SHORT BUT SWEET: MASTIC SCUM — “DEFY”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 282017
 

 

(DGR turned in this review of the new release by the Austrian death merchants in Mastic Scum.)

It has been four years since the release of the full-length disc CTRL by the Austrian death metal (and self-described grind-influenced) machine Mastic Scum. The album, which saw the band moving further into the realm of chunk-filled groove and saw-blade-sharp death metal riffs, was reviewed on NCS way after its release, though we had covered it in the lead-up.

Mastic Scum’s discography has a pattern of large gaps between full-,lengths, usually supplemented by a collection of splits and EPs, and in their case even a live DVD entitled Rage. However, the end of October brought us the release of the group’s new EP, Defy, providing a brief transmission of sound from the otherwise shadow-cloaked world through which Mastic Scum move. Continue reading »

ANTIGAMA: THE PREMIERE OF “NOW” AND A REVIEW OF “DEPRESSANT”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 022017
 

 

On November 10, Selfmadegod Records will release a new EP by Antigama, entitled Depressant, on CD (with an LP version coming soon). In this post we present a detailed review by DGR, as well as the premiere of an eye-popping video created by Chariot of Black Moth for a head-wrecking, bombing-run of a track called “Now”. You will find the video lurking in the midst of the review, which begins here:

 

It doesn’t feel like it has been that long since the cyborg Polish grind monsters of Antigama unleashed The Insolent (review penned by yours truly here) upon the world, and yet two years and a handful of months later, the band are returning with a sub-nineteen-minute, seven-track EP named Depressant via Selfmadegod. The group, ever busy in their time between full discs, found time since The Insolent not only to contribute to two different split releases, but also then managed to jam out seven songs of new music all wrapped around the concept of pill popping.

The songs are all tied together through a series of segues, and a strain of utter madness seems to run through the whole Depressant campaign. The opening first minute of the EP dedicates itself to a faux-infomercial alongside some smooth-jazz that is honestly not too out of place in an Antigama disc; the band’s methods of doing whatever the fuck they want quickly unfurling themselves as they kick into full obliteration mode after the infomercial promises to save us from “pain….pain….pain….pain”. Ever fueled by a rage that borders on utter annihilation, we are once again invited to go on a roller-coaster ride of music verging on warped instrument destruction via Depressant. Continue reading »

THE KENNEDY VEIL: “IMPERIUM”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 302017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by California’s The Kennedy Veil, which is out now via Unique Leader Records.)

Three years after the release of their 2014 album Trinity Of Falsehood, Sacramento, California’s The Kennedy Veil return to the stage a somewhat different beast than what they presented on that disc.

In that gap of time, the group have been joined by vocalist Monte Barnard, who has been in a handful of groups around Sacramento (among them the short-lived Soma Ras, and a stint in fellow Unique Leader labelmates Alterbeast) as well has having been live vocalist for groups like Fallujah and Thy Art Is Murder.

Added to this, the group have made a shift in their writing style — as evidenced on their newly released album Imperium — which sees them favoring longer and more densely layered songs, still maintaining the high-speed tempo and blast-heavy brand that the band have made their foundation, but amplified by a very light symphonic element and a heftier focus on letting the rhythm section thud their way through more of the songwriting. Continue reading »

ANTARKTIS: “ILDLAANTE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 242017
 

 

(DGR reviews the debut album by the Swedish group Antarktis, released earlier this month by Agonia Records.)

Sweden’s Antarktis, comprised of In Mourning, Ikhon, and Necrosavant musicians, are a project that we’ve been writing about at our humble abode for some time, albeit when they were first operating under the name Majalis. In the three years since that group’s debut EP, Cathodic Black, they have changed their name to Antarktis and settled down to write what has become their recently released debut full-length Ildlaante.

The album sees the effective tracklist from Cathodic Black doubled from three to six and the runtime similarly extended to a sweet, sweet forty-some-odd minutes of drifting, grooving, and lightly keyboard-seasoned post-metal with a light sludge element that reveals them running alongside fellow countrymen Gloson in the smoke-machine-enveloped bleakness that seems almost required of the genre. Continue reading »

BELPHEGOR: “TOTENRITUAL”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 092017
 

 

(We present DGR’s detailed review of the new album by Belphegor, which is out now on the Nuclear Blast label.)

You could be forgiven for thinking that at this point in their career Austria’s Belphegor would’ve been perfectly okay to rest on their laurels a bit. Having long ago established themselves as one of the more popular extreme black-metal-infused death metal acts out there, currently housed over at Nuclear Blast, and building a career draped in the worlds of blasphemy and a logo bearing prominent inverted crosses, Belphegor have defined themselves as one of the go-to groups for heavy metal’s dose of Satan.

Totenritual, the group’s eleventh album in a career spanning well over twenty years could’ve had the band serve up another smattering of heavier-than-the-Earth guitars and bellowing vocals, yet the Belphegor crew seem to have found new life in their chosen font of death and draw from it for the gathering on Totenritual. Totenritual does have its fair share of minor quirks, but overall Belphegor has honed in on a very focused sound — one which they hammer home numerous times over the nine songs that make up the disc. The album again shows the relic of subtlety (which Belphegor tossed a long time ago, in case albums titled Lucifer Incestus and Bondage Goat Zombie didn’t point you in the right direction) cast off in favor of nine tracks fueled by — and introduced numerous times by — the devil. Continue reading »

ARKAIK: “NEMETHIA”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 212017
 

 

(Later this month Unique Leader will release the latest full-length by California’s Arkaik, and here we have DGR‘s review.)

Southern Californian tech-death group Arkaik have become something of a slowly gathering storm in the music world for a little while now, having remained on a fairly consistent up-swing since the start of their series of meditative science fiction concept albums with 2012’s Metamorphignition.

Over the years the band have seen a rotation of members — including various members from Deeds Of Flesh, Flesh Consumed, and Brain Drill (even more fun considering former drummer Alex Bent currently sits behind the kit for Trivium) — yet they’ve been able to keep their hybrid of tech-death musicianship, brutal-death slamming, and yes, light deathcore sense and dedication to all things groove relatively unchanged. Continue reading »

SEPTICFLESH: “CODEX OMEGA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 082017
 

 

(DGR wrote this extended review of the new album by the Greek band SepticFlesh, which was released on September 1 in North America by Prosthetic Records.)

It’s hard to believe that three years have already passed since yours truly was given the opportunity to review Greece’s symphonic death metal arbiters SepticFlesh and their album Titan. Since then, I’ve dedicated a fair share of words to the band, as their brand of orchestra mixed in with crushingly heavy death metal scratches just the right itch, but I always wind up musing about the same subject, which is how the band’s chosen genres combine in order to form the band as it is today.

It’s interesting to me because, pulled apart, the orchestral music genre and metal genre are two gigantic beasts in their own right, so the thought of combining them makes sense. It’s been done for years, of course, but the gentlemen in SepticFlesh have developed a unique mastery of it. Even in the hands of masters it can occasionally get a little unwieldy — because although the two combine well, in the world of SepticFlesh they are also treading a very thin line, and depending on what side of that line they land on is the version of SepticFlesh you’ll be getting at that point in time. Continue reading »

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 »

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