WEREWOLVES: “DEATHMETAL” AND “FROM THE CAVE TO THE GRAVE”

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Aug 112022
 


Photographer credit: Rob Brens

(We continue our week-long series of reviews wherein DGR is doing a lot of catching up, and today he tackles not one but two 2022 releases by the same band, the Australian extremists in Werewolves.)

I get the sneaking suspicion that Werewolves‘ style of music works fantastically well for each person one time and after that it’s a little bit more give and take. Your first album with them is the revelation of how gloriously stupid and how intentionally so the Werewolves‘ brand of music is, and then once that becomes the high mark, everything is a little bit more even-keeled in spite how teeth-gnashing and vicious things may appear from there out.

For me, it was the group’s 2021 album What A Time To Be Alive, which was basically an album of deathgrind front-to-back with almost no chance to breathe. It was an album that basically felt ‘needed’ when it landed with, even if the overall approach was one-note as all hell.

Werewolves have achieved a rapid clip in terms of releasing music as well, essentially going year-over-year since the release of their debut album The Dead Are Screaming. 2022 alone has brought us the release of their latest album From The Cave To The Grave as well as a four-song EP simply called Deathmetal. We’re late to the bus on both, so this rumination needed to cover both releases, but that sure as hell isn’t going to stop us now. Continue reading »

AMON AMARTH: “THE GREAT HEATHEN ARMY”

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Aug 092022
 

(DGR has finally gotten around to reviewing the latest album by Amon Amarth, which was released last Friday by Metal Blade Records.)

While digging around in old files and folders I came across the old draft of my review for Amon Amarth‘s Berzerker, wherein the opening line – since scratched – was ‘fuck it, let’s do this’.

Even then, and especially around the release of Amon Amarth‘s Jomsviking album, it had become clear that the band that I’ve long referred to as one of a small handful of fantastic shuffle bands in the world were getting to be huge and had started to ascend in their career to the point of becoming more spectacle than music.

That’s fine but it just represents a shift in priority for seeing them live, much in the same way one might see Kiss, Iron Maiden, Gwar, or Tool. Yeah, you get a bonus and it feels great actually knowing the music, but you really don’t need to any more, because the band have become a spectacle to witness. The recent release of Amon Amarth‘s 12th album The Great Heathen Army hammers this fact home. Instead of Amon Amarth being the super-heavy melodeath-skirting Viking pillagers, they’ve become a spectacle themselves. Fewer runes and gravesites and a whole lot more medieval times.

However, since I’ve been the one to write about Amon Amarth releases here for a while now – though I skipped Jomsviking – l felt weirdly drawn to The Great Heathen Army. The traveling show that is Amon Amarth doesn’t really need our corner of the internet much these days, but there’s some amusing stuff happening within this album, so as the old draft for Berzerker said ages ago,

Fuck it, let’s do this. Continue reading »

SVART CROWN: “LES TERRES BRÛLÉES”

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Aug 082022
 

(NCS writer DGR has been on a roll, clearing out a backlog of reviews, and our plan is to publish them on a daily basis this week. We begin with his thoughts about the final recording from the French band Svart Crown, which was released in June by Nova Lux Production and Les Acteurs de l’Ombre Productions.)

In all honesty the events that took place after the release of Svart Crown‘s newest EP Les terres brûlées kind of took us aback when it came to writing about it. Granted, we were already late on reviewing it because it arrived in the post-MDF/pre-NWTF hangover period, but who would’ve guessed that in the time since its release the group would hang it up two weeks later? Yet here we are, now almost two months since its release, and the world is less one Svart Crown project.

Thus, writing about Les terres brûlées now is a little strange because it feels partially like we’re going to be praising the band for recognizing that it was time to call it quits and partially mourning the potential that Les terres brûlées promised, since the four songs and cover track here are some of the more ferocious material within the Svart Crown playbook.

Wolves Among The Ashes may have been divisive among the writers here (I enjoyed it, Andy ranked it as ‘disappointing’), but it’s hard to imagine anyone making it through even just the first song of this final EP without becoming convinced that Svart Crown sound absolutely mean this time around. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: BLEEDING THROUGH — “RAGE”

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Aug 042022
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new EP by Orange County’s Bleeding Through, their first new music in four years and out now on Sharptone Records.)

The fact that this site’s roots grew out of an in-joke born from early-aughts metalcore is always an amusing one, especially given the many pathways into things way, way heavier that we’ve taken in the decade-plus since. Yet we – and especially yours truly – would be lying if we said we didn’t still have a soft spot for a lot of those bands. That was partially why we found ourselves so oddly interested in the resurgence of MTV2 Headbanger’s Ball-era dominating bands beginning a few years ago as a lot of them decided that would be the time within the nostalgia cycle to mark their returns.

A few of those releases were legitimately good – we’ll still go to bat for The Agony Scene’s Tormentor release – and the rest at the very least were solid returns to what you’d always expect for that style of band. Bleeding Through‘s 2018 album Love Will Kill All somewhat stradled the line between the two, wherein there were a handful of truly ferocious and jaw dropping songs but also many other that sounded like Bleeding Through getting used to being Bleeding Through again.

They played what they’ve always done, and weirdly enough it made Love Will Kill All play out like an unintentional career retrospective…run backwards. It started out with their blisteringly fast and heavily chugged-out death metal leanings that colored their later releases and slowly became the more brawny and breakdown-filled style that made them a hallmark of the early 2000s. It was a weird dynamic for sure, but also one that made it perplexing to know what Bleeding Through‘s gameplan was for the future. Continue reading »

TEETHGRINDER: “DYSTOPIA”

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Aug 032022
 

(The Dutch band Teethgrinder released a new album through Lifeforce Records in the latter part of July, and we follow that today with DGR‘s review of this new record.)

When it comes to the type of music Teethgrinder make there isn’t really a concept of ‘doubling down’ on anything. For three albums – including this newest release – and an introductory EP, Teethgrinder have already existed at maximum volume and intensity. There’s no doubling of anything left here. Every song is an explosion from the start. and a lot of times they sound like they’re on the edge of a frenetic internal collapse.

Both Misanthropy and Nihilism were already excellent examples of the sort of high-volume attack available to the band, and if you’ve been following NCS for a while you’ll know that we’ve been banging the drum about both for a while. This is probably why it actually came as a surprise to discover that the gap between Nihilism and the group’s newest album Dystopia is almost five and a half years; it really doesn’t seem like the band have ever stopped.

Nihilism had such a long-burning flame here that it only just now seems like it has embered out a bit, and so Dystopia arrives at a perfect time. Yet it’s in a weird position, since we now have to ask if ‘if there’s nothing for the band to keep hammering on, then what direction is Dystopia left to travel in?’ Continue reading »

WITCHERY: “NIGHTSIDE”

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Aug 022022
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the latest album by one of our site’s favorite bands, Sweden’s Witchery. It was released on July 22nd by Century Media.)

Witchery albums have a habit of sneaking up on us around here, which is strange given that they do have a collective among the staff that will go to bat for them to this day.

Granted, in the span of time since the site’s founding up until now there’ve only been three Witchery albums released, but they’ve existed as a steady undercurrent for the writers around here and have evolved in the background into a ‘house band’.

July 22nd gave us the fourth addition to the collective of Witchery albums that have been released since this site’s founding, with the recent unleashing of Nightside, closing up a near five-year gap between albums. Continue reading »

PSYCROPTIC: “DIVINE COUNCIL”

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Jul 282022
 

 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the new album by Australia’s Psycroptic, which is in line for release on August 5th via Prosthetic Records.)

Technical death metal is an old enough genre now that you can have a tier of bands considered progenitors and a tier considered pillars of the genre. It’s a wild thought, considering it didn’t seem that long ago that the genre was the one where all the younger musicians were heading, younger bands breaking into the scene, and a whole bunch of baby-faced instrumental wizards who could play miles around even the simplest riffs.

The thought came to mind with Psycroptic‘s latest album Divine Council, because it is the group’s eighth full-length release in a career dating all the way back to the early-00’s. They’ve been such a known entity that Psycroptic albums were predictable highlights of the year. You know for the most part what you’re in for with the band, and if you really, really love that kinetic and manic writing style that has the band bouncing all over the place, then generally you couldn’t go wrong with a Psycroptic disc.

It’s not often you get to describe a tech-death artist as sounding like they’re bordering on an anxiety attack but Psycroptic‘s rapid vocal delivery and quick songs have kept them there for a while now. It was in the margins, and how the group augmented their sound, that there would be differences. Divine Council doesn’t move the needle that much from its immediate predecessor, but in the case of the album that came before it, that may not be such a bad thing, no? Continue reading »

ORDER OV RIVEN CATHEDRALS: “ABSOLUTE”

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Jul 252022
 

(Here we present DGR‘s review of a new album by the Italian dark death metal architects Order Ov Riven Cathedrals, which was released by Ultimate Massacre Productions.)

Late May of this year saw the release of Order Ov Riven Cathedrals‘ fourth album, Absolute – their first via a record label. The ever-ambitious brutal death project took some time between their third album Thermonuclear Sculptures Blackness and Absolute, almost three years in fact, after having previously placed themselves on an increasingly intense year-over-year churn of albums.

There’s a few surprising things about Absolute for those who have been following the band as long as this site has. You’re likely already familiar with them essentially as a two-piece hyperspeed blastbeat bulldozer, but Absolute could actually serve as something of a bookend for the slate of releases Order Ov Riven Cathedrals have put out thus far. It shares more in common with the group’s debut release The Discontinuity’s Interlude than its immediate predecessor, especially when you take into account that both weigh in at a concise seven songs and clock in at about thirty-two minutes a piece. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: GALUNDO TENVULANCE — “THE DISRUPTOR DESCENDS”

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Jul 202022
 

(DGR enjoyed the first EP by the Japanese band Galundo Tenvulance, released last year, and as recounted in the following review he seems to be enjoying the second one too.)

Only a handful of months ago while in a fit of caffeinated pique did we check in with Japanese -core band Galundo Tenvulance. The young group were on their second EP way back in ye’ olden days of 2021, yet for some reason the idea of reviewing it right before jetting out to go catch covid see MDF this year was very, very funny. It’s not the bands fault at all, just the fun of finding something that was fairly good – if full to the brim with style and genre-tropes – from a group who were clearly still finding their feet style-wise. So much so, that this is the sort of early state a band can be in where sounds differ drastically between releases as they add new influences to the overall course.

Not even a month and a half after we ran that review though, which we did in an attempt to buttress the site while we were out standing in one very long line of Edison Lot shade courtesy of a billboard pole, laughing about how some people forget that Coroner get kind of weird at times and have long keyboard breaks, or dodging thunderstorms, did the crew behind Galundo Tenvulance release a new EP in the form of The Disruptor Descends.

The question with The Disruptor Descends is that with a whole year between their releases and now functioning as a four-piece, what sort of stylistic jump did the band make? Continue reading »

ANTIGAMA: “WHITEOUT”

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Jul 192022
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new album by the Polish band Antigama. It was released a few days ago by Selfmadegod Records.)

When discussing Poland’s Antigama one of the chief genre-descriptors applied to the band is grindcore. Antigama‘s songwriting style, ethos, and general blast-fueled approach are fully within that world, but beyond that people get more abstract because the term grind doesn’t fully fit them as well as it should.

There’s more to Antigama than that, and it’s where you’ll often see ideas like “futuristic” and “cybergrind” thrown around, due in large part to Antigama‘s chaotic musical nature. At first pass through any Antigama release it does sound like the group are caught in the midst of an instrumental hurricane, and it’s only afterward when you realize that much of what the band are doing is calculated and controlled.

Not only that, but it also sounds much clearer than most other bands in their genre-sphere. There’s a sharp and angular technicality to Antigama‘s style that is hard to replicate with a production style so clear that it’s scientifically sterile. Whereas many bands bury themselves in reverb, distortion and general noise, everything Antigama have done has been to justify all of that being there – not just something to add to the general atmosphere. Which is why the group’s newest release Whiteout – abstracted artwork and all – is exciting, because even though it’s been five years since the group’s last EP and seven since the last full-length, it is made very clear early on that the group still have complete control of the chaotic maelstrom of sound within. Continue reading »

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