Feb 222023
 

(Professor D. Grover the XIIIth returns to NCS with the following review of Gorod’s new album, which is set for release on March 7th.)

Greetings and salutations, friends. If you’re reading this, I can only hope that you are familiar with French tech-death masters Gorod, whose career now spans two and a half decades (counting their early years as Gorgasm). The Orb is only their seventh full-length release, with a pair of EPs (and a couple early demos) sprinkled in, but at this point in their career their work has reached legend status in certain corners of the metal world. In my humble esteem, Gorod have for me represented the gold standard of modern tech-death ever since Process Of A New Decline, the album that truly got me interested in tech-death in the first place, and while that release remains my favorite to this day their output has been consistently high.

Gorod‘s style has evolved incrementally with each release, with the biggest shifts generally following a change in the band’s lineup. While the band have been spearheaded from the beginning by guitarist Mathieu Pascal and bassist Benoit Claus, the additions of guitarist Nicolas Alberny and, later, drummer Karol Diers have contributed to the band’s growth. The most notable change came with the additional of current vocalist Julien “Nutz” Deyres after the release of Process, and he made his presence and expanded vocal range felt immediately on the Transcendence EP, especially on that release’s 15 minute title track. ‘Transcendence’ brought with it an expanded focus on progression that paired exceptionally well with the band’s technical prowess and knack for writing catchy hooks and grooves, and the band has further explored that progression on subsequent releases. Continue reading »

Jan 022019
 

 

(Here’s the third installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music.)

Now that I’ve broken it out from the tremendous bulk of the rest of my year-end collective, I’m amused by how much world traveling this specific subset of the list does. It spends a surprising amount of time in France (which has done very well for itself these past few years), some time in the States, some time in Australia, and even manages to touch base with both Canada and Sweden for a few. It is also probably the most varied intsallment so far — the tech-death crews make a strong play here, but you’ll also start seeing some of the prefix-core resurgence that happened recently, as well as some ugly-as-fuck grind (on two fronts). And then there’s however in the hell Author & Punisher might be described.

Oh, did I spoil that Author & Punisher is making an appearance here? Whoops. Well too bad, Beastland is fucking killer but if you want to know why you’ll have to read on and see just where the San Diego noise-engineer found himself. There’s still a lot of list left to go, and knowing me, at least two-thousand more words of intro paragraph left to be written somewhere so let’s get the third chunk of this motherfucker going. Continue reading »

Nov 242018
 


Gorod (in Prague, not Birmingham)

 

(Andy Synn spent last night at the Asylum in Birmingham, England, enjoying performances by Beyond Creation, Gorod, and Entheos, and has quickly provided the following report and videos.)

Despite how stultifyingly stressful this week has been for the most part, yesterday turned out to be a pretty good day all in all, as things at work took a major turn towards the positive, while the evening found me taking a trip over to Birmingham to catch three (out of four) great bands of the “technical” persuasion. Continue reading »

Oct 222018
 

 

(Andy Synn has packaged two reviews into this post, addressing the new albums of Beyond Creation, released by Season of Mist on October 12th, and of Gorod, which was released on October 19th through OverPowered Records.)

When I initially wrote and published “A Tale of Two Albums”, comparing and contrasting the most recent Arsis and Revocation records, I had absolutely no intention of ever writing a sequel or follow-up.

However, in conversation with my friends/bandmates recently we got to chatting about the new Beyond Creation and Gorod releases, and I realised that these two would also make great fodder for a co-feature of their own, not only because both bands are going to be on tour together very soon, but also because both Algorythm and Aethra find their respective creators making an effort to expand and redefine their sound… although one of the two albums is certainly more successful than the other in this regard. Continue reading »

Jul 052018
 

 

I know we’ve thrown a ton of music and videos your way recently, but I find myself with a bit of free time left before I have to bid NCS good-by for the day, so I thought I’d do one more thing. To quote the timeless words of Bart in Blazing Saddles, “Excuse me while I whip this out.”

GOROD

Breaking news: A few minutes ago I happened to be loitering on Facebook (only briefly so as not to damage my health) when that eye-catching artwork up there popped into my news feed, accompanied by these words from the band Gorod: Continue reading »

Jul 162017
 

 

(In April the French band Gorod released an EP that they had prepared for distribution on a European tour. DGR finally caught up with that EP, and now turns in this detailed review.)

Heavy metal is often at its most fun when it feels like the artists behind it have lost their minds. There’s something about a musical genre oft-described as an explosion of catharsis having a creative explosion of its own and going nuts.

It’s not easy to stay reserved when you know that a band has set out to try something that is completely out of the norm for them, and such is the case with France’s frenetic tech-death titans Gorod and their recent thrash experiment EP, Kiss The Freak, which the band wrote and recorded in a very short window before going out on a European tour that saw them hitting the road with the likes of Havok, Warbringer, and Exmortus. Gorod themselves described it this way: Continue reading »

Feb 042016
 

Gorod-A Maze of Recycled Creeds

 

Yes, we are now into February and this list isn’t finished yet. I suppose I really ought to give serious thought to wrapping it up, but I have sooo many more attractive candidates still sitting in front of me. Maybe this weekend I can force myself to assemble the final tracks and reach a conclusion next week.  If you have any strength and willpower that I could rent for cheap, let me know.  I promise I’ll give ’em back on Monday.

GOROD

In his review of Gorod’s latest album, Andy Synn declared that “A Maze of Recycled Creeds is right up there with the best the band have produced… and it brings that memorable weirdness factor back into the band’s music with gusto,” helping “to give the album a brash and bold sense of character that makes it stand out from the crowd.” I certainly concur. I can also see the sense in the words Andy chose when he characterized the song I’ve chosen for this list as a “sexy jazz-prog shimmy” with “nimble, furiously funkified Tech-Death riff work”. Continue reading »

Sep 112015
 

Speedtrap=Straight Shooter

 

(Here’s Part 3 of Leperkahn’s round-up of new music for this Friday. Part 1 is here, Part 2 is here.)

SPEEDTRAP

Prior to finding a full stream of their new album Straight Shooter on Noisey, I hadn’t heard of Finnish troupe Speedtrap. If you’re in the same boat that I was in, I’ll tell you that these guys sound pretty much exactly like you think they will, in that they love Motörhead, as everyone should. This thing is chock full of blazing riffs and cheesy lyrics sung by an oddly bluesy power-metal-type singer — I’m in love.

http://noisey.vice.com/blog/speedtrap-straight-shooter
https://www.facebook.com/speedtrapmetal
https://speedtrap.bandcamp.com/ Continue reading »

Sep 102015
 

Gorod-A Maze of Recycled Creeds

 

(Andy Synn reviews the eagerly awaited new album by Gorod.)

In the hallowed halls of Tech-Death, some names resonate louder than others. Names like NecrophagistSpawn of PossessionObscuraBeyond Creation… these are the modern masters and living legends towards whom so many budding fretboard fanatics pay tribute.

This is far from a comprehensive list of course (“no Arsis/Anata???”, I hear you cry), not least because it omits the name of Gallic string-slingers Gorod, who have returned once more to try to claim their own place amongst the pantheon of the immortals with their latest album, A Maze of Recycled Creeds.

To be fair to them, the French fivesome have been teetering on the edge of greatness for almost as long as I can remember, and there’s more than a few folks out there who’d insist (with good cause) that the band belong firmly on the list with all the Tech-Death demigods whom I’ve mentioned above, but it remains to be seen whether or not A Maze of Recycled Creeds is going to be the album to finally garner the band a permanent place in the upper echelons. Continue reading »

Aug 042015
 

Ares Kingdom-The Unburiable Dead

 

I’ve been distracted by a combination of personal obligations and the demands of my fucking day job. As some of you may have noticed, we didn’t post anything on Sunday, which was only the seventh calendar day in five and a half years when that has happened, and we had only two posts yesterday. So great is the daily flood of metal that even a few days of distraction means that we get very far behind in our attempts to keep up with all the new music. Catching up would be a herculean task, but in this post I’ve made a modest effort to round up some (and only some) of the good new music and video streams that have surfaced since the end of last week.

This collection is incomplete, but it’s still a long playlist of recommendations — presented in alphabetical order by band name, with a rare paucity of words from me about the music. Your thoughts about these sights and sounds will be welcome, as always.

ARES KINGDOM

Roughly two years after the release of their last album, Veneration, Kansas City’s Ares Kingdom are about to drop a new one. The name is The Unburiable Dead, and the CD release is projected for early September on Nuclear War Now!, with LPs to follow. The album cover, which I think is wonderful, is based on a piece by the German artist George Grosz (1893 – 1959) called “The Pit“. When a friend of the band told me about the cover, he included this quote by the artist, who led a fascinating and tumultuous life: Continue reading »