COLD INSIGHT: “FURTHER NOWHERE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Jul 072017
 

 

(This is DGR’s review of the complete version of Cold Insight’s debut album, released on June 28 of this year.)

The subject matter territory that heavy metal covers is vast. When you view heavy metal as a filter through which all musical aggression seems to come through, you have a recipe for just about anything and everything being screamed, growled, shrieked, yelped, barked, and even sung about.

Heavy metal still has its staples; longtime readers will of course recognize the holy trinity of body horror in mutilation, gore, and murder — the various possibilities inflicted upon corpses has long since been the foundation upon which death metal is built. You also have Satan so ingrained throughout heavy metal that almost everything has a thin veneer of Lucifer spread on top of it, and then… then you also have the void.

We in heavy metal specialize in the void, the empty, and the abyss — we’re void worshipers and watchers, we claim to see things in the emptiness, and the abyss is where we seem to record half of our early musical releases until we can afford some proper production work.

The most analogous thing to all three, of course, is space. It doesn’t take a short logic leap to see that we exist quite literally in a Big Empty — where on a map, two planets can look close together, until you are informed that it takes years to travel between them. “Cold” and “empty” are often descriptors we apply to music, especially doom, so of course we have now wound up in space.

From that, we draw upon science fiction with its space-opera overtures and something that has found its way into heavy metal more and more, especially as a visual component. In part, this helps explain the sci-fi aesthetics of Cold Insight’s newly released debut Further Nowhere. Continue reading »

VALLENFYRE: “FEAR THOSE WHO FEAR HIM”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 062017
 

 

(DGR prepared this review of the third, and reportedly final, album of a consistent favorite of our site — Vallenfyre.)

In what will likely be the understatement of the year, you could easily say that Vallenfyre’s career has been one intertwined with death.

At face value, they’re a death metal band. Two out of their three album covers have prominently featured skulls, Vallenfyre’s genesis story is rooted in a tribute to founder Gregor Mackintosh’s father after he had passed, and the musicians who have taken part in the project have been death and doom metal luminaries — including longtime guitarist Hamish Glencross, formerly of My Dying Bride.

If you wanted to be reductive you could say that Vallenfyre have started to sound a lot like the groove-heavy side of Napalm Death, and now we’re faced with the prospect of the “death” of the band itself with Gregor giving interviews saying that he views the Vallenfyre releases as a trilogy and would be happy to leave it there. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ABORTED — “BATHOS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 052017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new EP by those Belgian barbarians (and old favorites of our site), Aborted.)

 

Of all of the bands nowadays who hardly seem to stop for a breath, Aborted are one who in recent years have steadily increased their output like few others. Most bands in the decade-plus eras of their careers tend to slow down; Aborted record music like the world is ending tomorrow — in terms of both aural quality and quantity.

In recent years, Aborted have also become master chameleons with their sound, re-energizing every album with just enough tweaks that although the band have clearly found a happy home in a hyperfast death-grind sound, each of the group’s releases since Global Flatline have felt different from one another. Those releases are still fairly recognizably as Aborted albums, and honestly, putting on shuffle the triptych of Global Flatline, Necrotic Manifesto, and Retrogore, along with the smattering of EPs and single releases with all their bonus rarities that happened in between those discs, pretty much guarantees a very consistent and frighteningly heavy through-line. Continue reading »

A DGR SEEN AND HEARD: DISTASTE, LENG TCH’E, ABORTED, THE HAUNTED, SAMAEL, THE RITUAL AURA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jun 272017
 

 

(DGR once again takes over round-up duties at our metallic fortress, presenting news and new music from six bands.)

This weekend was glorious if you were in a death grind sort of mood, as it felt like Friday was the first crack in a dam about to burst from a small handful of bands. Austria’s Distaste put out a new EP entitled Todt (which is curently name-your-own-price), and Belgium-based grinders Leng Tch’e and their fellow countrymen in the restless Aborted both began streaming new songs from their upcoming releases.

In fact, in compling this roundup I felt I had to temper the blade a little bit by tacking on something that wasn’t just raw fury from front to back, so Samael find themselves paired up alongside an EP announcement for Australian tech-death wonders The Ritual Aura and an ambient teaser that, were we not aware of just how heavy those guys can get, would be fairly calming. So, if you were looking to start your day without a massive pile of non-stop guitar batterings, relentless drumming, and vocals fired at the speed of a machine-gun, my friend…you’ve come to the wrong place. Continue reading »

A DGR SEEN AND HEARD: ABHORRENT DECIMATION, DECAPITATED, OCCVLT HAND, BROKEN HOPE, DECREPIT BIRTH, SCHAMMASCH, QUASARBORN, LEPROUS, THE ZENITH PASSAGE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jun 212017
 

 

(DGR once again takes over round-up duty, compiling a selection of nine items for your listening and viewing pleasure, culled from the last week.)

 

Clearly nobody got the email that we sent out announcing that we would be incredibly busy late last week Northwest Terror Festing, and therefore decided that it would be a good time to flood the heavy metal world with news. You wouldn’t know that by visiting NCS, because we slowed to a crawl, with writers Gorger and Andy Synn coming through as the heroes keeping the fortress guarded whilst the rest of us rotated between drunk and exhausted.

Now, though, DGR has come to collect his dues, so I have compiled a round-up with every single thing that I kept notes on from Thursday of last week ’til now, and I guarantee you that I’ve still missed a handful of things. Still, though, this collection of music videos, lyric videos, and live performance(s) is gigantic in its own right and it is certified NCS “Fresh”, which means it should only mildly smell like rotting beef carcasses.

Abhorrent Decimation – Conspire

When I first saw the artwork by Karmazid for the upcoming Abhorrent Decimation album The Pardoner, I declared that if the music on that disc could be half as cool as the artwork it bore or the concept behind it, then I would be a happy camper. Well, with “Conspire“, Abhorrent Decimation have shown that they are in good standing on that front — releasing a monstrous six-minute brutalizer. Continue reading »

ÆTHER REALM: “TAROT”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jun 062017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by North Carolina’s Æther Realm., which will be released tomorrow.)

An almost four-year gap between albums isn’t too unheard of these days. Metal, when it wants to, moves at a glacial pace, and as much as we love to assume everyone runs on the two-year cycle, there are always going to be a bunch of outliers. Æther Realm are one such band, with the gap between their debut album One Chosen By The Gods and the group’s soon-to-be-released sophomore disc Tarot being close to four years — though the band themselves have alleviated that a bit with a very healthy bit of touring, show playing, and a slow drip of singles that has actually made the time seem to disappear faster than one would think.

A sophomore disc can represent a huge shift for a band, especially one like Æther Realm, who had a very succesful first disc — one that really did prove the concept behind the band in one go and contained a healthy grasp of really catchy songs. For a band that at one point jokingly had as part of their online bio “We are not from Finland”, it certainly wasn’t hard to draw conclusions as to which groups the Æther Realm crew really, really loved and drew a ton of inspiration from. A second album of the same style, though, no matter how good the band might do it, becomes a harder sell, and with Tarot it seems like even Æther Realm recognized that. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ORIGIN, THE LURKING FEAR, SUFFOCATION, PATHOLOGY, BROKEN HOPE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
May 152017
 


Origin

 

(DGR steps in for round-up duty with a collection of deathly advance tracks from forthcoming albums that detonated late last week.)

2017 has been a year that has moved in fits and starts, with huge batches of releases and then a period of calm, then another huge batch and so on. It’s a different feeling from last year’s torrential flood, but it also means that promotional stuff moves in fits and starts as well — which is how we wound up with the back half of last week bringing one big release after another from some fairly recognizable names for those who love their death metal and high speed.

It was a pretty intense flood of death metal washing over the metal community, much of it coming from some fairly big names — a hefty collection of mainstays, old guard, and standard-bearers. We tried to collect some of them into our usual three-to-four part series of bands, but eventually it seemed like everyone wanted to get in on the game, and that’s why you have a SEEN AND HEARD headline with five recognizable names within it, all deploying material virtually at once. Continue reading »

HATE: “TREMENDUM”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
May 022017
 

 

(DGR wrote this detailed review of the new album by the Polish band Hate.)

There are some groups who exist like heavy metal’s undercurrent, groups who seem like they have always been there and never seem to age, as if the band were immortal, with each release they put out slotting neatly right next to the others in their career. Hate are one of those groups. Their martial brand of Satan-inspired, Anti-religion death metal has seemingly existed as part of heavy metal’s subculture forever, one of a small handful of bands playing a particular style, a constant go-to for a specific fix.

The new Hate album Tremendum marks the group’s tenth release in a little over twenty years. The thing that has kept Hate around like this, like many bands who’ve enjoyed a twenty-plus-year career in the metal business, is that Hate found a sound, and since locking into it, for better or worse, they have put out albums with differing variations on that overall style, but have never gone for a massive genre-shift or anything blindingly different. Hate are going to consistently sound like Hate. That is one of the ways you wind up a pillar of a genre, as Hate have done. Continue reading »

GENOCIDE GENERATOR: “III”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 282017
 

 

(DGR turns in this review of the new album by Bavarian grind merchants Genocide Generator.)

This one took a bit to review. Not because there was some conflict or confusion as to how Genocide Generator did things, but mostly because III is an album that does almost exactly what I was hoping the band would do after their debut album I — you’ll note, there’s no II yet — which was to double-down on all of the elements they had used to make their first disc.

I was hoping they would double-down on the speed, on the grind, on the usage of electronics, and on the heaping helping of just outright absurdity that they splattered over the top of everything. And that’s what they did on III. So if you can remember way back to the olden horse-cart days of the internets and our review of I, and if you enjoyed that, then III is perfect for you. What took a while with III, though, is that since the self-described “grindustrial madness” band doubled down on everything, it’s hard to pontificate about much with the disc. And it also raises a few interesting questions.

One question is that since the band have so much fun inserting dumb sound effects and cranking on random electronic noise to go along with the high-speed adrenaline rush that is their music, how does one possibly review grind like that? How does one talk about grind that takes on an almost carnival-like atmosphere with its big-top bombast and the joy of how anarchic some of the songs become? How do you review an album of grind that sounds like it was made for a funhouse? Continue reading »

TORTURIZED: “OMNIVORE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 252017
 

 

(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Germany’s Torturized.)

Here at NCS, we’re proud of the spelunking we do to find underground metal, in between our fawning over the genre as a whole. We also enjoy helping get folks’ names out there — in my case, especially when it comes to some machine-precise death metal.

The idea of musicians as machinery is one that still proves exciting, and hearing a band execute on that idea to crank out some crushing death metal still impresses. Which is how I wound up at the doorstep of Torturized‘s disc Omnivore. Continue reading »

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