AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CORPUS DIAVOLIS — “ATRA LUMEN”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 072017
 

 

We are very pleased to bring you a full streaming premiere of Atra Lumen, the third album by the satanic French metal band Corpus Diavolis. It will be released by ATMF on April 6 of this year.

Making music that has the feeling of ritual has become one of the traditions of black metal, at least within certain circles of the black arts, and Atra Lumen has that feeling. But not all ritualistic music is alike. Where some black metal might conjure images of cavorting witchery around a woodland bonfire or huddled figures drawing blood in the glimmering candlelight of a crypt, Atra Lumen brings to the mind’s eye the ominous grandeur and majestic might of a great ceremony of praise and summoning beneath the high vault of a gothic cathedral, a ceremony surrounded by the tangible presence of death. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: BUIOINGOLA — “SILENZIO”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 072017
 

 

“And now for something completely different….” That’s the phrase that popped into my head as I began pondering how to introduce the track we’re about to premiere, though the music has no comedic overtones (or undertones) that Monty Python’s famous catchphrase might bring to mind. It’s just… completely different… at least by comparison to our usual fare at NCS.

The band’s name is different as well. It has regularly defeated my efforts to type it, and also my efforts to pronounce it. The name is Buioingola (I am using copy/paste techniques now), and the track we have for your unsuspecting ears is “Silenzio“, which appears on the band’s new album — and likely to be their last — Il nuovo mare (“The New Sea”). The album will be released by Sentient Ruin Laboratories (and a consortium of European labels) on March 31. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS: HATE, SUCCUMB, MAUSOLEUM, PHRENELITH, HIDEOUS DIVINITY, CRYPT ROT, SIGIL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Mar 072017
 

 

As I looked through my list of candidates for a SEEN AND HEARD round-up, and having siphoned off some of the more blackened entries for a continuation of the latest SHADES OF BLACK column, it dawned on me that many of the remaining songs were of a deathly variety. And so I’ve compiled them here with a different post title. Different forms of death, to be sure, but plenty of heaviness and savagery is to be found below.

HATE

Tremendum is the name of the new album by the Polish leviathans (note, I did not say “behemoths”) in Hate. It will be released on May 5 by Napalm Records. This morning the band debuted a lyric video for the first single from the album, a track called “Asuric Being“. Continue reading »

THE BEST OF GERMAN, 2017 (PART 1): DESERTED FEAR / GLARE OF THE SUN / NAILED TO OBSCURITY

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Mar 072017
 

 

(Andy Synn combines reviews of three 2017 albums by German metal bands.)

You know who’ve been absolutely killing it over the last few years? The Germans. Those guys (and gals) definitely know their Metal. From the Thrash to the Prog to the Black to the Death… and every permutation in between… our Germanic brothers and sisters have produced a significant number of my favourite albums over the last couple of years.

And, so far, it looks like 2017 is going to be no different, as the year has already seen a number of high-quality releases from across the metallic spectrum, some of which I’m highlighting here today, and some more of which I’m going to bring you in the next week or so.

So, let us begin, shall we? Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 2): ENSNARED, KRIEG, GOAT DISCIPLE, HEXIS, VAIYA, WOLFBRIGADE

 SHADES OF BLACK  1 Response »
Mar 072017
 

 

Well, for those of you who actually pay attention to such things, I obviously failed to post Part 2 of this week’s SHADES OF BLACK column, which I began (here) on Sunday and said I would continue on Monday. And in the meantime, of course, more new metal in a blackened vein has appeared, and it happened to be new music that I really like. So I’ve adjusted my plans (i.e., I’m making this up as I go along so what else is new).

Part 1 of this feature included full album streams, and my intent for the original Part 2 was to focus on individual advance tracks I’d picked from forthcoming albums. I still intend to do that, except that has become Part 3. What I’m doing here is focusing on the new tracks that grabbed my attention yesterday.

ENSNARED

I’ve been very curious to hear Dysangelium, which is the debut album of Sweden’s Ensnared. Dysangelium will be jointly released by Invictus Productions and Dark Descent on May 12. The first track, which debuted yesterday, is very promising. Its name is “Apostles of Dismay“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DRUG HONKEY — “CLOAK OF SKIES”

 Premieres  9 Responses »
Mar 062017
 

 

Paolo Girardi’s cover art for the new album by Chicago-based Drug Honkey stopped me dead in the tracks of my internet scurrying when I first saw it, and when I learned that it was a new album by Drug Honkey, I experienced a combination of drooling and shivering, a blending of desire and incipient loss of mental stability.

Both of those effects were produced by the memory of the band’s last album, 2012’s Ghost In the Fire, and so it’s with a similar combination of dread and tingling anticipation that I’ve approached this new album, Cloak of Skies — which will be released on May 5 by Transcending Obscurity Records.

I had some difficulty trying to capture the experience of Ghost In the Fire when I wrote about it so many years ago. I re-read the review this weekend, and had forgotten how many words I had spilled in an effort to do that. They included these crazed attempts to capture the imagery that the music provoked in my shaken skull: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: INFERNO — “Ω > 1 (OSCILLATION IN TIMELESSNESS)”

 Premieres  4 Responses »
Mar 062017
 

 

In a career that now spans more than 20 years, the Czech black metal band Inferno have been on a journey of exploration and self-realization, a journey that has reached its highest plateau with their new album, Gnosis Kardias (Of Transcension and Involution). It not only represents the zenith of the band’s own understanding and creativity, it’s a also a searing, soaring, transcendent experience for the listener and a more than worthy successor to the band’s last album Omniabsence Filled by His Greatness. That’s not a hyperbolic claim, as we think you’ll agree when you hear the song we’re premiering today: “Ω > 1 (Oscillation in Timelessness)“.

As wondrous as the cover image by Peruvian artist Jose Gabriel Alegría Sabogal is, the music is more wondrous. It has already prompted DECIBEL’s Chris D. to proclaim, in his introduction to DECIBEL’s premiere of the album’s opening track, “There will be no more important release in 2017”. Perhaps those words display precognition, but even if they are merely an ultimate expression of enthusiasm, it’s an enthusiasm that I share. Continue reading »

NORTHWEST TERROR FEST: ANNOUNCING THE COMPLETE LINE-UP OF BANDS (AND A NEW ROUND OF TICKET SALES)

 Metal News  1 Response »
Mar 062017
 

 

As we first announced last month, on June 15-17, 2017, in the Emerald City of Seattle, Washington, No Clean Singing will be partnering with the tireless Terrorfest honcho David Rodgers and Invisible Oranges to present the first edition of Northwest Terror Fest. In our first announcement we disclosed the names of the first group of confirmed bands — 15 names that included the likes of Warning (UK), Cephalic Carnage, Lycus, and Uada. Today we’re providing the full list of confirmed bands, along with a link for a new round of ticket sales that begins today.

Today’s announcement includes such names as Wolves In the Throne Room, YOB, Goatwhore, Noisear, and Marissa Nadler, with the complete list amounting to a total of nearly 40 bands spanning a range of metal genres. Without further ado, here’s the list of new names we’re announcing today, followed by the 15 names we revealed last month: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WHILE THEY SLEEP — “THE PERFUME”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Mar 062017
 

 

When Les Fleurs du mal (“The Flowers of Evil”) was first published in 1857, it led to the prosecution of its author Charles Baudelaire and his publisher for “an insult to public decency”, the imposition of fines, and the removal of poems from the volume’s remarkable collection of verse. The attempted suppression did not work, of course. The volume to this day is recognized as a work of unsettling genius, with Baudelaire praised by no less a figure than TS Eliot as “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language”.

Les Fleurs du mal is also the name of the new second album by While They Sleep, a one-man black metal band from Crimea in Ukraine, which will be jointly released by Symbol of Domination and More Hate Productions on March 29. And that album is the source of the song we’re premiering today: “The Perfume“. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): CHRONAEXUS, ENDE, SCHATTENVALD, SACRAMENT OV IMPURITY, STRIBORG

 SHADES OF BLACK  5 Responses »
Mar 052017
 

 

I’ve divided this Sunday’s collection of music in a black vein into two groups. In Part 1 I’ve collected recent releases, all of which are full albums. In Part 2, which I probably won’t finish and post until tomorrow morning, I’ve gathered advance tracks from forthcoming releases.

I’ve also taken a different approach to the albums included in this post. Instead of trying to sum up each one, I’ve picked one song from each album to write about, and then provided a full stream of the entire album for you to explore further.

CHRONAEXUS

I learned about this first album from my Sacramento-based NCS comrade DGR. Chronaexus is a trio from his stomping grounds, and two of the three — guitarist/vocalist Nick Liuzzi and bassist Bret Tardiff — are also members of the excellent funeral doom band Lycus and the black metal band Minenwerfer, while Liuzzi and drummer Pete Chavez are also participants in the brutal death metal band Slaughterbox. Continue reading »

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