BENEATH THE NCS RADAR (PART 27): HELLEBORUS, VIN DE MIA TRIX, ENTROPIA INVICTUS, VINTERSORG

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Nov 162017
 

 

(Our ally Gorger from Norway returns to our putrid neighborhood bearing gifts — four more underground gems from 2017, three of which we haven’t previously reviewed. To find more of his recommendations, type “Gorger” in our search bar or visit Gorger’s Metal.)

And so, a month did pass anew. That’s what you get when life finds its way of twisting and turning for a handsome young man. To the worse I might add.

Nah, who am I fooling. I’m neither young nor good looking. Fuck it. Time to drown ourselves in more tunes never before presented on No Clean Singing.

By the way, I’ve sunk to new depths, and enrolled with the herd of sheep. So for those who care to give a fuck, this cunt can also be found on Facebook now. With this self-advertisement I likely can’t get any lower, so let’s fire up the engines and soar into mighty metallic sceneries. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: INTO COFFIN

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Nov 162017
 

 

(Comrade Aleks brings us another interesting and informative interview, this time with the German band Into Coffin, whose new EP will be released by Terror From Hell digitally and on CD upon the 4th of December.)

For timeless aeons human stared into the night skies and wondered if there were gods or demons living in the eternal depths of the shimmering void. And though humanity reached space – even with just one arm – we’re far from discovering all its secrets.

The German trio Into Coffin proclaimed with their full-length Into A Pyramid Of Doom: only extraterrestrial horror awaits amongst the stars. Their cruel and blackened death doom metal compositions were constructed under the influence of H.P. Lovecraft’s mythology and their own imaginations. The album was released just one year ago (and is on tape from Caligari Records), but Terror From Hell Records are already welcoming you to embrace The Majestic Supremacy Of Chosmic Chaos, the band’s thirty-minute-long EP.

As the label promises, this record “contains slow, heavy bulldozing riffs pairing with the pummelling drumming that create an uncomfortable tension right before the whole thing ruthlessly fall in an abominable ride into the somber blackness”. I’ve tried to puzzled it out with Into Coffin’s collective mind. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PERDITION WINDS — “SAINTS OF THE DEATHFIELDS”

 Premieres  3 Responses »
Nov 152017
 

 

Three years after their debut album, Aura of Suffering, and two years after their split with the Russian band Drama, the Finnish black metal band Perdition Winds are triumphantly returning with a new album named Transcendent Emptiness. It will be released by Hellthrasher Productions on December 8th, and today we present the second advance track from the album, “Saints of the Deathfields“.

Perdition Winds is a talented collective whose line-up includes members of Desolate Shrine, Sargeist, Lie in Ruins, and Corpsessed, among others, and this new album also includes the work of a new vocalist, J.I. (Grave Violator). Continue reading »

AN NCS DOUBLE PREMIERE: ONIRISM (“ASTRAL FOREST”) AND PURE WRATH (“THE DARKEST STAGE OF TWILIGHT”)

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Nov 152017
 

 

Beginning on December 1, the Mexican label Throats Productions will release Endless Journey, an album-length split by a beautifully matched pair, two striking atmospheric black metal bands we’ve praised here in the past — Onirism from France, and Pure Wrath from Indonesia. Today we bring you the premiere of two substantial songs from the split, one by each band.

ONIRISM

I first came upon Onirism in August of this year, through an advance track from a new EP named Sun, which was released by Naturmacht Productions the following month. That was the second EP released by this project, after The Well of Stars in 2016, a year that also saw Onirism’s release of a debut album, Cosmic Dream. The project is the work of a single creator, Antoine Guibert (aka Vrath), whose work is also present in the music of Catacombes, Hentgarm, KerIfern, and Belenos (with whom he has been a live performer).

When I heard the first music of Sun, I wrote: “Onirism isn’t the first band to combine utterly enthralling and transcendently beautiful sounds with the kind of savagery that makes you want to hide under your bed, but holy hell, they do it well.” And a similar kind of union occurs within this new song from the split, “Astral Forest“. Continue reading »

THANTIFAXATH: “VOID MASQUERADING AS MATTER”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Nov 152017
 

 

Even if you think you have nothing to be thankful for on Thanksgiving, you will on the day after that, because on that day Dark Descent will release the new EP by Thantifaxath, Void Masquerading As Matter. The odds are it’s like nothing you’ve ever heard, unless you’ve heard Sacred White Noise, and even then, this one pushes the envelope even further.

These songs are the children of Dionysus and Hermes, of Ares and Hades, of the Maniae and of Apollo. You could pick a different pantheon, but this is the one that sprang to my mind, because the music is orgiastic and ecstatic, mysterious and arcane, warlike and tortured, grand and funereal, and above all insanely creative — and simply insane. Thoughts of The Wild Hunt and George Gershwin sprang to mind, too.

It might be possible to parse these songs into their manifold musical ingredients, to map them in a blueprint, which no doubt would look labyrinthine, but I lack the musical knowledge and the word-smithing capability to do that adequately. And so, mainly, my thoughts are about the sensations of this sensational music. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ROTTING KINGDOM (SELF-TITLED EP)

 Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Nov 142017
 

 

Rotting Kingdom is a new band from Lexington, Kentucky, that features current and former members of Tombstalker, whose music we’ve covered several times in the past. They’ve recorded a self-titled EP that is being released today, digitally and on tape, via Morbid Records, and we’re helping spread the word through the premiere of a full music stream.

The EP consists of three songs that entwine melodic doom and death metal to produce staggeringly bleak but seductive results, featuring beautifully bereaved dual-guitar performances, a crushing bass-and-drum tandem, and a vocalist whose growls are lower than ocean trenches. Continue reading »

RAPID FIRE RECOMMENDATIONS (PART 2): DEIVOS, MORTIFICA, PRAYERS OF SANITY, OPHIS, THE WRATH PROJECT

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 142017
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli returns with another blast of fast recommendations, with music streams that will let you take the full plunge.)

Welcome back to rapid fire recommendations where I throw brief reviews or recommendations of albums that would have been reviewed already if we hadn’t been drowning in the metallic avalanche of 2017.

Deivos – Endemic Divine

Polish hyper-death titans Deivos have put out a killer death metal record bathed in rabies, bath salts, beefy guitars, schizophrenic riffs, and classically Polish militaristic technical drumwork. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: IPERYT — “MINDTAKER”

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Nov 142017
 

 

I’m going to cut to the chase: Iperyt’s “Mindtaker” is indeed a mind-taker. Hugely destructive and hugely addictive, it’s a jet-fast main-lining of unadulterated adrenaline that earns the label this Polish band stamp upon their music: “Satanik Terror Metal”.

“Mindtaker” is the 9th track on Iperyt’s new record, The Patchwork Gehinnom. It’s their third album and the first one in six years, and it will be upon us on December 15 through the infernal graces of Pagan Records. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: VRÅNGBILD, BERGRIZEN, BLEEDING GODS, HEXAGON, SCHATTENFALL, VETURHEIM

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Nov 142017
 

 

In this past Sunday’s edition of this series I mentioned that I had enough new recommendations to fill a two-part post, but wasn’t sure that I would have time to write the second part. Well, I did, and this is it.

Three of the recommendations are individual songs (one of which comes with a video). The other three are complete albums, accompanied by something less than full reviews, and one of those (the first one below) was a last-minute addition.

VRÅNGBILD

As mentioned, this first album wasn’t part of my original plan for this carry-over from Sunday’s SHADES OF BLACK. I became aware of it on Sunday night through a recommendation from starkweather, who never steers me wrong. After listening to the first track on Bandcamp, I bought it immediately. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: FRAILTY (EDMUNDS VIZLA)

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Nov 142017
 

 

(We welcome back Comrade Aleks, freshly returned from the herculean labors that produced his new book, and his interview of Edmunds Vizla, vocalist/guitarist of the band Frailty.)

The Latvian band Frailty was actually founded in 2003, but the debut full-length Lost Lifeless Light appeared on the Russian label Solitude Productions only in 2008. They provided powerful, almost classic death doom metal with the kind of grim, desperate atmosphere that’s reflected in the album’s title; it’s a pretty fair deal.

The sophomore work Melpomene (Arx Prod) was a step further, as the band developed their sound and performed more remarkable stuff with a few individual features such as profound growls, melodic and utterly heavy guitars, and lyrics partly connected with Ancient Greek mythology. For five years there wasn’t news from them, and suddenly I’ve found that Frailty returned in March 2017 with a new album, Ways Of The Dead.

It’s better late than never, so we’ve done the interview with Edmunds Vizla (guitars, vocals) and explored the current mutations of Frailty, who turned in a more extreme, faster, and crueler beast, spreading extraterrestrial Lovecraftian horrors! Continue reading »

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