SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: DARKEST HOUR, GREAT FALLS, WORM ALTAR, NERVOCHAOS, MILIM KASHOT VOL. 7, GRISEVILLE

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 052026
 

(written by Islander)

As we all do, some days I wake up feeling like shit but still have to forge ahead with daily tasks. Today is one of those days.

The covid virus is still spreading around the country, and an updated vaccine for it became available last week. Because I’m in a demographic with an elevated risk of serious infection, I got the updated shot at a local pharmacy late yesterday afternoon. That’s what caused me to feel like shit this morning. I have a mild case of the sniffles but mainly I ache all over. It’s not so bad if I stay perfectly still, but any kind of movement is painful.

If my past experience with the vaccines is a guide, this will all pass by tomorrow or the next day at the latest, and for me the discomfort is a price worth paying for the enhanced immunity. The daily tasks I still feel the need to forge ahead with include preparing this column you’re now reading.

I mean, I could have just blown it off and gone back to bed. No one would have fired me for shirking. No one else would have suffered serious damage (probably). But this is the kind of daily task that takes my mind off of what ails me instead of turning up the torture dial — so on we go. Continue reading »

CAVE SERMON – FRAGILE WINGS

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Apr 172025
 

(Andy Synn provides his first impressions of the brand new Cave Sermon album)

Well, well, well… isn’t this a surprise!

And not an unpleasant one, let me make that crystal clear, as Divine Laughter, the second album from Post-Metal prodigy Charlie Park (aka Cave Sermon) was absolutely one of the best albums of 2024 (and only narrowly missed out on a place in my “Critical Top Ten”).

That being said, it’s entirely normal to be a little bit wary and/or sceptical whenever an artist is this prolific – after all, you can have too much of a good thing, and it’d be all too easy for them to accidentally end up repeating themselves, to increasingly diminishing returns, if they haven’t allowed themselves the necessary creative space between releases.

Thankfully, however, despite the truncated timescale between releases, I’m happy to say that Fragile Wings cleverly complements its fantastic predecessor – while also providing some welcome creative contrast – without simply attempting to copy what made it such a success.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: CAVE SERMON, SALQIU

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jan 272024
 

After three weeks away from home working my day job I’m finally back. It was a stressful and often bizarre experience, made worse by the absence of my spouse and cats, and worse still because I had no time to listen to music, much less write about it.

That may sound weird. There’s always time to listen to music, isn’t there? In my case, it just didn’t fit what I was doing, too much of a distraction instead of a companion. Especially when it comes to metal, my brain’s not wired to combine even less raucous variants of music with trying to concentrate hard on something else. So I was forced to take a very long hiatus, the longest one in the 14+ years I’ve spent in devotion to NCS.

Andy and DGR stepped up and kept the site from going dark, and a few other writers continued sending things in too. But we’ve still got a backlog of un-published material to bring to the surface, mainly a big slug of interviews from Comrade Aleks. Other backlogs will never be fixed. Continue reading »