AN NCS PREMIERE: MALVENTO — “LA VIA SINISTRA”

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Oct 272017
 

 

As we all know quite well by now, black metal has blossomed over the decades like a spreading tangle of thorn trees, and now cuts the skin in many different ways. As that pestilential growth has occurred, the Italian band Malvento have persisted and pursued their own evolution of sound across the space of three albums and a handful of shorter releases dating back to their Camera Prima demo in 1999. And now, seven years after their last album, 2010’s Oscuro Esperimento Contro Natura, they are returning with a new full-length under the banner of Third I Rex.

The new album is entitled Pneuma, and from that album we bring you a track aptly named “La Via Sinistra“, as well as the reprise of a previously released track, “L’Incanto“. Together, these songs provide clear signs of the black magic that Malvento have conjured for this new release. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 90: DESOLATE SHRINE

 THE SYNN REPORT  5 Responses »
Oct 272017
 

 

(We present the glorious 90th edition of THE SYNN REPORT, and on this milestone occasion Andy Synn reviews the collected discography of Desolate Shrine, including their brand new album Deliverance From the Godless Void, which will be released by Dark Descent on November 10.)

Recommended for fans of: Incantation, Bloodbath, Enthroned

I’m sure, like me, a lot of you have bands in your collection who you absolutely love… but whom you got into surprisingly late. Desolate Shrine are one of those bands for me.

Heavier than granite, nastier than gangrene, and grimmer than the reaper himself, the Finnish three-piece (mainman L.L. handling all writing and instruments, with vocal duties shared by R.S. and M.T.) were always a band on my radar, but it wasn’t until the release of their third album, The Heart of the Netherworld, that I really took a vested interest in them… and then started kicking myself for waiting so long.

Thankfully I was quick to correct my error, snapping up a copy of both …Netherworld and its predecessor The Sanctum of Human Darkness soon after, and eventually grabbing hold of their debut, Tenebrous Towers, not long after that.

Now, with the band’s fourth album, Deliverance from the Godless Void, set for release on November 10th, this seemed like the perfect opportunity to spread the word about the band’s brutal, black-hearted brand of Blackened Death Metal. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: UNTIL THE SKY DIES — “IV”

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Oct 272017
 

 

Are you starting to think about Halloween? Do you have your creepy costume all picked out? Started making bags of candy salted with broken glass for the neighbor kids? Wondering whether your little visitors will notice the stink from the bodies you buried under the house? I’ve got just the thing to help get you in the right mood, some music you can just keep running on a loop between now and sunrise on November 1 — although even if you listen to it just once, the odds are it will run on a loop in your head anyway, whether you want it to or not.

This song we’re premiering is a gnarly bit of nastiness, a real monster mash. I have no reason to believe it was written with Halloween in mind — in fact, the concept behind it is quite a different tale — but it really does seem perfect for the occasion. The title is just a Roman numeral — “IV” — and the diabolical creators are the two men behind Until the Sky Dies. It comes from their debut album, The Year Zero Blueprint, which Cimmerian Shade Recordings will release on November 3rd. Continue reading »

AN NCS DOUBLE PREMIERE: WOJCZECH AND KRUPSKAYA

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Oct 262017
 

 

On October 27th — tomorrow! — the German label 7 Degrees Records will release a 12″ split by two explosive but unpredictable grind bands, Germany’s Wojczech and UK-based Krupskaya. What we have for you today is a double premiere, one song from each band’s side of the split.

WOJCZECH

If the folks at Metal-Archives have got their facts straight, this new release is the 17th split discharged by Wojczech (along with two albums, an EP, and a compilation) in a career that now spans more than two decades. The track we’ve got for you today is the third of the three Wojczech tracks on this new split, an unsettling mauler named “Stunde Des Wolfes“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: AUTUMNS EYES — “OPEN YOUR EYES, NOT YOUR WRISTS”

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Oct 262017
 

 

Ending Life Slowly is the eighth album by Connecticut-based Autumns Eyes, the solo project of Daniel Mitchell. Fittingly, it’s due for release on Halloween, when those of us in the northern hemisphere will find the door to the dead of winter opened by ghouls and goblins. Yet although Mitchell has frequently found inspiration from the changing colors and supernatural hauntings of late October, the new album was more inspired by what comes after. In Mitchell’s words:

“Living in New England has always made it easy to draw from the month of October for creative inspiration, with life breathing its flaming colors into all the surrounding trees. Unfortunately, these themes can only be revisited every so often before it becomes repetitive. That’s why I reached into the month of November for inspiration. A time when Fall is still thriving, but where color has faded and the trees are bare as skeletons.

“While a walk through the woods here in October can be a relaxing activity, doing the same in November carries an overwhelming sense of dread. You’re surrounded by death, and the trees no longer sway and breathe with the air. They’re cold, stiff, bare, and knock together like bones breaking in the sky. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NEKRASOV — “THE MIRROR VOID”

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Oct 262017
 

 

Most of us search for beauty in life, dream of it, grasp it when we find it, hold onto it as long as we can. But the horrors of existence always intrude, whether in the form of the daily abominations practiced by some people against others or from the incurable fear that nothing we cherish will last and that nothing awaits us at the end of our lives but the yawning void of mere extinction. And in time, all human life will also end in ashes, without a trace, a converging of all striving in death. Against the depths of such terrors, tales of goblins and vampires, ghosts and golems, seem like child’s play.

In every form of art, people have been driven to give some shape to our deepest fears and most paralyzing disillusionments, to express implacable dread or the conviction that humanity itself is a disease that will ultimately eat itself, while also devouring everything around it. And the results of such efforts can be very uncomfortable to witness and experience. Given the nature of the drives that inspire such efforts, how could they not be?

Which brings me to the title track of Nekrasov’s new album, The Mirror Void, which we’re premiering today. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): PORTAL, VALDUR, WALTER FORNICATION, DÖDSRIT, TERRA MATER

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  8 Responses »
Oct 262017
 

 

I started writing this round-up of new music two days ago, but was unable to finish it. It is now somewhat dated. But I’ve resisted the impulse to make it dramatically longer by adding everything I’ve discovered in the intervening days — I only added two new things. But since the collection has now ballooned up to music from 10 bands, I divided it into two parts

I really don’t believe that there is a higher or lower power organizing the events of my life, but I can understand why other people do believe that. Sometimes the shit rains down so hard and chokes the throat so completely that I think to myself, “This can’t possibly be a matter of chance!” And sometimes everything flows so shiny and chrome that I think I have done something right and some force recognizes that and bestows a blessed reward. Take last night, for example.

In making my usual rounds, in which I surf the effluent of the internet and our own in-box looking for musical revelations, I came across the following gems gleaming among the sewage. And it’s all pretty damned filthy, yet still gleaming, in the way that the best filth shines with a preternatural vibrancy.

And while I don’t believe in higher or lower powers, I do appreciate synchronicity, and so it proved to be that almost everything here was a form of death metal (though my later additions diluted the death a bit), and the excursion began and ended with scarecrows, which seemed so fitting less than one week before Halloween. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): TALV — “ENTERING A TIMELESS WINTER”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 252017
 

 

The Italian one-man black metal project Talv makes no secret about the atmosphere created by the new third album that’s set for release on November 3 by A Sad Sadness Song (a sub-label of ATMF). It is clearly displayed in the cover art, in the album’s title — Entering A Timeless Winter — and in the names of the songs (“Dreaming A Funeral In Another Life”, “A Sad Moon Concealed By Pines”, and Sidereal Hypothermia”), as well as in Tarv’s decision to end the album with an ethereal ambient-music cover of a song (“Winterreise”) by Coldworld.

In short, this is a bleak and wintry form of musical sorcery, and to hear it is to slowly drown in a vast and rising lake of tears, one that’s frigid enough to slow the blood, cloud the emotions, and carry the mind away to places we might not often visit. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WARCALL — “BULLY BASTARD”

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Oct 252017
 

 

On Friday the 13th of this month Montreal’s WarCall released their fourth record, Invaders, a concept album based on humanity fighting back an alien invasion, with lyrical themes that focus on topics such as the importance of resisting oppression. What we have for you today is the debut of a lyric video for a track named “Bully Bastard“.

WarCall guitarist and backing vocalist Mat Simard sent us this comment from Europe, where the band are in the midst of a tour in support of the album: “The song shows a different side to the style of the album, more groove oriented. We wanted to do a lyric video from this one because the text is interesting, talking about standing up for what you believe in. I see it as a very very heavy rock song.” And it definitely is that. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEVLSY — “PRIVATE SUITE”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  2 Responses »
Oct 242017
 

 

“Post-Black Metal” is a particularly amorphous genre term, one that has been applied to everything from Alcest to Enslaved, from Sólstafir to Wolves In the Throne Room, from Oranssi Pazuzu to Harakiri For the Sky, from Altar of Plagues to Deafheaven. With such an expansive palette of sounds arguably encompassed by the term, it can leave a lot to the imagination, though a re-imagining of the boundaries of black metal may itself be the very core of the concept. Which brings us to the Lithuanian band DEVLSY and their forthcoming second album Private Suite.

It is a provocative and adventurous six-track affair, a compact 35 minutes of music that will be released by ATMF on November 3, but which we have the pleasure of presenting in a full stream today. Continue reading »

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