ORGAN DEALER: “VISCERAL INFECTION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 102015
 

Organ Dealer art

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Organ Dealer from New Jersey.)

This one may wind up a little shorter than my usual screeds…maybe. But I promise you, when you hear it you’ll understand why.

There is a moment in the movie The Raid 2 in which a man has his face held against a grill until it is completely seared off — no doubt one of the more butal fight scenes in a movie with an amazing second half. That man’s face is often how I have begun to picture myself after the end of a listening session with New Jersey-based hyperviolent grind band Organ Dealer’s upcoming release Visceral Infection.

Organ Dealer are a new face on the scene, having to their name only a demo from 2014 (both songs on said demo appear on this new release) and their new upcoming EP. Yet theirs is a name that you should get prepared to hear a lot really, really soon. Continue reading »

WRVTH: “WRVTH”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 072015
 

Wrvth-Self Titled

 

(DGR reviews the new album by WRVTH [formerly known as Wrath of Vesuvius].)

It hasn’t been lost on me that over the years I’ve been lucky when it comes to seeing bands. While not in a preferred situation, my living in Sacramento has allowed me to see some really good shows, groups just starting out who have gone on to do some awesome things. By virtue of proximity to a couple of rather large cities and a populous region, I’ve been lucky enough to see some hyper-creative people roll through town multiple times.  Even though I have often joked that Sacramento is some backwater cow-town pretending to be a city (you’d be forgiven, judging by all the highway billboards and signs in our airport for thinking that the most exciting thing to do in Sacramento is go elsewhere), there have been perks — such as being able to see WRVTH over the years as they’ve came visiting from their hometown of San Jose, California, on tour.

At the time, the band was going by the name Wrath Of Vesuvius and they were dealing in the sort of hyper-technical metalcore-and-deathcore hybrid that was gaining steam in the mid-to-late 2000’s. It had its moments for sure, as many talented musicians continually added different elements into a -core sound.  In the case of Wrath Of Vesuivius the band neared a tech-death sphere multiple times. If you were to view a particular chunk of California in those days through a sort of prism, focused in on three corners — one being the Bay Area, one being Sacramento, and one being San Jose — you would’ve found quite the scene for that sort of hybrid, and eventually quite a few of those bands went full-blown technical death metal. Continue reading »

AUTHOR & PUNISHER: “MELK EN HONING”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jul 022015
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Author & Punisher.)

If you’ve been reading the site for a bit you’ll have noted the name Author & Punisher coming up from time to time, usually by way of my loud mouth. I’m a relatively recent convert to the Author & Punisher school, yet in that time the releases out of this project have quickly rocketed up the charts into ones that I look forward to the most — in large part buoyed by the fact that I find this project absolutely fascinating.

It’s been great seeing the Author & Punisher profile increase over the years, even in the limited time I’ve been following it since my review of Women And Children (having heard stuff before, but never fully exploring until that disc). More people seem to be discovering this odd bit of machination turned into music — but lo and behold, who would’ve predicted that the next Author & Punisher album was going to be produced by Phil Anselmo of Pantera, Down, and Superjoint Ritual fame?

For those who are still wondering what it is the hell I am rambling about, Author & Punisher is a San Diego-based musical project belonging to artist and engineer Tristan Shone. Over the past few years, he’s been making a sort of slow-moving, suffocating, industrial, and heavy form of doom that is already pretty left-field to begin with, likely to be much discussed in dark, smoky rooms by people who probably finish half their sentences with, “You might not have heard them”. Continue reading »

SIFTING FROM THE PAST TO THE FUTURE: IN DEFILADE, KARLAHAN, AERNUS, ORGAN DEALER

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jun 292015
 

 

(DGR prepared this review of new songs and albums from four bands.)

These Sifting articles are ones that I like to hammer out from time to time, as I have a habit of discovering so much new music in an effort to feed the NCS readers’ gullets that I absolutely cannot cover it all, much less dedicate a huge review to each discovery. However, I also feel like I’m doing the bands wrong by simply going, “I’ll try to get around to it”, because a lot of these groups are quality musicians who deserve a chance to get out there. So, Sifting was born — a series of articles in which I dig through the various recent collections of music I’ve accumulated and try to get some shorter summaries up to share out with people.

Of course, as I am prone to do, I still get stupidly wordy, and some of these summaries are longer than the reviews we run on this site — but still, its all about the thought, right? So sit down with me, as we travel the world and I blather on with more long-winded phrases and stupid similes to share with you about quite a few different bands, bouncing across the US and then over to Europe and back again.

In-Defilade

Fun fact: I have never for a moment toyed with the idea of joining the military — but were I ever drafted or forced into it, the one thing that I could see myself doing would be trying to join a drum corps. Continue reading »

KRONOS: “ARISEN NEW ERA”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Jun 252015
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by those French titans in Kronos.)

Since Unique Leader has come into prominence over the last few years, the label has been the overseer of a tech-death explosion, one that has seen them dredging up all kinds of different groups from the rubble and ash piles of local scenes while at the same time ensuring that in the wake of their roster of bands there would be absolutely no notes left for anyone else to play on guitar.

As something of a genre-label, Unique Leader have acquired a sound — the type of noise where you can see their logo on a group’s album and more often than not usually guess what they will sound like. Not to knock them, of course, as the label has been the savior of the Nor-Cal death metal scene up here, picking up some of the most highly technical and underrated bands and at least giving them a shot after they’ve been scrapping it out for years. Continue reading »

PARADISE LOST: “THE PLAGUE WITHIN”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Jun 102015
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Paradise Lost.)

I guess, when it comes to Paradise Lost, the old axe that everything is cyclical rears its ugly head once again. I’ve never been much of a believer in it, but lo and behold, Paradise Lost have released their darkest, doomiest, and arguably heaviest record in some time — a record we were told was never likely, as Nick Holmes was likely never to growl again and instead would forever sing through Paradise Lost’s goth-laden doom, and a record that would never be this heavy despite the fact that the band had gotten heavier since returning to their doom standard a few records ago.

Then again, things change. Continue reading »

SHOW REVIEW: CONDUCTING FROM THE GRAVE, AENIMUS, FLUB, JOURNAL, THE BROTHERHOOD OF ELLIPSIS (MAY 1, 2015)

 Concert Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 022015
 

 

(DGR reviews a recent show from Sacramento, California, featuring Conducting From the Grave, Aenimus, Flub, Journal, and The Brotherhood of Ellipsis.)

It is rare these days for a show to line up perfectly with my schedule. It has also become rare these days that the guys in Conducting From The Grave, a group I’ve seen a whole bunch and reviewed for this site before, play live now, so the fact that the two lined up on a Friday felt like the planets aligning.

Conducting From The Grave just recently re-recorded their first EP Trials Of The Forsaken themselves and re-released it under the name Revival Of Forsaken Trials and were celebrating that fact. It was a ten-year anniversary show for that EP and one that also saw the reunion of some old band members to the fold for a limited run. Also on the docket for this show were The Brotherhood Of Ellipsis, Journal, Aenimus, and Flub — many groups I would be seeing for the first time, and that was exciting.

Unfortunately, Entheos had to drop off the bill as they had been a late addition to another tour and the routing made it impossible for them to make it. That was a bit of a bummer because they would’ve been exciting to see live — I get the sense they’re slated for big things. As it stood though, that night was still going to be an assault on the senses spread across five bands — with two of them being on very different ends of the instrumental spectrum. Continue reading »

SHOW REVIEW: SEPULTURA, DESTRUCTION, ARSIS, BORIS THE BLADE, MICAWBER

 Concert Reviews  9 Responses »
Jun 012015
 

 

(In this post our man DGR reviews a Sacramento performance by Sepultura, Destruction, Arsis, Boris the Blade, and Micawber.)

Two shows in two days can sometimes be a difficult prospect, especially when you’re used to working those evenings. When you’ve barely recovered from one, dragging yourself to another can feel like a herculean labor. You don’t have the ‘holy shit I’m here’ adrenaline of being at a festival, it’s just two separate events on two different days, and as it would turn out, on two fairly different scales.

The previous night before this show, I wind up seeing Anaal Nathrakh in a venue the size of a fairly large kitchen (that show reviewed here), and this time I was slated to see Sepultura at Ace Of Spades — a venue that I have lavished many loving words over, mostly in hopes that they keep booking metal shows because they have a knack for bringing bands that normally wouldn’t roll through to Sacramento. Of course, you have to keep in mind that this show was a fairly large cultural icon at this point, with both Sepultura and Destruction being long-running international bands at about thirty years a piece. Hell, this was a Sepultura thirty-year anniversary tour, all things considered. (While we’re on the subject, Boris The Blade turned out to be from Australia, meaning this was quite the international tour.) Continue reading »

DISARMONIA MUNDI: “COLD INFERNO”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
May 282015
 

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Disarmonia Mundi.)

It’s likely that this horse has been beaten to death so much that the goo on the ground is hardly recognizable as a biomass — but it remains true that a six-year gap is a long time to wait between discs. The situation is more common than people think, and some bands will make you wait far, far longer — although by a certain point it’s pretty clear that a group is on “hiatus”. Disarmonia Mundi has provided one of the few times when I’ve personally gotten to be part of the esteemed club of fans desperate for any word.

The two-piece that is the core of Disarmonia Mundi have certainly kept busy, with a whole array of projects that cover the whole spectrum of metal — production work and otherwise, including the Princess Ghibli project and The Stranded. However, even though The Stranded veered far closer to Disarmonia Mundi’s brand of melodeath than likely even its members intended, it’s still not Disarmonia Mundi proper, still not the band that gave us one of my personal favorite melodeath albums of the last decade with 2009’s ugly-artwork-bearing hook-machine that was The Isolation Game.

Cold Inferno, the group’s soon-to-be-released new album, has a lot to live up to and already marks a bit of a shift from the previous disc with a track list slimmed down to ten. Cold Inferno’s appearance may have seemed sudden but this is a disc that has been cooking for a while. Was the time worth it though? Can Disarmonia Mundi prove themselves to still be a melodeath powerhouse already halfway through another decade? Have I jokingly made light of the fact that I’ve been waiting six years for this album? Continue reading »

SIFTING: DISARMONIA MUNDI, MAJALIS, AUTHOR & PUNISHER, SIBERIAN HELL SOUNDS / TRAVELS SPLIT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
May 272015
 

 

(DGR wrote this round-up of new music while I was away at MDF, and I rewarded his helpfulness by posting it days later after I got back home. You’re welcome, Dave.)

While most of the goofballs who inhabit this site are off fucking around somewhere in Maryland, one of us has to pick up the slack and bring you yesterday’s news tomorrow, otherwise we wouldn’t be fulfilling our mission statement of always being just behind the curve — but with more words to make up for the delay.

This edition is going to be a little heavily biased toward my tastes, which means we’re probably going to be on the lighter fare of the metal scale, but there was still some damn good music to happen within recent weeks, and most of the bands you folks will be familiar with. There were a couple of interesting discoveries on that front, as a couple of different artists decided to release new songs out to the world, and then in the other two cases, they’ve been out for a bit but we’re doing our best to keep them from flying under the radar. Continue reading »

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