAVISMA, NATTVERD, THRONEUM, FINIS, 酸葬儀 ACIDFUNERAL, WITCHSKULL, HAMMERS

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
May 082018
 

 

I had enough time last night to turn myself into a musical glutton. Just kept stuffing myself to the point of swelling up like a dirigible, hoping I’d come across something that wasn’t tasty before I exploded. That didn’t happen, so I had to summon the last vestiges of willpower and make myself stop.

So here’s a whole bunch of music, and only pithy impressions from me.

WAYFARER

Wayfarer’s third album, their first for the Profound Lore label, is described as “a reflection of the Rocky Mountains and high plains of their native Colorado”, “drawing influence as much from the dusty, dark Americana of the ‘Denver Sound’ and the scores of epic westerns as they do the fury and melody of black metal….” Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PISSBOILER — “MONOLITH OF DEPRESSION”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
May 072018
 

 

Our own introduction to the sonic ravages of the Swedish band Pissboiler came last fall, when we premiered a relentlessly oppressive, disturbingly trance-inducing track named “Cutters” from the band’s debut album, In the Lair of Lucid Nightmares, which was later released by Third I Rex. That unsparingly hopeless experience led us down into the full black depths of that album, but also back to the 26-minute side of Pissboiler’s split release with Develkuth from earlier in 2017, a track aptly named “Monolith of Depression”. And now we’re coming full circle.

In July, a new Pissboiler record will become available through the combined efforts of Third I Rex (UK), Weird Truth Productions (Japan), and Dying Sun Records (Netherlands). The name of this new EP, Att Med Kniv Ta En Kristens Liv, can be rendered in English as “To Take The Life Of A Christian With A Knife”.

Musically, the first three tracks chronicle an actual murder in which an old couple were stabbed to death in their beds, but not before the woman woke up and called 911. Samples used in the music come from the horrifying recording of her call, and the tracks move from the moment before (“En visa för elden”) to the murder itself (“Att Med Kniv Ta En Kristens Liv”), to the burning of the corpses (“Pt II – Ett avslut”).

But the new EP includes a fourth track after these, a re-mixed and re-mastered version of that previously released opus, “Monolith of Depression” — and that’s what we’re bringing you today, just to whet your morbid appetites for those three new songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SADISTIK FOREST — “ZERO PROGRESS”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
May 072018
 

 

The death metal of Sadistik Forest is a destructive art, a morbidly majestic revery on a life characterized by decades of torment, and then death — zero progress lies behind, the hour of dread approaches, and then the maelstrom opens, the monsters of death come slavering forth from a place where the bones of a giant lie waiting for you to join them.

And in case you haven’t figured it out, all the song titles on the band’s new album, Morbid Majesties, were stitched together into that opening sentence in a way that suggests a narrative, but also conveys some of the moods in this band’s potent attack on the senses. What that sentence doesn’t adequately convey, however, is how tremendously vibrant the music is, and how well-crafted the songs are to achieve an immediate visceral impact while also digging their hooks into the listener’s head. We’ve got a prime example of this in the song we’re premiering today: “Zero Progress“. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MEPHORASH

 Interviews  3 Responses »
May 072018
 


Photo by Per Ole Hagen

 

(One of our Norway-based contributors, Karina Noctum, conducted the following interview with members of the Swedish black metal band Mephorash at this year’s Inferno Festival. The band are at work on a highly anticipated new album, which follows 2015’s 1557 – Rites of Nullification.)

 

Karina: You have released a single that belongs to your fourth upcoming album. Have you finished it or are you producing it?

Mishbar Bovmeph: We are almost finished. We are working wrapping the whole album up and hopefully we will release it towards autumn this year. Continue reading »

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