2025 THROUGH DGR’S EYES: A YEAR END EXTRAVAGANCE WITH PLENTY OF EQUALS: 30-21

 LISTMANIA 2025  No Responses »
Dec 242025
 

(We have now arrived at the third installment of DGR’s 2025 year-end list, counting down from No. 30 to No. 21, with the next two segments coming in the next two days ahead. That’s right, we’ve found no reason to spare Christmas Eve or Christmas Day from the continuing conflagration.)

Watching this list shrink down is invigorating at times. It is overwhelming at first and it has been that way every time, but much like things are with actual procrastination, actually knuckling down and pushing the car forward can do a lot for morale. The finish line slowly crawls its way into sight and to such a point that it no longer seems like a hallucination but an actual tangible thing.

Of course I say this as if I don’t enjoy this exercise every year as well, rolling backwards through the year and with the rose-tinted glasses on and blinders big enough to block an IMAX screen so that I can focus only on the music and not other bullshit. Then, as is always the case when you write these things, you’ll come across an album and be kicking yourself thinking you should’ve positioned it higher, things should be re-ordered, you reassure yourself again that the rankings really don’t matter and that a game of Whose Line Is It Anyway has more actual structure.

Yet here you are, trying to once again re-stack and rewrite things, like trying to have a bareknuckle boxing match in a train that has derailed and is sailing over a cliff. You have bigger problems at stake vis-a-vis said train now plummetting Earthward, but still, the fight is important as well. My high school English teacher would want to kill me for having never figured out how to prioritize this crap. Continue reading »

2025 THROUGH DGR’S EYES: A YEAR END EXTRAVAGANCE WITH PLENTY OF EQUALS: 40-31

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Dec 232025
 

(We have reached the second installment of DGR’s 2025 year-end list, counting down from No. 40 to No. 31, with the next three segments coming in the next three days ahead.)

Right as I finished typing the last sentence of the previous entry for this feature it occurred to me that I had not gone onto my usual musings for how this list functions and where the true rankings actually lie. I’ll do so here, otherwise I’ll feel guilty for people actually thinking that I somehow have a nuanced enough opinion that I can actually rank this many albums against one another.

Truthfully, I can at best do a top fifteen and maybe a top twenty. The rest of these inclusions are as fluid and fungible as can get. I’ve joked before and I’ll do so again and again as my memory gets worse due to age but you could almost view this as a top fifteen albums and then thirty-five other really, really, really good releases worth listening to.

If you want to feel better about yourself, you could almost look at this as a fifty-way tie for first place. It’ll help assuage some of those aforementioned guilty feelings on my end at least. This also serves as an explainer for how the opening salvos from this list every year manage to sound as eclectic and wide-reaching as they are. Not as eclectic as a lot of people around here, but if you’d gone from album to album on the last edition you’d have gotten hit with metal bouncing all over the place, from death, to grind, to black metal, to moody-as-can-get sad boy rock, to melodramatic doom, and further down the line. This chunk of the list won’t be too different in that regard. Continue reading »

2025 THROUGH DGR’S EYES: A YEAR END EXTRAVAGANCE WITH PLENTY OF EQUALS: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2025  2 Responses »
Dec 222025
 

(This is Part I of a five-part year-end list from NCS writer DGR. We’ll have all the remaining Parts coming out day-by-day until hitting the next weekend.)

I’d like to think that every year I manage to keep some sort of schedule when it comes to writing out the end of year events for this website. Usually it’s Andy’s comprehensive autopsy of the year, followed by my bullshit, and then everyone else gets a shot in between. If I manage to time it just right this usually runs just before the holidays and lands just in time so that you could really ruin a Christmas gathering or two with your musical taste were you so determined. I failed in every regard on that front this year.

Life handed me a few raw ones that I am still dealing with and I’m not even sure I’ve completely cleaned off the heaping plate of horseshit I was served so generously last year. That and of course the overall world events so omnipresent that even if you’ve managed to live in a sort of blissful ignorance, the cavalcade of bullshit just seems to be wearing on everybody. Everybody is fucking tired, everyone feels like shit, and my few moments of joy seem to consist of being surrounded by the gaggle of chucklefucks that attend concerts and festivals that I get to talk to.

Every year for at least the past half a decade at this point has opened with me opining about some sort of pessimistic crap, but to be honest, if you ever see me run one of these lists with a semblance of “man, things were just swell this time around!”, you should probably get a wellness check performed on my behalf. At the very least you shouldn’t trust whatever I put for the top ten that year. Or any year, really. The sheer ego of stacking fifty plus albums and expecting people to read it should be disqualifying enough. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE PART IV: THE WILD, WILD, (w)REST

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Dec 162025
 

(This is the fourth and final Part of a series of record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are somewhat shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear the slate in preparation for his year-end lists that will be coming soon.)

This started with the intention of me absolutely smashing out four of these and then diving head-first with wanton abandon into my year-end list collective. A final freeing of thoughts so that I could then look backward through the year and fry my brain one more time while rediscovering all of the music I had enjoyed since the beginning of 2025.

Then your pet gets sick and you wind up being told that she has three or four different things happening all at once and you now have a twice daily, six rotating medications regimen to stick to and things get sort of waylaid until you’re back to wavering on the precipice of stability and you can weasel a little time out to write something. That’s where I’m at now, I think. I should probably check on the cat again just to be safe.

Today’s final collective is a wild one, a combination of releases that kept getting back-burnered, opening and closing paragraphs rewritten multiple times, and discoveries that happened while perusing different label Bandcamp pages while writing the previous three entries in this series. In combination with my year-end list – which I do already have basically laid out albums-wise, just not written – these things have started to congeal into one mass of ideas that I’m not sure apply to each album. In order to prevent random wires being crossed I’ve somewhat sequestered this article from the year-end shenanigans, and as such, must finish this before the true descent into madness begins. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE PART III: THEMES FALL APART

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Dec 112025
 

(This is the third Part of what projects to be four record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear his slate in preparation for his year-end lists to come.)

Just four albums after the shovelfuls of music you’ve been flinging at us already? What sort of madness is this?

At one point I swear I had a theme going for this particular grouping of albums. I cannot for the life of me remember what that theme was. I think at one point it was just me archiving September releases but that fell apart quick. The other was an attempt to cover bands that’ve been long-running but have somehow not found much footing here at the olde’ NCS cliff wall, but that too kind of hit a snag.

Finally, the ever-constant moving cogs of the metal machine assured that releases would shift back and forth and my review archive would soon resemble a crayon box after an attack by a toddler. An interesting swatch of color all splattered around places you don’t necessarily want them to be. Thus, as Part three of four, my inevitable “organization can get fucked” mindset finally kicks in. Ballast must be launched, otherwise this review boat is going down. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE PART TWO: BRUTALITY

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Dec 092025
 

(This is the second Part of what projects to be four record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear his slate in preparation for year-end lists to come.)

Part Two of this completely out of control yet still well-intentioned slate clearing comes to us as the result of yours truly realizing that a lot of his review collective consisted of some pretty overwhelming death metal albums.

On top of this, there’s still more but they’re being shuffled around as best I can because even then there were still one or two “surprise motherfucker!” late additions to the list that, in this case, served as good balance to the meteor impact albums that otherwise comprise this fucking monster of a collection. Knuckle dragging and neck snapping walk hand in hand among this collection, save for one surprisingly introspective battering in the middle, and it only clears the way for an even more steady pile of music to follow… and we haven’t even descended into the year end list depravity yet.

Send help. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE PART I: THE ADVENTUROUS (DESSIDERIUM, OMNIVIDE, MECHINA)

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Dec 082025
 

(This is the first Part of what projects to be four record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear his slate in preparation for year-end lists to come.)

Here’s how this happens: Inevitably at some point in November, year-end lists start dropping and the reality of the fact that the year is ending suddenly feels more “real”. The compulsion to cover everything begins to vanish and the compulsion to grid everything instead becomes stronger, yet the same imagined debts to bands that you’ve been listening to throughout the year remains.

I swore up and down this year that I wouldn’t do many articles like this and I like to pretend I held to that promise. If I intended to review a band, they received the full investment and treatment, rarely broken out into these articles where the reviews are a little more freeform, freeflowing, and more casually written. It was meant to reflect that I was taking time with these bands, which is why articles like this one tend to frustrate me. For the reader they’re an obvious blessing, given that it’s a much quicker series of recommendations, but it’s a gap I can’t mentally jump just yet. Continue reading »

MATALOBOS: “PHANTASMAGORIA: HEXED LANDS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Dec 032025
 

(This is DGR’s review of the third album by the Mexican band Matalobos, released by Concreto Records in February of this year.)

We cannot be the heavy metal spelunkers we imagine ourselves to be if we do not drive ourselves insane chasing after album after album. The result, admittedly, is a segment of blindspots so large that it often seems like we’re using a laser pointer to illuminate an underwater cave. We have one fine dot of light that we manage to cover and everything outside of there either doesn’t exist or is well within “here be dragons” territory.

It just doesn’t seem right, especially when we have a giant content dragnet absorbing potential releases throughout the year and now it seems as if by virtue of being caught in said net, we are driven to discuss something about said capture. That does however also afford us some tremendous opportunities to discover bands we would’t have otherwise crossed paths with, and if we are to live up to our imagined heavy metal Indiana Jones persona then this is something that is an exciting prospect every time.

Mexico’s Matalobos is one such group, a band who captured our eye by way of not just the album art of their third album, suggesting a pulpy goth adventure with tons of leather-draped swagger, but also by title alone. It’s not too often one is going to pass on the opportunity to at least try to listen to something with a title as grandiose as Phantasmagoria: Hexed Lands.

Otherwise, as metal fans, what the hell are we even doing here? Continue reading »

WRETCHED: “DECAY”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Dec 022025
 

(Below we present DGR’s review of the long-awaited fifth full-length by North Carolina’s Wretched, released on October 17th by Metal Blade Records.)

I’ve thought a lot about legacy and what I admire in a band when they decide to return after an extended period of silence. It may just be that this year has been a prime fruiting ground for such bands to find their way back into the eternal heavy metal fray, but the thought has danced on the edges of the intellectual periphery for a while now.

When the subject of what a band has left behind and what they are returning to comes back again – which has proven to be the worst mental dam in the history of man, as I’ve been waiting for thoughts to congeal into something resembling cogent writing – it is mostly couched in the ideals of expectation and what their fans may want from them. This is where the intellectual breeding ground has run wild.

The one overriding thought I’ve come back to is I admire many of the approaches available to a band returning to music after an extended hiatus, though part of that may just be that I’m a barely evolved chimp who is just happy to have his favorite band logos appearing on tour posters again, and among those are exceedingly difficult choices that lie in either the chase of where the group left off last – picking up a baton long covered in dust and left roadside – or the return, but as something different and unexpected, which is where I have found myself standing with North Carolina’s newly resurrected as a four-piece Wretched and their new album Decay. Continue reading »

DISTASTE: “AGONIEPOSITUR”

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Nov 282025
 

(We present DGR’s review of Agoniepositur, the latest album by the Austrian deathgrind band Distaste, released on October 24 by F.D.A. Records.)

It comes as a surprise to see something from Austrian grind band Distaste so soon after the release of their 2023 album Der Ertraeger Und Das Fleisch, but it seems to be the band’s modus operandi to quickly burst into and out of existence like someone lobbing flash grenades from the window of a passing race car.

Sliding in just under the wire for 2025 is an impressive act too, given that the crew comprising Distaste do keep busy with a small handful of other projects, but perhaps the summoning call to the blastbeat has proven too strong, bringing them home from the wilds to once again unleash a sub-thirty-minute hammering of music that exists entirely in the redline and rarely moves from it. Dynamics, to put it politely, can get fucked. Continue reading »

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