TWO FINAL 2017 RECOMMENDATIONS FROM THEMADISRAELI: TONGUES AND ATHENIC

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Dec 312017
 

 

(Here we are, on the last day of the year. But before it disappears into the history books, TheMadIsraeli has a couple more 2017 releases to recommend.)

 

I decided before we let 2017 end, I’d get one more in. This is another case of released way too late in the year for it to matter for many people. I’m telling you, December releases for albums fucking suck.

TONGUES

I, Voidhanger is low key one of my favorite labels around. They’ve always been good at acquiring some of the absolute best in the realm of avant garde and progressive, especially in the black metal realm. When the music isn’t either of those things, it’s full of so much venom and grit it’s hard to say no regardless.

Tongues are a Danish black metal band, a minority genre to my knowledge considering Denmark’s typical pedigree for metal. They play a very dissonant haphazard style that still manages to contain quite a bit of melody, with some slight death metal and doom metal riffing touches put in play to enhance the rather dismal horrific atmosphere of their sound. Their debut record Hrellia is quite impressive. Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT (PART 92): DROTTNAR

 THE SYNN REPORT  5 Responses »
Dec 302017
 

 

(In the final Synn Report of 2017, Andy assesses the discography as it exists to date of the distinctive Norwegian band Drottnar — whose Facebook page is here.)

 

Recommended for fans of: Mayhem, Dødheimsgard, Krallice

For the final edition of The Synn Report in 2017 I found myself torn between a number of possibilities, ranging from bruising, technically-adept Death Metal, to high-energy, thrash-infused Melodeath, to grim and gritty Black/Death riffosity.

In the end however I made the choice to go with the Technical/Avant-Garde Black Metal menace of Norway’s Drottnar (although don’t worry, the other bands referenced obliquely above will all be getting their own features very soon).

Calling their sound “Bunker Metal”, the Fredrikstad quintet have always been one of the more unusual and hard-to-pin-down members of the Norwegian scene, with a sound that largely defies easy definition and clean categorization, and an image that pulls more from Soviet-style militarism than the pseudo-fascist iconography employed by many of their brethren.

However I’m hopeful that this column will serve as a great introduction to a band who I think are one of the most overlooked, and underrated, acts to ever come out of the great frozen North. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: B’S TOP 17 OF 17 (FROM BRENDAN SLOAN OF CONVULSING)

 LISTMANIA 2017  24 Responses »
Dec 292017
 

 

Editor’s Intro

If you haven’t yet discovered the music of Australia’s Convulsing, you should carve out some time and allow it to carve you up. 2016’s Errata (reviewed here) was amazing; Convulsing‘s side of this year’s split with Siberian Hell Sounds (reviewed here) even more so.

I’ve benefited not only from Convulsing‘s music, but also from the musical recommendations of Convulsing‘s lone gunman Brendan Sloan (also a member of Dumbsaint), whom I follow on Facebook. And so this year I invited him to share with us (and you) his year-end list of favorite releases. He has chosen a Top 17 (plus a list of EPs, splits, and Honorable Mentions), and they aren’t all metal, but they are all interesting. He went further and hand-picked individual songs from each release as examples, and I’ve embedded streams of them within his list. So settle in for some good reading and some good listening.

 

The last few years I’ve been the most clever person of all time and listed a “top 14 of 14, 15 of 15, 16 of 16”, but this year is genuinely the only one where I’ve struggled to actually pare it down. 2017 has been a monster year for music, and here are the reasons why. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: THE GRAND TOME OF ALBUMS THAT DGR ENJOYED IN 2017 (Part 3)

 LISTMANIA 2017  11 Responses »
Dec 292017
 

 

(This is the third and final part of DGR’s massive year-end list feature. Part 1 (here) included Honorable Mentions and albums ranked 30-21; Part 2 (here) counted down albums 20-11. And today we present DGR’s Top 10, plus a few other assorted year-end honors.)

 

There are few things that I enjoy each year more than the yearly list roundup here at NCS – including taking the time to write out my own personal favorites. This is a post that I spend a large part of the year dreading, knowing that my penchant for massive verbiage in the face of all things common sense will turn around and bite me in the ass and the stress implied therein of the constant re-reading and editing that goes into the joy of crushing one’s website editor under the sheer weight of text. Were the yearly list allowed to be a book, I would deeply enjoy witnessing the ever increasing size of the roll of toilet paper mine would have to be printed on throughout the year. Maybe one year I’ll actually be able to spring for two-ply and at least have some effect. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: NÒTT — “WHITE. COLD. DEATH.”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Dec 282017
 

 

Those of you who’ve been visiting us for years are quite familiar with our continuing admiration of the Minnesota band Amiensus, whose releases we’ve followed closely and written about frequently ever since the appearance of their debut album Restoration in 2013. And so we were intrigued when we learned that Amiensus frontman (and Fail to Decay bassist) James Benson had started a separate solo project named Nòtt as a vehicle for creating music that combines bleak and progressive elements of black metal.

We can now reveal that Nòtt’s debut album is nearing completion and is projected for release in January of the new year, and we can go further than that — because today we’re premiering the first single from the album, a song called “White. Cold. Death.“, which is now available for free download at Bandcamp. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: BLASHPEMOUS FOUNDATIONS (A YEAR-END ROUNDUP BY THEMADISRAELI)

 LISTMANIA 2017  13 Responses »
Dec 282017
 

 

(We present here the lists of 2017 releases that proved to be the favorites of NCS writer TheMadIsraeli.)

2017 was a fucking great year for metal of all kinds, but most particularly the extreme kinds. Keeping it short and sweet again this year, I’ve decided to call this list Blasphemous Foundations. I picked a Top 6 of thrash, black, and death metal, the central pillars of extreme metal (heuhueheue 666 get it!?) followed by a miscellaneous Top 10 of stuff either not in those categories or was its own thing to the extent I didn’t think it fit into them. This will probably be my year-end list format going forward, although there will be differing amounts of exposition and me generally being an overly verbose fuckhead.

But first, some hot takes, and not-so-hot takes I’d like to offer: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MYSTAGOS — “DROWNING IN THE SEA OF UNCONSCIOUSNESS”

 Premieres  7 Responses »
Dec 282017
 

 

Roughly three months we premiered a remarkable debut album named Ho Anthropos Tes Anomias by the Spanish band Mystagos, which was subsequently released by Clandestine Faith. In an accompanying review, I wrote about the way in which spiritual inspiration and distinctive musical talent had come together in an unusually successful way: “The music itself has an otherworldly and occult resonance, channeling the exploration of dark mysteries, the exaltation of sinister forces, and the delirium of madness”.

Given the rare appeal of that album, we were excited to learn that Mystagos has prepared a new collection of songs, an EP entitled Pvrvsha, which is projected for release on February 1, 2018, by BlackSeed Productions., with great cover art by Opposition Artworks. It includes three black metal songs and four dark ambient songs, and today we have the good fortune to bring you the premiere of one of the black metal tracks: “Drowning In the Sea of Unconsciousness“. Continue reading »

LISTMANIA 2017: THE GRAND TOME OF ALBUMS THAT DGR ENJOYED IN 2017 (Part 2)

 LISTMANIA 2017  5 Responses »
Dec 282017
 

 

(This is the second part of DGR’s massive year-end list feature. Part 1 (here) included Honorable Mentions and albums ranked 30-21. Today he presents the next 10 selections for the album list, ranked 20-11. Tomorrow we’ll have the concluding segment.)

 

There are few things that I enjoy each year more than the yearly list roundup here at NCS – including taking the time to write out my own personal favorites. This is a post that I spend a large part of the year dreading, knowing that my penchant for massive verbiage in the face of all things common sense will turn around and bite me in the ass and the stress implied therein of the constant re-reading and editing that goes into the joy of crushing one’s website editor under the sheer weight of text. Were the yearly list allowed to be a book, I would deeply enjoy witnessing the ever increasing size of the roll of toilet paper mine would have to be printed on throughout the year. Maybe one year I’ll actually be able to spring for two-ply and at least have some effect. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INTO THE STORM — “MURDER MURDER MURDER”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Dec 272017
 


A little more than one year on from their 2016 album Where the Merfalo Roam the sludgy rockers in Seattle’s Into the Storm will be returning in February with a new split album with another Seattle band, Smooth Sailing, and today we have a single from Into the Storm’s side called “Murder, Murder, Murder“.

They do say it three times in the title, but you’d get the picture even if the track were untitled. Based upon the sound alone, this is musical murder with a verve fueled by wild-eyed lust for blood splatter and bone splinters, and perpetrated not with the sneaky sharpness of a stiletto but with the brutalism of crowbars and sledgehammers. It’s an invigorating bruiser of a track for sure. Continue reading »

UNDERGROUND METAL FOR THE TRVE CURMUDGEON (BEST OF 2017 EDITION) BY SURGICALBRUTE

 LISTMANIA 2017  23 Responses »
Dec 272017
 

 

(For the 7th year in a row, I asked our old pal SurgicalBrute to weigh in with his year-end list of favorite albums and EPs. As expected, his list (presented in alphabetical order) adds names of underground releases that haven’t appeared before in our 2017 Listmania series, including some that (gasp!) include clean singing.)

 

What to say?….What to say?…What to say? I mean, was it a good year for metal…of course it was…that observation is trite and tired. It’s not 1996 any more, we’re not stuck using dial-up and getting our heavy metal information exclusively from magazines. There is a constant stream of new music to be found at your fingertips if you want it, and the chances of us ever seeing another year like 2002 (one of the weakest I can remember) are extremely unlikely.

How good was it, though? Well that depends. If you were looking for something new and unique, you were probably let down a bit, but as far as I’m concerned, that’s not what makes or breaks a year. I’m not looking for anything genre-defining, I just want to kick back and listen to some killer music, and by that measure I can’t find a single thing to be disappointed about.

So, with that said, let’s get on with the list….Enjoy! \m/ Continue reading »

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