Jul 012023
 


Incantation

When I started this blog 13 years, 7 months, and 10 days ago (but who’s counting?) I had very few ambitions. One of them was to continue posting about metal straight through the weekends for as long as this NCS lark might last, no days off.

Back in those days of the internet’s infancy, blogs devoted to metal were few in number (none of them were fancy enough to call themselves “web sites”), and I thought being the only such place with something new on the weekends would attract a few more visitors. But my main motivation was to tangibly demonstrate that NCS wasn’t a business, and writing for NCS wasn’t a job, and never would it be. Because if it were a job you’d get the weekends off, right?

13 years, 7 months, and 10 days later, I’m still not pausing NCS on the weekends. In all that time we’ve had some weekend days where nothing new went up, but not many. Maybe a dozen days, certainly not more than two dozen. Illness, injury, and apocalyptic hangovers have taken their tolls, but not nearly as often as you might think. However, weekends like this one pose a special challenge. Continue reading »

Aug 292018
 

 

Crucible of Hate may be a new name for many of you, but this Ohio metal band’s members aren’t newbies, having burnished their vicious skills in such groups as The Conquering (black metal), Skullbomb (thrash), and The C.O.A.S.T. (melodeath). In this new formation, which began to take shape in 2016, they’ve pursued a groove-heavy brand of dynamic melodic death metal, whose varying sounds are about to be displayed through a debut album named Dark Metamorphosis, which will be released on September 15th.

The diversity of the music on this first full-length means that it’s tough to fully represent what they’ve accomplished in any one song, but the one they’ve chosen for our premiere today — “The Hell Inside” — certainly reveals their talent for crafting hook-heavy, head-moving thrill-rides. Continue reading »