SEEN AND HEARD: COMMUNIC, EXHUMED, THE KENNEDY VEIL, ORIGIN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 072017
 

 

This will be a very busy day at our site. We’ve posted one review already, we have another one coming, and we have four (!) very good premieres lined up. But thanks to DGR, we also have a brief round-up of new songs and videos that have recently appeared elsewhere — to which I’ve added one news item at the front end, one wisely suggested by my comrade Mr. Synn. So, you’ll have to tolerate a bit of my verbiage for the first item, and then I’ll turn you over to the words and selections of DGR.

COMMUNIC

This has been a banner year for metal album covers, and Berlin-based Eliran Kantor has been responsible for many of the best ones, including the one above, which accompanies a new album by the Norwegian progressive metal band Communic. And the fact that we will have a new Communic album this year is itself very welcome news.

The name of the album is Where Echoes Gather, and it will be released on October 27 by the band’s new label, AFM Records, following four previous albums released by Nuclear Blast. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET — UNBEHELD — “DUST”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 062017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new EP by Unbeheld from British Columbia, which was released near the end of July.)

Something happened in the three years since their self-titled EP in 2014 that caused Canadian death metal band Unbeheld to develop a nihilistic streak that has spilled over into their music. The group’s latest EP, Dust, features seven songs and not a friendly thought amongst them. The band themselves even explain this upfront on the Bandcamp page for Dust, stating:

Dust is lyrically based on thoughts rooted in depression and anxiety. The sort of feelings that one dealing with such mental conditions goes through on a daily basis. The sense that nothing ever quite feels “right”. The fact that that exists in itself is an absurd phenomena. It also deals with the usual death metal themes of death and violence; but instead of being about the process of these things, it more so deals with the thoughts that go through ones mind during death and or while performing acts of violence as well as a general fear of fading away into nothingness. That is to say that after we die; nothing we did really mattered.

I’m not a gambling man but I’d guess that “friendly” and “approachable” will likely not be the words attached to Unbeheld’s music, and to be fair, the artwork for Dust matches the music within — intense and violent. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): DYSCARNATE, BROKEN HOPE, HIDEOUS DIVINITY, ARCHSPIRE, VOLTURYON, FLESHKILLER, THE RITUAL AURA, SEPTICFLESH, THE HAUNTED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 052017
 


Dyscarnate

 

(DGR has again stepped forward for round-up duty and has pulled together 9 new songs and videos that caught his eye between last week and yesterday.)

Last week saw a tremendous on-rush of heavy metal news, and of course, since many people knew that we here in the States (or at least many of us) would get a long three-day weekend, a lot of it hit in the back half of the week. As the site’s resident hoover vacuum, I’ve compiled an itemized list of nine… items… that caught my interest over the course of the week that we didn’t get a chance to cover that I will now lovingly shove right into your faces.

If you’re a big fan of death metal and its chugging ilk, this roundup is mostly for you, as it seemed like a large chunk of what I found came from that sphere of influence. There’s definitely the requisite world-traveling element as well, as we go from England to Canada to Italy to the States to Greece to Sweden (twice), and you can see where this is going from here. So let’s quit goofing off and get to the fun stuff. Continue reading »

PSYGNOSIS: “NEPTUNE”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Sep 052017
 

 

(DGR prepared this extended review of the latest album by the French band Psygnosis, which was released in May.)

I tend to approach French now-instrumental band Psygnosis with something of an art-house cafe motif in mind. Over the years, the group have slowly morphed into a project that has combined quiet, minimalistic tendencies — mostly credited to small electronics usage — with fierce blasts of heavy metal, and a love of inserting movie samples into their songs so that they become something of a story that you’re only getting a partial glimpse of.

The overall picture is usually spread throughout the whole disc, but even then it often feels like something you’ve entered into in medias res so that it isn’t just the music you’re enjoying, you’re also getting the soundtrack to a series of events that you’re not witnessing. There’s no picture except the one that Psygnosis chooses to paint, and so the music takes on a dreamlike quality, in between the heavier segments — which, as they’ve gone later in their career, have become a little bit less of the focus and more the backing foundation.

Psygnosis really nailed this formula with their release Human Be[ing] in 2014, and afterward would make a drastic change in sound, which saw their vocalist bowing out in favor of becoming an entirely instrumental group, and a cellist stepping in to take the lead spot – with the extra strings now serving to take over the vocal lines. Continue reading »

INANIMATE EXISTENCE: “UNDERNEATH A MELTING SKY”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 292017
 

 

(DGR is experiencing the opposite of writer’s block. After a review and a round-up yesterday, he returns with another review. Today the subject is the new album by California death metal band Inanimate Existence, released on August 25 by The Artisan Era.)

Releasing an album a little bit under year after your last disc is a tall order for a lot of bands. There are a handful of prolific artists out there who seemingly have all the time and creativity in the world, able to put out new releases year-over-year; hell, even the ones who manage to do a new release any time under two years since the last one still seem impressive.

Bay Area tech-death group Inanimate Existence recently found themselves at the most difficult version of that challenge yet, recording and releasing their new disc Underneath A Melting Sky (via The Artisen Era) in the year since their last album, Calling From A Dream, came out. On top of that, the band did that despite some lineup shifts taking place, recording Underneath A Melting Sky as a three-piece. Considering that the band had just recently been a complete five-piece group, Inanimate Existence had a tall order ahead of them as a newly slimmed down trio (slimmed down almost to their first album’s core members, with Cameron Porras and Ron Casey being the tenured members still left). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): THE KENNEDY VEIL, BELPHEGOR, DAGON

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Aug 282017
 

 

(DGR prepared the following round-up, featuring three items of news and new music that surfaced last week.)

Last week was a densely packed week for metal, with a lot of huge names like Arch Enemy, Ghost, and Mastodon all releasing music videos, and that wasn’t even the tip of the iceberg in metal news. There was so much that seemed to land backloaded onto Friday that it seemed like metal had just decided to spin up into one of its whirling torrents of destruction modes. Thus I once again step in to write about some of the things that caught my interest within the tornado of heavy metal that thrashed about over the week.

This time around we’re going to do a little traveling again, with two musical releases from Sacramento’s The Kennedy Veil, and Austria’s Belphegor, and then we’re going to take a look at the crowdfunding campaign from Lansing, Michigan’s own Dagon and their latest quest to write more ocean-themed death metal.

THE KENNEDY VEIL

It’s been some time since we last heard from Sacramento’s hyperspeed death metal group The Kennedy Veil. In the time since 2014’s Trinity Of Falsehood, The Kennedy Veil have seen the addition of a new vocalist, Monte Barnard, whose resume includes a ton of live vocalist work for groups like Alterbeast, Fallujah, and Thy Art Is Murder, in addition to having been the vocalist for The Antioch Synopsis and the short-lived Soma Ras. Last week the band were finally able to release details about their new disc, Imperium — which is due out October 20th — as well as release a new song, which premiered at Decibel. Continue reading »

EMPYREAN THRONE: “CHAOSBORNE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Aug 282017
 

 

(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Southern California’s Empyrean Throne.)

There exists an alternate reality where the fusion of black metal and death metal, instead of favoring the atmospheres of the icefrost and bleak of the black metal side, took on the more mechanical and firebreathing aspects of the death metal spectrum. Where most blackened death metal tends to favor the ritual and romanticized pomp-and-circumstance theatricality loaned to it by its colder atmosphere-favoring brethren, in this alternate reality it instead leaned toward the heavier groove.

It’s not often that you see the phrase “sun-baked” attached to a disc, yet here we stand with Southern California act Empyrean Throne and their brand of symphonic bombast layered over a large feast of mechanized death metal, with the black metal aspect providing its ritual airs and snarling nihilism to the overall affair.

The group’s recently released album Chaosborne sounds like it was written from within a furnace, every song pushed to the maximum in terms of volume, and the instrumentation following suit, making grandiose sweeping movements from one carved-out blast to the next one. It envisions a world in which the entire planet is basically the high-desert, segments of sand so dry that it looks like it was created in a kiln and shaped into tiles, and those somehow still managing to crack under the heat of the sun. Continue reading »

NIGHTRAGE (“THE VENOMOUS”) AND CARACH ANGREN (“DANCE AND LAUGH AMONGST THE ROTTEN”)

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 172017
 

 

(In this long post we have not one but two extended reviews by DGR, one focusing on the 2017 album by the Greek band Nightrage and the second dwelling upon the 2017 album by the Dutch storytellers in Carach Angren.)

If there is one thing I’m a big fan of doing throughout the year, it’s the inevitable dive backwards into the earlier part of the year in order to play the increasingly desperate catch-up game, to write about releases I’ve been listening to, but never took the time out to say anything about. I’ve got a handful of those, and now that I have a little bit more free time from the day-job (which will be brief, let me tell you, the holiday season approaches) I can finally talk about two pretty constant spins from 2017 that NCS hasn’t had the chance to cover yet, completely glossing over the fact that I’m the guy at the site who will usually wave the flag for both bands.

The two this time around are melodeath stalwarts Nightrage and their seventh (!) album, The Venomous, and the latest batch of supernatural symphonic shenanigans from Carach Angren and their album Dance And Laugh Amongst The Rotten.

Nightrage – The Venomous

Without descending too much into an image of me in a room with newspaper articles and photos all connected with string in so many ways that I can barely move around inside of it, disheveled with a half-drunk cup of coffee that has somehow managed to turn semi-solid, screaming that “there has to be some sort of connection here!”, I’m starting to think that the melodeath crew of Nightrage have developed a pattern. It’s one I hoped that with the March release of their album The Venomous, the band would manage to break. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): BELPHEGOR, SEPTICFLESH, INANIMATE EXISTENCE, AMON AMARTH, INCANTATION, THE LURKING FEAR, ABHORRENT DECIMATION, THENIGHTTIMEPROJECT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Jul 172017
 

 

(DGR takes over round-up duties again, with this collection of new songs and videos from eight bands.)

The end-of-the-week news flood was insane, as we have settled well into summer now and a lot of bands are either gearing up to hit the road or are already out making numerous loops on the festival circuit. Of course, this also means that there are a lot of albums in the hopper, getting ready to come out within weeks, or you’ll start seeing a lot of press for albums set to hit when the first leaves of fall drop.

That’s how you wind up with posts like this SEEN AND HEARD that helped kick off the weekend — not even counting our own fuel that we added to the fire, and the one that you’re reading now, which is basically just a gigantic dragnet for bands that had premieres elsewhere throughout the tail end of last week, or just blasted that thing right out to the world to see.

This episode of SEEN AND HEARD is eight (!) bands deep and skews death-metal heavy, so prepare yourselves for a lot of gigantic grooves, growled vocals, enough blasts to reach gunfire status, and enough chainsaw guitar destruction to fuel the planet. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET — GOROD: “KISS THE FREAK”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jul 162017
 

 

(In April the French band Gorod released an EP that they had prepared for distribution on a European tour. DGR finally caught up with that EP, and now turns in this detailed review.)

Heavy metal is often at its most fun when it feels like the artists behind it have lost their minds. There’s something about a musical genre oft-described as an explosion of catharsis having a creative explosion of its own and going nuts.

It’s not easy to stay reserved when you know that a band has set out to try something that is completely out of the norm for them, and such is the case with France’s frenetic tech-death titans Gorod and their recent thrash experiment EP, Kiss The Freak, which the band wrote and recorded in a very short window before going out on a European tour that saw them hitting the road with the likes of Havok, Warbringer, and Exmortus. Gorod themselves described it this way: Continue reading »

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