DGR Archives - Page 54 of 58 - NO CLEAN SINGING

SHINING: “INTERNATIONAL BLACKJAZZ SOCIETY”

Oct 212015

(DGR reviews the new album by Norway’s Shining.)

Years ago, in reviewing the then newly released album One One One by Norway’s Shining, I joked that the band were one of those groups I would listen to in order to pretend that I was much smarter than I actually was. I hypothesized that I might not get much of what the band were doing, despite a love for the album Blackjazz, with their freeform jazz routines, constant instrument abuse, and love of all things dissonant, but the parts that my brain could grasp onto would surely fool people into never figuring out that I am, and always have been, a rube with the ability to write a lot.

One One One was a drastically different turn for Shining and pretty much insured that every disc the band had put out was different from the one before it. In comparison to Blackjazz, One One One was remarkably straightforward — it still had its spazz-out moments, but overall the album was a lot easier to get into and had its fair share of infectious songs. “I Won’t Forget”, for instance, is still prime volume-way-up-blasting material and “The Hurting Game” is another driving monster of a track. Continue reading »

ENSHINE: “SINGULARITY”

Album Reviews 8 Responses »

Oct 202015

(DGR reviews the new album by Enshine.)

Jari Lindholm is one of those musicians who surrounds himself with incredible talent, having been involved now in a handful of projects over the years and beginning to find himself having multiple releases within one year. Two of the projects that he is a part of are two-man melo-doom groups. Though they lie on different sides of a very finite spectrum, both are still playing a brand of ethereal doom that has always felt decidedly European, even as more groups in North America seem to be mastering it recently.

The first release of these two-man collaborations hit earlier this year, with Exgenesis releasing its first EP in the form of the soul-crushing bleakness of Aphotic Veil. Exgenesis sees Lindholm paired with musician Alejandro Lotero for a project that spans a pretty good chunk of the globe. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 2): SHINING (NOR), PRAETORIA, NAMI, MASTIC SCUM

Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Sep 282015

(DGR steps up for round-up duty, and he prepared a really big round-up, so big that your humble editor decided to divide it into two parts. Part One is here.)

In case you missed it, Friday was a kind of slow date for the site. We’ve had times like this before, where various outside influences conspire to make sure that we post with the speed at which animals are able to escape the La Brea Tar Pits. That doesn’t mean we weren’t up here in space, lookin’ down on you and keeping track of various rumblings going throughout the web.

I’ve gathered together eight fairly recent developments in the heavy metal world for you all to enjoy. As usual, I’ve tried to catch stuff that has flown under the radar and mix it in with a few things that have likely made a big splash across the web already. This collection of stories covers a pretty good swath of the globe in terms of distance but has a foot heavily planted in the death metal and doom metal realms, making a few labored grasps to the outside genre world.

SHINING

We turn next to Norway’s blackjazz entourage Shining. The group have been building up to the release of their new disc International Blackjazz Society, and recently the song “Last Day” found its way to the web. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ENSHINE, CRYPTOPSY, NECROSAVANT, FOREVER OBSCURED

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Sep 282015

(DGR steps up for round-up duty, and he prepared a really big round-up, so big that your humble editor decided to divide it into two parts.)

ENSHINE

In case you missed it, we here at NCS have a bit of a soft spot for the melo-doom band Enshine and all their related shenanigans. The group recently allowed us to premiere their song “Adrift”, and that song was an awesome teaser of things to come for the group’s upcoming album Singularity. Recently, Enshine uploaded another song to the web in the form of “Resurgence” and boy, in NCS parlance, is it a doozy. Continue reading »

PSYGNOSIS: “AALIENS”

Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET 8 Responses »

Sep 152015

(DGR reviews the new EP by the French band Psygnosis.)

Psygnosis are a band whom we’ve crossed paths with before. They’re a multi-talented group of Frenchmen whose music plays heavily with the experimental while also fusing death metal, -core, and industrial elements into their overall sound. Their music ranges into the epic, with tracks easily lasting longer than eight minutes, and between the band’s two EPs and two full-length releases, they have grown impressively good at telling a story.

2014’s Human Be[ing] saw the band at their best up to that point, interweaving film clips with dramatic passages of music and heavy, thundering sections of metal. They often used ambience in their favor, leaving whole sections of their songs feeling empty but for a couple of guitar and synth notes and occasional whispered vocal lines echoing out into the ether.

Since Human Be[ing], though, the group have gone through some lineup changes. They’ve seen the full exit of their vocalist and have made a shift toward instrumental music, adding a cellist in their vocalist’s stead to pick up the melodies that were once provided by human voice, and freeing the cellist to come to the forefront with his own creations. A cello has been present in Psygnosis‘ music before, but the recently released EP AAliens is the first time the band have recorded with their new lineup, with new music, and with said cellist at the forefront. Continue reading »

WOLFHEART: “SHADOW WORLD”

Album Reviews 8 Responses »

Sep 022015

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

There exists a temptation when writing reviews to try and come up with a narrative and attach it to each album. It’s been a way of doing things for a long time, and to be honest, I’ve struggled with trying to come up with one for Wolfheart’s newly released album Shadow World and the two-year gap between it and its predecessor.

The temptation lay in trying to paint the two albums as fraternal twins, discs that share a lot of DNA but actually are opposing and contrasting with each other in a lot of their elements. If you were to glance at the cover art for Shadow World and the cover art for Wolfheart’s 2013 debut Winterborn, you’d almost immediately notice the red-and-orange, warmer aesthetic of Shadow World pulling a first-lesson-of-art-class contrast with the prominent blue and cold themes of Winterborn. However, the music within doesn’t bear out the difference, and actually shares some similarities in terms of number of songs and track times with its older sibling.

So, I suggest we try to take a different tack and explain what Shadow World is. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR

THE REARVIEW MIRROR 4 Responses »

Aug 232015

(DGR presents this Sunday’s edition of The Rearview Mirror.)

When the prospect of a new feature entitled The Rearview Mirror was broached on the site, the idea seemed interesting. I’ve always liked the opportunity to just delve deeper into a song, as I’m sure my reveiws have shown, since I try to focus on at least two or three in depth. But outside of having a news bit or an album to review, the ability to open a forum for full discussion is rare indeed.

Rather than just try to post “hey, check this shit out”, I know we’ve always tried to provide at least a little context — that, and the intended similarities to the Morning Wood feature from ye olden ashes of the defunct website I hail from, where we essentially posted a song every morning in this fashion, mean that I may be one of the best-equipped to actually contribute every once in a while. And honestly, who would I be if I didn’t take the opportunity to ruin your weekends every once in a while with my garbage music taste? Continue reading »

MECHINA: “THE WORLD WE LOST”

Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, SHORT BUT SWEET 3 Responses »

Aug 222015

(In this post DGR reviews the new release by Chicago’s Mechina.)

Mechina are a band whom I’ve learned to stop trying to figure out. They’ve somehow evolved into superhuman musicians who can seemingy do no wrong when it comes to putting out quality music. They’ve consistently kept to a yearly release schedule, and recently have even added a single release mid-way through the year — and those have become huge efforts in their own right. I keep waiting for them to slip, but it seems that somehow the people behind Mechina are absolutely tireless as well as immensely talented.

The Mechina singles are some of the longest songs the band have written and are the musican’s equivelent of a short story — which is odd to say when it comes to music, but given that the band have created their own universe and continually add to it, it isn’t hard to see the band’s brand of symphonic/industrial/groove/death metal starting to become like sitting down with a storyteller and letting them entrance you with another tale. Continue reading »

HOPE DRONE: “CLOAK OF ASH”

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

Aug 132015

(DGR wrote this review of the new album by Australia’s Hope Drone.)

It’s not often that I am able to pontificate on the future here at NCS and actually be correct — I’m more likely in the running to be one of the kings of talking out of my ass about what may be coming to us soon (I hear tell that the batting average amongst our other writers is just as good, though, with the exception of our lovely esteemed editor whom I have been informed is correct 100% of the time and never, ever wrong), but overall I’ve found that this is work best left to the TV pundits and people who can actually make a play at knowing what they’re talking about.

I’m admittedly enthusiastic about the style of music that I love and review, but truthfully, and in my case especially, I’m a bit on the dumb side. However, that isn’t to say that I don’t have the occasional blink of brilliance. Sometimes, there will be a band and a moment for that band where you hear them and you immediately get the sense that,”Yeah, that is going to get them signed”. These times seem so obvious that it is like being hit by a fish thrown at you in an open field; you saw it coming, but you still got gills in the face.

In the case of Brisbane’s Hope Drone, it wasn’t just one moment, it was actually a series of moments. Eleven of them, to be exact. Continue reading »

A LOATHING REQUIEM: “ACOLYTES ETERNAL”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Aug 102015

(DGR reviews the new album by Nashville’s A Loathing Requiem.)

You may recognize the name A Loathing Requiem, as we have written about this project before. In early July we actually featured a small write-up about it in one of our “Seen and Heard”, posts alongside Orkhan and some others, and now we’re going to check back in with it because July 31st actually saw the release of the band’s second album, Acolytes Eternal.

Acolytes Eternal, the new album from A Loathing Requiem — the one-man solo tech-death project headed by perpetually angry-looking musician Malcolm Pugh — comes at an interesting time. 2015, like the years before it, seems to be adding to the ever-expanding blast-front that is the tech-death explosion, and a lot of bands are clearly giving it their all — these releases are coming hard and fast. It makes them somewhat difficult to distinguish, and you have to dig that much harder to get past the massive walls that each band erects in terms of sound and song structure.

It’s an increasingly hard field to break into, but A Loathing Requiem has some interesting advantages up its sleeve. One is that this project has been around for a while; Acolytes Eternal marks the second full-length release from this project — serving as a follow-up to 2010’s Psalms Of Misanthropy, and another advantage lies in the musician behind the project himself. Continue reading »

Older Entries Newer Entries