NO CLEAN SINGING

AN NCS PREMIERE: SANZU — “HEAVY OVER THE HOME” (EXPANDED REISSUE)

May 202016

Australia’s Sanzu have garnered quite a bit of praise at our site (and just about everywhere else you might care to look within metaldom). Andy Synn proclaimed their 2015 EP Painless “one of the best releases I’ve heard this year… aggressive and abrasive, designed for maximum killing capacity”, and then heaped more praise on the band’s debut full-length Heavy Over the Home: “The overall package provides one of the heaviest, deepest, and most intimately rewarding (not to mention crushing) listening experiences I’ve had all year. Let’s hear it for Sanzu… the undisputed masters of southern hemisphere hydro-groove.”

Both the EP and the album were initially self-released, but now Listenable Records is re-releasing the music worldwide on CD and limited-edition orange vinyl. This new edition bears the title of the album — Heavy Over the Home — but includes the Painless EP as bonus tracks. As icing on the cake, the reissue edition comes with a revised version (above) of the eye-catching and memorable cover art that adorned the original. And we’ve got a stream of all the songs below. Continue reading »

IT DJENTS: “THIS DOESN’T DJENT”

Free Shit, Metal News 1 Response »

May 202016

(Austin Weber brings us news about a new free comp that he helped curate.)

While I’m constantly pitching spur-of-the-moment ideas to Islander that relate to growing the scene as a whole, not every vision and concept comes to pass in the end, usually because of an unfortunate lack of time to do everything on my end. Luckily, two other metal music writers and myself decided to join forces and craft a free Bandcamp compilation for the masses called This Doesn’t Djent. Every song/band is worth your time and attention.

Rounding out the swath of bands and songs that I helped curate is content assembled by It Djents head honcho Chris Delano and MetalSucks/Invisible Oranges contributor Mark Ehmahre (bandleader/main composer of Existential Animals, whom I have covered before — and who appear below, too). Continue reading »

WITHERED: “GRIEF RELIC”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

May 202016

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Withered.)

Make no mistake, despite the almost six-year gap between albums, and a significant line-up shift in the intervening years — with Primitive Man’s Ethan McCarthy and renowned uber-bassist Colin Marston stepping in to replace the departed Mike Longoria and Dylan Kilgore – Atlantean (shut up, that’s the right word) filth-mongers Withered are back with a vengeance… even though I’ll admit Grief Relic didn’t quite “click” with me the first time around. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SURROUNDING THE EARTH — “PART I”

Premieres 3 Responses »

May 202016

Long-time followers of our site will be familiar with Nick Vasallo, but for newcomers in the audience, he is the lead vocalist and songwriter for the excellent technical death metal band Oblivion — and he has a Ph.D. in Music, he is the Director of Music Industry Studies at Diablo Valley College and Artistic Director for Composers, Inc., and he is a composer of contemporary classical music whose works have been performed internationally.

When last we featured him in these pages (here), the subject was a video for an experimental composition named “Inches From Freedom” performed by the guitar-and-drum duo known as The Living Earth Show (Travis Andrews and Andrew Meyerson) and two clarinetists — John McCowen and Gleb Kanasevich (yes, THE death metal clarinet cover guy).

Since then Vasallo (vocals/guitar) and those same four other musicians have formed a new project called Surrounding the Earth, and what we have for you today is a video for a 13-minute opus composed by Vasallo and performed by Surrounding the Earth called “Part I“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ÆVANGELIST — “THRESHOLD OF THE MIRACULOUS” (AN EXCERPT)

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May 202016

A vast distance on the planet’s surface separates Blut Aus Nord and Ævangelist, but in the perilous, un-fleshed shadow realms from which their music seems to emanate, they are not so far apart. A split release by these two bands is one of those ideas that was ingenious in its conception but once revealed makes obvious sense — and it is an idea that has become a reality.

On June 17, Debemur Morti Productions will release Codex Obscura Nomina, a split LP by these two conjurors of otherworldly hallucinations. Blut Aus Nord contributes four songs while the split includes only a single track by Ævangelist — “Threshold of the Miraculous” — but it’s more than 21 minutes long. As a preview, today we’re bringing you the streaming premiere of an excerpt of that song, along with some thoughts about the song as a whole. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PERIHELION — “FENEKETLEN”

Premieres 8 Responses »

May 202016

I hope that most visitors here have realized by now that our site’s name is not entirely serious and not entirely impervious to the attractions of clean singing. But we are at least partially serious: Given our own prejudices and predilections, exceptional music is necessary for us to make exceptions to our “rule” — and Perihelion have earned a permanent pass.

Last year I wrote frequently about the wonders of Zeng, the remarkable 2015 album by this Hungarian band. We had the pleasure of premiering a song from the album (“Vég se hozza el”) and named a different one (“Égrengető”) to our list of last year’s Most Infectious Metal Songs. And now Apathia Records has brought us a new Perihelion EP named Hold that is a marvel in its own right — with a song transformed into an even more wondrous experience by the video we’re premiering today: “Feneketlen“. Continue reading »

GOJIRA: “SILVERA”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

May 202016

I haven’t heard Gojira’s new album Magma, but my comrade Andy Synn has. And last night he alerted me to the fact that Gojira would begin streaming a new song today — a song he described as “one of the really good ones” on Magma. And so they have. And so it is — really good, I mean.

The name of the song is “Silvera”, and it’s presented through a video directed by Drew Cox. The music is powerful and jolting, with a swirling Eastern-influenced melody that’s urgent and intense. It’s unmistakably a Gojira song, bursting with passion and displaying many of the band’s hallmark ingredients — yet it also differs from their past output, featuring more clean vocals (which will evidently be a hallmark of this new album) and coming to a close in a way that might seem premature in comparison with the band’s older work. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: INQUISITION, INSOMNIUM, NAILS, SHATAAN

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 5 Responses »

May 192016

Here are a quartet of things I saw and heard over the last 24 hours that I thought might peak your interest as they did mine.

INQUISITION

Yesterday Season of Mist revealed details about the new album by Seattle-based Inquisition as well as a new song. The name of the album is Bloodshed Across The Empyrean Altar Beyond The Celestial Zenith, it includes 13 tracks, and it will be released on August 26. Here’s a statement about the album by guitarist/vocalist Dagon: Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: (ECHO) — “BLOOD AND SKIN”

Premieres 2 Responses »

May 192016

On May 23rd the Russian label BadMoonMan Records/Solitude Productions will release Head First into Shadows, the second album by the Italian band (EchO). Today we bring you the premiere of the new album’s opening track, “Blood and Skin“.

Since the band’s 2011 debut album Devoid of Illusions, there have been changes in (EchO)’s line-up as well as movements in the band’s sound, and the new record (mastered by Esoteric’s Greg Chandler) also features guest appearances by Daniel Droste (Ahab) and Jani Hala-Hukkala (Callisto) on two songs. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): IN TWILIGHT’S EMBRACE — “TREMBLING”

Album Reviews, Premieres, SHORT BUT SWEET 4 Responses »

May 192016

For me and many others, The Grim Muse by Poland’s In Twilight’s Embrace was one of 2015’s highlights — a multifaceted and uniformly strong melodic death metal album loaded with fantastic riffs, memorable lead-guitar melodies and solos, powerful performances by the rhythm section, and absolutely ferocious vocals. The band are now following that stand-out album with a new three-song EP entitled Trembling, which will be released by Arachnophobia Records on May 25 (which is also the day set for Arachnophobia’s release of a vinyl edition of The Grim Muse). Today we bring you a full stream of the new EP.

These three new songs were recorded by the band during the same sessions that produced The Grim Muse, but were set aside with the idea of this EP specifically in mind. True to the band’s penchant for creating variations in their core sound, each song is distinctive, no one of them quite like the other two — yet all three are both dark and blistering. Continue reading »

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