OUR LIST OF 2017’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 9): KREATOR, HELLRIPPER, CONDOR

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2017  4 Responses »
Jan 222018
 

 

I had a whirlwind out-of-town trip that consumed this past weekend, which is why I was unable to continue the roll-out of this list on Saturday and Sunday. But I’m back home in the Seattle area now, and ready to pick up where I left off on Friday.

And speaking of whirlwinds, there are three of them in this 9th installment of the list. It won’t take you much time to figure out why I grouped them together.

KREATOR

Because thrash is the core of all three songs I’m adding today, and because all three bands are so good at what they do, all three albums were loaded with hellishly catchy songs I could have picked for the list. That was certainly true of Kreator’s latest full-length, Gods of Violence. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 3): TEMPLE OF VOID, CAVERNLIGHT, CONDOR, CATHEXIS, WAR/PLAGUE, MAIM, AOTV

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Apr 302017
 

 

This catching-up effort which began on Friday may have gotten out of control. I have music from 7 bands in this “final” installment, including three full releases as well as a quartet of individual tracks. And I put “final” in quotes because I still have a bunch of new black metal for a SHADES OF BLACK feature. I almost always post those on Sundays, but this time I may have to post it tomorrow. Depends on how long I can go without food, bathroom breaks, sociable interaction with my wife, rational thought, other distractions from our glorious mission….

TEMPLE OF VOID

“Huge, enormous, vast, immense, large, big, mighty, great, colossal, tremendous, prodigious, gigantic, gargantuan, mammoth, monstrous, monumental, giant, towering, elephantine, mountainous, titanic”. These are all synonyms for the word “massive”. By listing them, I’ve gotten a head start on the task of describing the first single from Temple of Void’s new album.

Ooops! I forgot “humongous” and “hulking”. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: CONDOR (MAGNUS GARATHUN)

 Interviews  2 Responses »
Apr 102017
 

 

(Argentinian writer Matías Gallardo rejoins us with this interview of guitarist Magnus “Magressor” Garathun of the Norwegian band Condor, whose blistering new album (and probably their last one) Unstoppable Power will be released on April 28th.)

 

You might have noticed Condor the first time they flew over our heads in 2011 with the release of the Speedwagon EP. Championed by none other than Fenriz from Darkthrone, that material secured the thrash/black Norwegian trio a cult following that embraced with joy their self-titled debut released two years later.

Fast forward four years and Condor is back with a great new LP, entitled Unstoppable Power. The successor of 2014’s split with Töxic Death, Victims of Burning Death, feels like the guys left the darker influences aside and chose to go with a full old-skull German-influenced thrash metal sound instead, which is – obviously – awesome news. Following, guitarist Magnus ‘Magressor’ Garathun tells NCS how unstoppable is the new menace that dwells in the skies. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: WĘDRUJĄCY WIATR, TARDIGRADA, FURIA, RASPAIL, AZOOMA, CÓNDOR, BESTIAL RAIDS, VIRCOLAC, AGGRESSION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Nov 152016
 

wedrujacy-wiatr-art

 

As I mentioned earlier this morning, we’re rapidly approaching the brink of our year-end LISTMANIA orgy. In fact, on Friday I’ll be soliciting reader suggestions for our annual Most Infectious Song list, and about a week after that I’ll be asking our readers to give us their lists of the year’s best releases — so please start thinking about both of those subjects. Of course, we’ll once again be re-posting year-end lists from select print zines and “big platform” music sites as they appear, as well as publishing “best of” lists by our staff and invited guests, both band members and fans.

In the meantime, we’ll also continue trying to recommend new releases, and there are still some big ones due for arrival before January 1. There have also been some notable ones released quite recently that I fear we’ll never get around to reviewing, and so I’m forced to resort to posts like this one in which I’ll just share the music and sacrifice the words of praise (though in many cases we’ve already written about individual songs). However, we do welcome your own thoughts about these releases in the Comments. Here we go — I hope you’ll give each of these albums at least a sample test.

WĘDRUJĄCY WIATR

Album: O turniach, jeziorach i nocnych szlakach
Released: October 31
Approximate Genre: Atmospheric Black Metal
Country: Poland Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LVTHN, NECROSAVANT, OUTER HEAVEN, GNAW THEIR TONGUES, CONDOR, BÖLZER AND SPECTRAL LORE,

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 212014
 

 

I suppose this post could be considered Part 2 of a collection I began yesterday (here). It’s a big selection of music I discovered over the last couple of days that in widely varying degrees incorporate elements of black and death metal into the sound. And I do mean “widely varying” — no two of these bands sound alike, but I hope you’ll agree they all sound good.

LVTHN

LVTHN is a Belgian black metal band with three short releases to its credit, all of them appearing in 2014. The first one, Adversarialism, I reviewed here. The next two of those releases came this month — a four-song EP entitled The Grand Uncreation (which includes a cover of a Katharsis song) and a split with Lluvia entitled Illuminantes Tenebrae. Both are worthy of separate reviews, but I’m so pressed for time that I’m afraid I’ll never write them. I decided this short comment is better than nothing.

In a nutshell, these five new LVTHN songs are potent examples of bestial black art — torrential hailstorms of knife-edged riffs undergirded by the distant rumble of percussion and pierced by flesh-rending vocals, with waves of dark, dramatic melody moving through the music like the migration of leviathans. It’s gripping, galvanizing, ravaging music, with just enough well-placed breaks in the onslaught to prevent total sensory overload.  And the Katharsis cover is obliterating. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2013’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 26

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2013  13 Responses »
Feb 112014
 

Here we have the 26th Part of our list of 2013′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. To see the selections that preceded the three songs I’m announcing today, click here.

Three parts left after today, and then I’ll be done. In this part I’ve collected three songs that you could fit under the heading of black thrash. They’re fast, they’re corrosive, and they’re hot as hell.

HEXER

A certain kind of purist will object to my selection of this next song by Philadelphia’s Hexer. It comes from a self-titled album released by Gilead Media in 2013, but that album was a remastered re-packaging of two EPs that the band originally distributed on cassette in 2011. But I found the song on the album and that’s good enough for me.

For a complete discourse on the infernal joys of Hexer, plus an album stream, you can visit my review at this location. In a nutshell, it’s a romping blast of hellfire and brimstone, with the kind of riff mastery that will cause foaming at the mouth. Fans of black thrash should not miss it.  Continue reading »