THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 062025
 

(Andy Synn returns to regular posting today with an apology and an attempt to atone for his absence)

As you may have noticed, I missed a lot of stuff last month… mostly because I was very busy, first with my superb stag-do (“bachelor party” to those who don’t know what that means) which involved myself and my chosen band of brothers heading to Islay for a weekend full of whiskey (so much whiskey), and then my wonderful wedding (yes, that’s right, I’m a married man now) which also involved the extended NCS family coming to visit (which, of course, meant we spent most of the week before and after the event hanging out).

As a result I had very little time to actually sit down and listen to music, let alone write about it, and it’s really only thanks to the valiant efforts of DGR – who was smart enough to write a bunch of reviews in advance of him and Islander coming over – that we actually stayed active and afloat for much of September.

It won’t surprise you to learn then that my “short list” of albums to potentially write about this time around was much, much longer than usual, and even though I’ve tried to compensate for this by increasing the number of albums from 4 to 6, I still feel like I need to apologise to the likes of Cult Member, Nexion, Occulsed, Ordeals, Piece, and Yotuma for not having the time or space to include them (and an additional apology must also be extended to Hexrot, whose late-August release I honestly had every intention of reviewing).

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: JUDAS PRIEST, AMPHISBAENA, FAUNA, SUNKEN MONOLITH, MALPHAS, ABRAHAM

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jul 052025
 


Black Sabbath, 1970, photo by Chris Walter

(written by Islander)

Post Fourth of July, I hope you all still have 10 fingers and are non-concussed. Way up here on the northern rim where the day takes its sweet time slipping away, I didn’t stay awake long enough for the sky to turn and finally become a black backdrop for fireworks. But I did do a modest amount of carousing with friends and family before punching out, so it’s another late start for this Saturday roundup.

I’m beginning with a big dose of nostalgia and then shifting into more current generational directions. In thinking about how I’m beginning and what follows that, the words of Isaac Newton come to mind: “If I have seen further [than others], it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” (Though in this context what the successors are seeing is in further darkness.) Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jan 162022
 

 

This weekend hasn’t been conducive to my NCS plans. I didn’t have time yesterday morning to post a round-up of new songs and videos, only time enough to share some artwork and news. During Saturday afternoon I plowed through a lot of new tracks and videos that mostly surfaced over the last week, and found a whopping 23 of them that I enjoyed to varying degrees.

Obviously, that’s way too many to post about, even for an OVERFLOWING STREAMS type of round-up. Some sifting was required. But sifting takes time, and for reasons I won’t bore you with it turns out that free time has been in very short supply this weekend. What to do?

Well, what I decided to do was just to say Fuck It and foist all 23 of those songs and videos upon you, with almost no commentary about the music and not even the usual links and artwork, just a small amount of info about the releases that include them. Even with that approach I’m dubious that I’ll get everything ready to go before I have to depart my computer for the rest of the day. So I alphabetized everything by band name and cut the group into two parts.

Part 2 might come tomorrow instead of later today. Sadly, I won’t have time for a SHADES OF BLACK column, though there is some black metal sprinkled through this giant collection, along with music across a big range of other sub-genres. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 36): GOROD, MARSH DWELLER, ABRAHAM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  1 Response »
Feb 282019
 

 

In thinking about what to pick for the penultimate installment of this list I was kind of wildly scrambling through the hundreds of songs on my master list of candidates, nearing mental lock-up as I tried to figure out what to do. Despite how many songs I’ve already selected, the decision process has gotten harder, not easier… because time is about to run out.

As a result, there’s no organizing principle in today’s collection. The music is all over the place, stylistically. But I sure do like all three of these picks, and hope you will too.

GOROD

This year, as usual, the bands whose music I’ve chosen have been a mix of old favorites and newcomers. Gorod falls into the camp of old favorites because they’ve been so consistently good (and so consistently interesting) over such a long stretch of years. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GLORIOR BELLI, ABRAHAM, OUR PLACE OF WORSHIP IS SILENCE, SCIENTIST, FOEHAMMER, HOSTIA, KALMAH

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Feb 122018
 

 

The flood of outstanding new metal is unceasing. I actually wouldn’t mind a break — not long, mind you, maybe a week or 10 days of absolutely no new music at all. But since that won’t happen, I’ll continue doing my best to tread water and keep my flaring nostrils above the tide.

Here’s a collection of new tracks that I sifted from those that appeared late last week. In genre terms, they’re all over the map.

GLORIOR BELLI

It has gotten increasingly difficult to predict what Glorior Belli is going to do from album to album, or even from song to song. The one you’ll find below is “Deserters From Eden“, the first single off this French band’s new album, The Apostates. Continue reading »

ABRAHAM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 172012
 

Abraham are a band from Lausanne, Switzerland. Pelagic Records plans to release their second album, The Serpent, The Prophet, and The Whore, on September 28 in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland, and on October 1 in the UK and the rest of Europe.

I found out about Abraham from record producer Sean Golyer (Oak Pantheon) over the weekend. He sent me a link to one song from the new album, and I found a music video for another one that the band debuted yesterday. Both songs really grabbed me. The music is difficult to pigeon-hole, genre-wise, but these two songs are intense, heavy, and very interesting — reminiscent of early Neurosis and Cult of Luna in their most pissed-off moments.

The long first segment of “Dawn” drones with a dark synth beat, acid vocals, and shrieks of guitar feedback, and then evolves as tumbling drums and a tremolo-guitar enter the fray. Heavy bass, post-metal guitar chiming, and a barrage of double-kicks and blast-beats kick the song into a building, high-intensity finish.

The new video is for a song named “Start With A Heartbeat”. Like “Dawn”, it isn’t built around a verse-chorus-verse structure, but instead sweeps the listener along in an increasingly turbulent flow. The pacing steadily increases in a really interesting way, with all the instrumentalists accelerating like a rushing river channeled through boulder-strewn rapids. A strobing effect in the video amplifies the sensation of something barreling forward, almost out of control. Continue reading »