DGR Archives - Page 53 of 62 - NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): WORMROT, WASTEWALKER, CARACH ANGREN, BRUJERIA

Sep 132016

(DGR steps forward with a round-up of new songs and videos. We will have a second round-up later today as well.)

Wormrot – Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Grind

If it feels like this summary is a little shorter than usual, it’s because the song itself is kind of like a car crash that you didn’t see coming. One moment, you’re blissfully unaware of anything around — then you blink, you see headlights and hear the crunch of metal, and that is the end. Such is the case with Wormrot’s new blink-and-you’ll-miss-it song.

Yes, the end of last week brought welcome news to the NCS fold in the form of new music from Singapore’s Wormrot. The newly released song, entitled “Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Grind” comes off of the group’s new album Voices — due next month and their followup to 2011’s Dirge. Like many of Wormrot’s songs, “Spotless Grind” clocks in at just over a minute and is punchy as can get, having said all it needs to say in the meantime — which can mostly just be boiled down to “AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAGGGGHHHHH” over a series of unrelenting grind blasts. Continue reading »

VRTRA: “MY BONES HOLD A STILLNESS”

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Sep 122016

(DGR reviews the debut album by Sacramento’s Vrtra.)

A half hour of music is honestly not a tall order when it comes to heavy metal. Most of the time you’ll find (especially amongst reviews here at NCS) that a half hour is really concise, more often than not an exciting prospect due to its propensity for constant repeats, and usually tied into jokes about a half hour being strictly reserved for Infinite Jest-length grind albums.

A half hour is actually something of a selling point, easily packed into work commutes and lunches. A half hour across three songs makes things much more interesting, and now the concessions start: A half hour available right now only through digital means or via cassette tape is when we start getting into strange territory. Such is the case with Vrtra’s My Bones Hold A Stillness. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (DISMAL LAPSE)

THE REARVIEW MIRROR 4 Responses »

Sep 112016

(Our Sacramento-based writer DGR is the author of this Sunday’s edition of our series on metal from the past.)

Dismal Lapse were a Sacramento-based death metal band who were active for a brief period in the later 2000s, with their roots in an earlier Sacramento band known as Bled. During their time playing, the group would release one EP entitled The Nameless Faceless and then a 2009 album called Eon Fragmentation — which surprisingly enough this very site wrote a brief bit about long before they gave me the opportunity to set my roots down and burn this place to the ground.

Dismal Lapse played what should be a very familiar sound to a lot of our readers as they were a technical death metal band, although at the time that label hadn’t really homogenized around the sound that we currently associate with it. This fair city where I live would actually have a small hand in that though, alongside a swath of groups from the Bay Area who had been cutting their teeth for a long time on the I-5 touring run, when they were all picked up around the same time and divied up amongst labels like Unique Leader.

In 2009, that wasn’t really too much of a thought though, and Dismal Lapse were one amongst a handful playing a style that was intense and, yes, hyper-complicated. Continue reading »

VADER: “IRON TIMES”

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Sep 072016

(In this post DGR reviews the new EP by the Polish legends, Vader.)

It’s not too often that we review an EP ahead of a full disc, but Vader’s Iron Times is one that I’ve been privately intending to get around to, especially since I would hazard to say that for metal fans, Iron Times really is a “fun” listen — and I’ll explain what I mean by that.

Iron Times came out in Mid-August, which is about the time I got in my first listen, and with four tracks, two of which are covers, Iron Times is an unassuming release, one that is quietly understated with its album art — but the moment you press “play”, Iron Times tells a much faster, heavier story. However, it was Vader themselves revealing the album art to their new album The Empire, which is due out in early November, that triggered this review, especially since the two songs on Iron Times that are not the cover track or a brief Panzer X resurrection will be present on the full album. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): KHONSU, DÉPARTE, FROM THE VASTLAND, WASTEWALKER, EVERGREY, HEAVEN SHALL BURN, HANNES GROSSMANN

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 5 Responses »

Sep 062016

(DGR prepared this large roundup of new music streams, with one item added by the editor.)

I’ve been slowly gathering up this veritable feast of heavy metal for this roundup, basically doing my usual duty of being the last line of defense for metal news that often pops up and we didn’t catch right away for a variety of reasons. This time around, I’ve got a huge collection of six [now seven] different items, some of which I’m sure you’ve likely crossed paths with but we didn’t dedicate words to and others because they may not be in the usual NCS coverage wheelhouse. I even managed to include some serious lighter fare this time, to help brighten up the mood musically after the first two full onslaughts [now three] hit your musical listening systems.

So let’s kick this thing off with a real quick one that happened as I was writing this intro, and then dive into the meat of it and romp around in its innards for a while.

KHONSU – ARTWORK TRAILER / “A DREAM OF EARTH” SNIPPET

This one is going to be quick, mostly because there isn’t a huge block of heavy metal music proper — but it just happened, and I’ll be goddamned if I don’t say that I am immensely excited for this disc. Continue reading »

OVARYROT — “SUICIDE IDEATION”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 2 Responses »

Aug 242016

(DGR prepared this review of the new album by the Swedish/U.S. band Ovaryrot.)

This disc sounds like a goddamned nightmare.

Every once in a while we’ll come across a release that makes the hair fly back from minute one and then leaves us glued to the wall for the entirety of its run. Not that it is usually a mark of quality, but sometimes from the first moment an album will start out sounding like someone taking a saw to sheet metal and somebody else hammering on a trash can behind it. Sometimes the music is so abrasive that you kind of can’t help but be entranced by it; judgments of quality usually come after the second or third listen, which is just about the time when you parse out exactly whatever the fuck that previous forty-some-odd minutes of whirlwind was.

Ovaryrot’s Suicide Ideation — which came out on August 14th — is one of those albums. Not that we would ever expect a band who go by the moniker of Ovaryrot to play nice; we’ve learned our lessons there before. Continue reading »

VOLTURYON: “CLEANSED BY CARNAGE”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 232016

(DGR reviews the new album by Sweden’s Volturyon.)

Sweden’s Volturyon are a band for whom I’ve been waving the banner pretty frequently — most of that faith inspired by the EP they put out in 2014 entitled Human Demolition. It’s one that I bring up often because I feel like it flew under the radar of a lot of metal listeners; to me that seems insane, because I am hardly ever on the cutting edge of anything, and if I have something that I feel flew under the radar — something that seems to consistently surprise listeners every time I show it to them — then something isn’t right, and I need to do more to shout it from the mountaintops.

Human Demolition was a concise EP, with four songs and an intro, and three of those songs were blisteringly quick death metal grinders, with one sort of mid-tempo chuggathon to break up the pacing a tiny bit. “Concrete Devotion” is a constant highlight for me. That’s why I was pretty much locked in from the start with the group’s upcoming early-September release, Cleansed By Carnage. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SCOUR — “SCOUR”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 9 Responses »

Aug 152016

(DGR reviews the debut EP by Scour.)

There is no doubt that the reason the Scour EP and its mid-July release landed on most metal fans’ radar due to the presence of one Phil Anselmo trying his hand at extreme metal. Phil has proven himself to be a polarizing figure this year via one very particular scandal, and it is still not clear whether he thought he was being funny making a racist joke or if he is a fucking gigantic moron.

He seemed penitent enough when the inevitable backlash occurred, pretty much making it clear that if he was proving to be an obstacle to any of the bands he was in, he was willing to leave. But it makes you wonder if these events had any sort of effect on the lead-up to the Scour EP’s mid-July release. Continue reading »

NECRONAUTICAL: “THE ENDURANCE AT NIGHT”

Album Reviews 11 Responses »

Aug 112016

(DGR wrote this review of the new album by the UK’s Necronautical.)

Let’s lay all our cards on the table up-front here. I was very excited when England’s Necronautical announced a follow-up disc to their album Black Sea Misanthropy. I genuinely enjoyed the nautical-themed group’s debut full-length, and for a while was worried that they wouldn’t do another after they went radio-silent for a brief spell.

I was actually introduced to the band via a review of that album on this very site by our own Andy Synn. Though I am loathe to admit this in public, as the man’s ego hardly needs any more inflating, and knowing that he was right about a recommendation might just provide more reason for it. His homeland may not be sure what part of the planet it wants to be located on at this moment, but I don’t need it to literally float off the map via Andy Synn‘s head-shaped balloon.

Black Sea Misanthropy was a symphonic black metal disc and, as the name implied (as well as the band’s own name), it focused heavily on ships, the ocean, and the brutality involved in many of those sea-going adventures. It was at times thrashy, full-blown death metal, raging and teeth-bared symphonic death, and frustratingly catchy (look, years out and I still get chunks of “Ghosts Of Men” stuck in my head), so I had high hopes for the band to have a follow-up. The Endurance At Night is that follow-up. Released in the middle of July, it continues the band’s nautical explorations but manages to do so in a much more mature package, one that shares a lot of similarities with its predecessor but also comes off much more fierce. The two years between discs have given Necronautical enough time to come up with one hell of a record. Continue reading »

WITHERSCAPE: “THE NORTHERN SANCTUARY”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 092016

(DGR provides this extended review of the new second album by Sweden’s Witherscape.)

Witherscape’s debut album The Inheritance is one of those albums where I’m not sure where the internet fell on it as a whole. Usually you can get a pretty good sense of the fan consensus around albums a while after release, once we’ve all gotten off of the shiny new high and hindsight takes over. But The Inheritance is one of those rare albums where it seems like some folks really loved it and others were content to look at it as an interesting experiment with some odd quirks. I fell into the latter camp.

I thought The Inheritance had some incredible highs but overall it felt a bit like Witherscape were throwing caution to the wind, which is an awesome thing for a new project, but by the same token it also means that some parts just don’t work together. However, with a release like that comes the ability to analyze what really worked for you and what didn’t. If done correctly, a followup disc could make a band like this sound stronger than ever before and really execute upon the premise that (in this case) Witherscape was founded upon — which admittedly, I’m not quite sure of to this day. Continue reading »

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