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THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING 2016 EDITION (PART 2)

LISTMANIA 2016 6 Responses »

Dec 202016

(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.)

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: Continue reading »

THE DGR-NCS HOLIDAY BUYERS’ GUIDE AND YEAR IN REVIEW FOR THE METALHEAD WHO HAS TO HAVE ABSOLUTELY EVERYTHING — 2016 EDITION (PART 1)

LISTMANIA 2016 11 Responses »

Dec 192016

(DGR created year-end lists of great length. He wrote many words about each listed item. Your humble editor fears that the site would collapse beneath this great leviathan of words if it reared its bulk in a single post, and has therefore decided to split it up. How many parts will be required to complete the undertaking hasn’t yet been determined — but this is Part 1.)

In fact, this year has been insane. This is the first year amongst the now handful of years that I’ve done this where I’ve actually dreaded making the top whatever list for the end of the year. Anyone who asked me what I thought about my albums of the year basically got a shocked thousand-yard stare and me uttering “2016’s year-enders are going to be a bloodbath”. Continue reading »

ULCERATE: “SHRINES OF PARALYSIS”

Album Reviews 12 Responses »

Nov 222016

(DGR reviews the new album by New Zealand’s Ulcerate.)

There’s a certain sort of apocalyptic reverie one takes on as a state of mind when reviewing an Ulcerate disc. The now long-running New Zealand-based death metal three-piece have made a career out of creating music that sounds tailor-made for the end of the world. When the Earth’s crust is rended asunder and magma comes shooting up into the air, Ulcerate are one of the groups that I am expecting to provide the mood music, like the band playing on the Titanic, on a planetary scale.

Keeping in mind that among the group’s discography are albums with names like Everything Is Fire and The Destroyers Of All, you can see why that description might feel apt. Ulcerate play a deafening form of death metal, one that is largely cavernous and often cataclysmic in its impact. They have grown in popularity over the years and have become a cultural landmark in the death metal scene as a whole. They are able to channel utter destruction in their sound and have done so for quite some time.

Only a few groups out there get to name a song “Weight Of Emptiness” and have it feel like it was built to fit that song, not just because it sounded cool. The same goes for Ulcerate’s newly released album Shrines Of Paralysis, which came out at the tail end of October, three years after the release of their last album Vermis. Shrines continues Ulcerate’s trend of auditory destruction, a slow death march to oblivion, and over the course of an hour it’s hard not to feel like there is some sort of darkness spreading through your veins. Continue reading »

HANGING GARDEN: “HEREAFTER”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Nov 112016

(DGR wrote this detailed review of the new EP by Finland’s Hanging Garden.)

I will be the first to admit that I absolutely missed the bus on Hanging Garden’s 2015 release Blackout Whiteout. Not only did I miss the bus on last year’s album, while that bus is likely in another state by now, probably delivering the mail in rural counties on its cross-country trip, I have just now reached the bus stop, blissfully unaware the such an event had even taken place and now standing at the bus stop impatiently tapping my foot and staring in the oncoming direction wondering “just when will that goddamned thing get here….”

While I may have missed the bus on Blackout Whiteout, I did not do so with the band’s followup EP Hereafter, thanks in large part due our esteemed editor who has somehow, in between the mountain of premieres and news items he has written about, found a way to send along a note that basically boiled down to, “You need to check this release out. It’s so far in your wheelhouse that it is almost comedic”. Though the edgy, angsty teen rebel in me wants to shout, “You don’t define me! You can’t predict me!”, and go back to wearing all black like all my friends do, I’ve walked the Earth long enough to know when I’ve been pinned down because goddamnit, Hereafter is one of those releases that feels near tailor-made. Continue reading »

DGR’S BIG OL’ MESS O’ REVIEWS (ONE): CHRONOLYTH, MALEVOLENTIA, KINNEFRET, OVARYROT

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Nov 092016

I know it has been a pretty hefty amount of time since I last touched bases here at NCS. I’ve found that the queue of reviews continues to build up and I fell victim to it, allowing the tremendous amount of stuff that I wanted to talk about to become absolutely paralyzing, to the point where I just couldn’t cohere thoughts anymore. In this case, it was because a handful of releases were clogging up the works — discs that I had been enjoying for the better part of half a year now but for some reason or another we just never got around to talking about.

So, this collection of smaller reviews is an experiment, an opportunity to try writing something briefer and more concise. Much as I love to dissect an album and romp around in its innards until I’m a gore-soaked mess from time to time, I also feel like this is a collection of discs that I need to get out there, especially as we draw closer and closer to the year-end collections, when there’s a good chance that some of these discs will be popping up on there. At the very least, I want to get these bands out there for people to listen to, as some of these are flying under the radar and absolutely shouldn’t. Continue reading »

ANAAL NATHRAKH: “THE WHOLE OF THE LAW”

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Oct 272016

(DGR reviews the new album by the UK’s Anaal Nathrakh, which will be released by Metal Blade on October 28.)

Few bands out there these days have weaponized music like Anaal Nathrakh has. The long-running project now has an immense collection of albums in its discography — all of which are some combination of abrasive noise, destructive instrumentation, and annihilation on the lyrical front.

Anaal Nathrakh are a band whose very formation is based around the idea of being as noisy as possible. If heavy metal is to be treated as a form of catharsis, then the aims of Nathrakh are to be the ultimate form of that in rage. For all of this talk of destruction, however, there are the occasional signs of where this anger comes from (considering this is a band that doesn’t provide lyrics to its albums and even then could probably save ink doing so since half of its vocal lines seem to lack consonants), which has been largely driven by a disgust with humanity and where the species is headed. Continue reading »

NOCTEM: “HAERESIS”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Oct 102016

(DGR reviews the new album by Spain’s Noctem, which was released on September 30 by Art Gates Records and Prosthetic Records.)

Spain’s Noctem have kept themselves to a pretty tight every-two-years-put-out-a-new-album schedule, something made more impressive by the fact that the group have had some pretty consistent — though small — lineup shifts in between each album. In the case of Noctem’s new disc, that isn’t the case anymore, as the band’s current lineup features three new members, with the change made official in 2015.

Noctem are one of those groups who have drastically refined their sound with each release, as they trim whatever fat they find, or make a shift in sound. In the case of the group’s 2014 release Exilium, Noctem wound up a fairly sleek, blackened death metal band with a penchant for going at hyper-speed for most of the album; they sounded like a hyperbasting death metal band with just a slight bit of recent-era Kataklysm guitar shred tossed into it. The songs were of the shock-and-awe-assault type: no time to build, just starting at a million miles an hour and accelerating from there. Whatever wasn’t destroyed by the initial blast still had to weather three-plus minutes of the band roaring at you.

Haeresis is Noctem’s fourth full-length disc and it stays pretty close to its siblings Divinity, Oblivion, and Exilium in terms of run time at about ten songs and forty-five minutes in length. Barring Oblivion, which is an outlier with a last track running thirteen minutes long, Noctem have at this point found a pretty concrete formula in terms of just how many songs they want and how long an album needs to be. They’ve found that a sleek forty-some-odd minutes tends to work for them, and with Haeresis, the band do that without any instrumentals in the mix, meaning that all ten songs on Haeresis are Noctem at their most vicious. Continue reading »

SOLUTION .45: “NIGHTMARES IN THE WAKING STATE – PART II”

Album Reviews No Responses »

Oct 062016

(DGR reviews the new album by Sweden’s Solution .45, which is out now via AFM Records.)

Five years after their debut, Solution .45 returned to the musical stage with Nightmares In The Waking State last year. The band had intended for Nightmares to be a multiple-part release, and in that sense the group were not fucking around.

Often, when a band announces multiple-part albums some sort of wrench will get thrown into the works that results in delays, or extended waits between the discs — so if you enjoyed the themes present on said hypothetical first disc, you often had to just sit and twiddle your thumbs for a few years whilst waiting for a followup.

Nightmares In The Waking State doesn’t have that issue, as earlier this month saw the release of the second part of that album — with a color-muted and sepia-toned version of the first part’s Pär Olofsson drawn artwork. Continue reading »

INSOMNIUM: “WINTER’S GATE”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Oct 032016

(DGR reviews the new album by Finland’s Insomnium, which is out now.)

A few times over the course of my time here I’ve been able to function as an NCSstrodamus of sorts, and when it came to Insomnium’s recently released album Winter’s Gate, that time came once again. Winter’s Gate is Insomnium’s seventh full-length release and one of those albums where we could not possibly have been more prepared for it, almost like a couple of the reviews we’ve done this year were prescient glimpses into the future, so that when the band announced that Winter’s Gate would function as one strict over-forty-minute-long song, we were ready for it. Continue reading »

FROZEN GATE: “BEHIND THE DARK ICE”

Album Reviews, Eye-Catchers 6 Responses »

Sep 142016

(In this post DGR reviews the debut album by the Swiss band Frozen Gate.)

Occasionally some questions will arise as to how the NCS reviews process works. To be honest with you, the answer is fairly simple — we’re pretty freewheeling. We try our best to keep up with recent and relevant releases but often the authors of the site are pretty free to write about whatever strikes our fancy, which is why you’ll occasionally see reviews for albums that came out anywhere from the beginning of this year to two years ago on this page. If we think our readers will like it, we’ll write about it.

But, there are occasional quirks in this system that can often bring about discoveries: In this case it is that I am a giant manchild, who at his “wizened” age will still occasionally check out albums if the combination of cover art and album name strikes my fancy or in this case, amuses me.

Switzerland’s Frozen Gate released their debut album Behind The Dark Ice earlier this month and I came about it whilst scrolling through my various resources for recent releases. In this case the cover art for Behind The Dark Ice caught my eye — mostly for how stark it is. It can best be boiled down to just the band’s logo with a crest and some dark blue paint-brushing, evocative of a frigid land. It’s bare bones but it manages the job of matching its name sake of Behind The Dark Ice. I just had to have a look — while having no idea what sort of music Frozen Gate put out. Continue reading »

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