SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: NECROFIER, CONSUMPTION, EXIMPERITUS, DER ROTE MILAN, SMEARING, MARTIRIO

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Dec 062025
 

(written by Islander)

For you music lovers out there who just crawled out from under a rock, yesterday was a Bandcamp Friday, the last one of 2025. During those 24 hours we received more than 300 e-mails in the NCS in-box, at least half of them Bandcamp alerts, and that’s not counting the flood of digital traffic that rolled in the day before. Many of the messages were about music that had just been released.

I figure I have about a 50/50 success rate in getting new-music roundups posted on Bandcamp Fridays, which for obvious reasons would be an ideal time for them. Yesterday goes in the failure column. Just couldn’t get it done yesterday, what with other distractions getting in the way and the desirability of allowing Andy Synn’s list-week pre-launch to be our last post of the work-week.

I do feel guilty, but would have felt guilty anyway: Even rounding up a handful of new songs yesterday wouldn’t have made a very big dent in the wall of new tracks that slammed down this past week. Today’s roundup is just a modest dent too, but hopefully sufficient to start your weekend off with a dented skull. As usual, I’ll attempt to do additional cranial denting (of a more consistently blackened variety) tomorrow. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: DER ROTE MILAN, NUSQUAMA, ONDFØDT, BLUE HUMMINGBIRD ON THE LEFT, OMEGAVORTEX

 SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
Dec 182018
 

 

I wasn’t able to write a SHADES OF BLACK column for last Sunday due to feeling like hell. I felt somewhat better than hell yesterday, and decided to pull this together now rather than wait until next Sunday. I have more new music from the black realms that I’d like to recommend, and will try to fold them into a different kind of round-up later this week. What you’ll find below are songs from four albums slated for release early next year and a mid-2018 promo EP that I’ve just discovered.

DER ROTE MILAN

Der Rote Milan‘s 2016 debut album Aus der Asche was an intense blending of grim ferocity and melancholy beauty, a powerfully affecting sequence of songs that makes their new album also worth close attention. Entitled Moritat, it will be released by Unholy Conspiracy Deathwork on February 1st. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): HAIL SPIRIT NOIR, ROTTING CHRIST, KVALVAAG, INCULCATOR, DER ROTE MILAN

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  9 Responses »
Jun 072016
 

Hail Spirit Noir-Mayhem In Blue

 

For almost two weeks I’ve been in the throes of Maryland Deathfest frenzy, taking time away from many of my typical blogging activities to attend the festival itself and then re-living the experience through a five-part recap all of last week. I missed a lot of new music, and of course when you check out for that long in today’s riotously fecund metal environment there’s no way to completely catch up. However, I have spent some hours making incomplete lists of what I missed and then listening… and from that I have some songs I want to recommend.

Many of the new songs I want to write about are connected in various ways to black metal, and I’ve collected some of them here, along with one recent piece of very enticing news. There will be at least one more installment in this blackened catch-up collection, and maybe two if time allows.

HAIL SPIRIT NOIR

I think of Hail Spirit Noir as sonic alchemists, highly adept at combining different stylistic ingredients and transmuting them into strange and wondrous sounds. They’ve proven those alchemical talents through two albums so far — Pneuma in 2012 and Oi Magoi in 2014 — and last month they announced that a third one is on the way. Continue reading »