Feb 182023
 

Today I woke up late and moved lazily. For most of my life, and probably yours, that’s the way Saturday mornings always were. Except in my case I had the lunatic idea when I started this blog in the fall of 2009 that I’d post something about music I liked even on Saturday and Sunday, and every holiday.

I thought of that as a way of underscoring that NCS would never be a business, and would consider none of us here as “workers”, because people working “jobs” almost always get weekends off. I think I also believed we might get more visitors due to the lack of competition on the weekends from the somewhat more-established metal sites that were beginning to dot the internet landscape.

And I probably thought the lifespan of NCS would be about a year, so how tough would it be to listen and write on the weekends for a year? Who knew it would go on like it has? I sure as shit didn’t.

In the last 13+ years I’ve failed to make some weekend posts, after a long stretch of never failing, though the number of failure days is still small. So now when I wake up late and move lazily it doesn’t take long before I start to feel like I’d better get my shit in gear, even if the lateness of the morning hour means I’m not able to make the Saturday roundup as extensive as I’d like (which is true today). But… no failure today at least…. Continue reading »

Jan 232023
 

We have seven weekdays left before the end of January, which marks my self-imposed ending of this list. Seven days before I ought to stop, and like every other year, the impending end adds to my anxiety levels because I know I have so many more songs I’d like to include and not enough room to include them all. To begin this final seven-day stretch I decided to concentrate on shades of black metal.

BLACKBRAID (U.S.)

Seemingly out of nowhere this indigenous black metal project from the Adirondacks made a big splash in 2022 with a debut album denominated I. The size of the splash was measured by how often it appeared on year-end lists, both here and in many other locations across the web. For those of you who somehow missed the album despite all the attention and acclaim it received, I’ll borrow some words from Andy Synn’s NCS review: Continue reading »

Aug 222022
 

(The highly-anticipated debut album from Native American Black Metal artist Blackbraid is set for release this Friday, and our very own Andy Synn has some deep thoughts to share about it)

Hype… whether it’s the organic, grass-roots, free-range variety, or the artificial, astro-turfed, paid-for by your parents, kind… is a major part of today’s media landscape, whether we like it or not.

It’s not always a bad thing, by any means, but it sometimes becomes a bit of a self-fulfilling prophecy where, once a narrative about a band is established by an author or an outlet (or, increasingly, someone with sufficient twitter influence), that becomes the only story that gets any traction.

Case in point, Blackbraid I is not – as some have claimed, and even more have amplified – the “best Black Metal album of the year”, but it is a very good, occasionally unabashedly great, example of how Black Metal can serve as the perfect medium for anyone with a strong enough vision to express themselves.

Continue reading »

Mar 202022
 

 

As you can see, I have ambitions for a two-part SOB this Sunday. Part 1 is obviously done, so I can confidently state that it includes singles and advance tracks from forthcoming albums. My plan for Part 2 is to recommend a collection of complete albums that have recently been released, albeit without proper reviews. Let’s get to it:

BLUT AUS NORD (France)

Blut Aus Nord‘s mastermind Vindsval has characterized his creations under that name as a “process of perpetual regeneration”. In introducing BAN‘s last album Hallucinogen, he observed: “Music is a fascinating quest without end… and it would be a mess to express the same range of emotions, a mess to remain frozen in the same aesthetic, the same energy, a mess to compose and release the same thing again and again… and again.” Continue reading »