WOLFHEART: “TYHJYYS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Mar 272017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Finland’s Wolfheart.)

Tyhjyys, the new album by Finland’s Wolfheart, is a moody album, shrouded in fog, happy to stew in cold and detached misery. It has actually shown itself to be an excellent soundtrack for the rain-drenched and fog-shrouded drives home from work in the month since its release, the perfect encapsulation for grey skies and dense mist rolling in off the water.

Tyhjyys also marks the third album for founder Tuomas Saukkonen’s Wolfheart project — his name should be at least somewhat familiar as the founder of many an NCS-covered band: Before The Dawn and Black Sun Aeon, to name two — itself having since evolved into a full group as of 2015’s Shadow World album.

It is also a disc of transformation — one that sees Wolfheart traversing from one genre to another, finally giving into their gloomier leanings and going for the melodeath/doom hybrid that the region traffics in so well. And it does so organically across eight songs, starting out with music that feels like it is picking up right where Shadow World left off and slowly getting colder and colder from there before finally landing on its title song and overall theme of the album. Fitting for a release whose title translates to the word ‘Emptiness’. Continue reading »

LOCK UP: “DEMONIZATION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 152017
 

 

(We present DGR’s review of the new album by the death-grind super-group Lock Up, which was released on March 10th by Listenable Records.)

It is rare that I find myself admiring a musician for the amount of fun he seems to be having on a disc; but I sincerely hope that one day I have half as much fun as Nick Barker seems to be having with the toms on his kit on Lock Up’s new disc Demonization.

We open with musing on that fact because if there is one dominant thing you won’t help but notice over and over during the vicious barrage of auditory violence that Lock Up wield against their listeners during Demonization, it is the constant drum fills that feature the upper part of the man’s drum kit as he just flies through the whole thing. Someone pulled him aside and told him ‘go fast’, and that is what he did for most of the album, save for three songs where the group actually slow down slightly, and he unleashes some ultra-tight blasts and rolls constantly, making sure every drum and cymbal available to him gets the everliving shit beat out of it.

But of course, that’s much like the entire listening experience; it is why we come to grind-stalwarts Lock Up in the first place, right? Continue reading »

EX DEO: “THE IMMORTAL WARS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Mar 132017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by the Italian band Ex Deo, which was released last month by Napalm Records. Okay, they’re really from Canada.)

One of the common narratives for a band returning from hiatus is the “boy, has it been a long wait for a new disc” lead-off, and 90% of the time these are generally correct. Usually a group returns to fans desperate for new material and the wait, after a while, no longer feels like an eternity and quickly becomes just another fun fact. Any long wait tends to do that.

This is not the case with Kataklysm mainman Maurizio Iacono’s Roman-themed symphonic death metal side project Ex Deo. In fact, Ex Deo enjoyed one of the shortest formal hiatuses (hiati? hiatus’?) I’ve heard of, with the project being put on hold in early 2014, two years after the release of the album Caligvla, and then being reactivated in late 2015 to work on the album that would eventually become their new disc, this year’s The Immortal Wars.

I generally enjoyed Caligvla, so I was one of those who was initially bummed out by the hibernation of this Kataklysm-save-for-one person project, and then just as immediately excited by the prospect of a new disc. Granted, when you look at it on paper, there is a five-year gap between albums. Continue reading »

PERSEFONE: “AATHMA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 282017
 

 

(DGR prepared this detailed review of the new album by Andorra’s Persefone, and we have a full music stream for you at the end.)

If there is one thing that I’ve come to admire in music over the past few years, it is a sense of ambition. As music has become democratized and we’ve found bedroom and studio projects achieving just as much as groups with label backing, I’ve found bands who seem to have decided that since there is no more ‘living within their means’ any more, they can just go for it every time they step up to the plate. Persefone are one of those bands.

Now a handful of albums deep into their career, each disc has seemingly grown in size and scope compared to the last one. They come off as a group that has overdosed on just as many Dream Theater and Symphony X keyboard-laden discs as they have the late ’90s and early 2000s melodeath scene. Continue reading »

MECHINA: “AS EMBERS TURN TO DUST”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Feb 062017
 

 

(Chicago’s Mechina released a new album on January 1 and, continuing a long tradition, DGR reviews it.)

The idea of a band creating their own lore occupies a special place in my heart, a place where admiration and hilarity co-exist in the case of Mechina. The ambitiousness of trying to set up a universe and tell a multiple-release-spanning story is incredible, in an age of music that is quickly devoured and disposed of, reserved exclusively for streaming and set up to run in the background. Going beyond the usual goal of “let’s make a really good disc” and into one that seeks to create a musical space opera that pulls from equal parts miltiary sci-fi and exploration segments, that is where my admiration comes to fruition.

That the Mechina crew have doggedly sought to create this saga on a yearly release schedule, with the occasional single release ahead of time, has felt like an exercise in insanity. The hilarity, for me at least, has been in the part where year afer year I have to describe this to what may be a new audience not feel like I’ve fallen into a feedback loop of repeating myself. Continue reading »

HOUR OF PENANCE: “CAST THE FIRST STONE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jan 242017
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Italy’s Hour of Penance, which will be released on January 27 by Prosthetic Records.)

There is a temptation when writing reviews to believe that everything needs to have some sort of deeper meaning attached to it — especially when it comes to music, because the idea of describing sound with words is one that can paralyze a person. So whenever something is pretty much exactly what it says on the box, you can often find yourself spinning endlessly.

Italy’s long-running Hour Of Penance have made a name for themselves in the brutal death scene since their full-length starter in 2003 as one of the forebears of the hyperblasting death metal bands who now seem to extrude out of that country like few others. Since 2010’s Paradogma, Hour Of Penance have really found a sound for themselves, a relentless battering of metal that is driven almost entirely by a wall of hellfire-belching guitars and drumwork that exists somewhere between Gatling gun and machine gun in terms of speed. Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 6)

 LISTMANIA 2016  4 Responses »
Dec 262016
 

dgr-list

 

(Each day last week we rolled out a part of DGR’s list of his favorite 50 albums of 2016. In this 6th and final installment of his year-end list we have not-metal favorites, awards, confessions of shame, and other miscellaneous stuff. Follow these links for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, and Part 5 of the list.)

NON-METAL

I often try to include a small segment of not-metal shit that I’ve listened to during year soon ending, and to be honest, the rotation kind of stays the same. But it’s only because I feel like these groups absolutely nail it. However, I can fully understand that the “DGR pitches Fixt-label and Celldweller music” paragraph can be tiring, which sucks, because both of Klayton’s Scandroid and Circle Of Dust discs came out this year and they’re both GREAT.

However, that’s not going to fully stop me from putting all my credibility underneath a dump truck’s tires and then backing over it until it is a fine paste, so here’s a small taste of the rock and electronica stuff I got around to this year. Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 5)

 LISTMANIA 2016  8 Responses »
Dec 232016
 

dgr-list

 

(DGR created year-end lists of great length. He wrote many words about each listed item. Your humble editor feared that the site would collapse beneath this great leviathan of words if it reared its bulk in a single post, and therefore decided to split it up, with one part appearing each day this week. Follow these links for Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, and Part 4.  And guess what? There’s still one more part left to come after this one.)

You knew this was coming, or you would if you had been around here the last few years. It’s been a long-standing tradition here at NCS that when the Listmania series happens, I take the filter completely off and just produce a gigantic screed of words that is occasionally interrupted with album art, music streams, and album titles with little numbers next to them. This year is no different.

In my attempt to rationalize an enormous year of music, I’ve capped my list at fifty albums, ranked in order of whichever numbers my fingers were closest to on the keyboard. On top of that, I have my usual small collection of not-metal stuff, some fun stuff, my list of shame, a likely happy face where number 8 should be because I’m a moron and put the numbers in front of a parenthesis and WordPress translates that into an emoticon, and my personal favorite award that I hand out each year.

The 50-album list continues today, counting down the top 10. What’s left after that will come your way on Monday. Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 4)

 LISTMANIA 2016  6 Responses »
Dec 222016
 

dgr-list

 

(DGR created year-end lists of great length. He wrote many words about each listed item. Your humble editor feared that the site would collapse beneath this great leviathan of words if it reared its bulk in a single post, and therefore decided to split it up, with one part appearing each day this week. Follow these links for Part 1, Part 2, and Part 3.)

You knew this was coming, or you would if you had been around here the last few years. It’s been a long-standing tradition here at NCS that when the Listmania series happens, I take the filter completely off and just produce a gigantic screed of words that is occasionally interrupted with album art, music streams, and album titles with little numbers next to them. This year is no different.

In my attempt to rationalize an enormous year of music, I’ve capped my list at fifty albums, ranked in order of whichever numbers my fingers were closest to on the keyboard. On top of that, I have my usual small collection of not-metal stuff, some fun stuff, my list of shame, a likely happy face where number 8 should be because I’m a moron and put the numbers in front of a parenthesis and WordPress translates that into an emoticon, and my personal favorite award that I hand out each year.

The 50-album list continues today, continuing the countdown through No. 11: Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 3)

 LISTMANIA 2016  9 Responses »
Dec 212016
 

dgr-list

 

(DGR created year-end lists of great length. He wrote many words about each listed item. Your humble editor feared that the site would collapse beneath this great leviathan of words if it reared its bulk in a single post, and therefore decided to split it up, with one part appearing each day this week. Part 1 is here and Part 2 is here.)

You knew this was coming, or you would if you had been around here the last few years. It’s been a long-standing tradition here at NCS that when the Listmania series happens, I take the filter completely off and just produce a gigantic screed of words that is occasionally interrupted with album art, music streams, and album titles with little numbers next to them. This year is no different.

In my attempt to rationalize an enormous year of music, I’ve capped my list at fifty albums, ranked in order of whichever numbers my fingers were closest to on the keyboard. On top of that, I have my usual small collection of not-metal stuff, some fun stuff, my list of shame, a likely happy face where number 8 should be because I’m a moron and put the numbers in front of a parenthesis and WordPress translates that into an emoticon, and my personal favorite award that I hand out each year.

The 50-album list continues today, counting down through No. 21: Continue reading »

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