(Andy Synn shares some words of wisdom, and warning, about the duplicitous, dichotomous, and devastating new album from Defacement)
Everyone knows that the common trajectory for bands is for them to get mellower and more melodic – maybe a little proggier, here and there, but still more accessible overall – as their career goes on.
But what the hell would such a transition even sound like in the context of a band like Defacement?
Oranssi Pazuzu – photo by Rainer Paananen
Look at this, a true rarity: two NCS posts on a Saturday. If you haven’t yet read the first one, Andy‘s Synn Report for the merry month of May, you should do that (here) and then come back for what follows below.
If you had only listened to three new songs this past week it would be easy to choose what to recommend and to explain why. You’d pick three, two, or one of them. Or maybe you’d just keep quiet if they left you lifeless.
But what if you had listened to 20 new songs? How would you choose among then? Maybe you would listen to all 20 several times and then start ranking them. By the time you’d narrowed it down, the day would be gone. Which is why I didn’t do any of that with the 20 new songs I wanted to hear for purposes of this roundup.
What I did instead was to focus on singles from a few bands who have already proved themselves dependable (there were other such bands on that list of 20, so mood and impulse played a role too), and then took one chance on a newcomer to these ears. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn encourages you to check out four albums from last month which you might have missed)
Well then… how exactly do you try and address a month like September, which was, arguably, the biggest and busiest month of the year for new releases yet?
Hell, my initial shortlist (sorry, “short” list) for this column was a good eight or nine albums long, an even though I successfully spun one of them off as part of last month’s edition of The Synn Report, that still left me with more options than I could possibly fit into one article.
So what I ended up doing, to be frank, was just picking not-entirely-at-random and going with my gut for this latest edition of “Things You May Have Missed”, which ultimately ended up covering an intriguing array of artists/albums from across the (Extreme) Metal spectrum.
Part 1 of today’s recommendations of black metal consisted of “singles” from three albums due for release later this year. In this second Part are streams of four full releases that surfaced in the last week. For reasons explained in Part 1, my words will be hurried, but the music here is so good that I hope, in your listening, you won’t be as rushed as I am in my writing.
ZLOSLUT
Sahar, the third album by this Serbian band (whose name roughly translates as “ominous”), and the first since it expanded from the solo project of Agnarion into a full line-up, is an interesting and very effective interweaving of stylistic ingredients, made with a blazing loom. Continue reading »