(written by Islander)
Triskaidekaphobia is a recognized affliction, but no one should fear this 13th installment of our infectious song list. Instead, it should be relished, though in the case of some aspects of the following music it may be worth remembering that in the tarot deck, XIII is the card of Death, often depicting the Pale Horse with its rider. You’ll probably relish those aspects too. Continue reading »
(Today we present DGR‘s review of Grand Cadaver‘s new EP The Rot Beneath, which will be out on August 15th via Majestic Mountain Records.)
When you’re spread among many projects in the way Dark Tranquillity‘s Mikael Stanne has been over the past few years, there is a chance of one of them going consistently underrated in the face of all the other material being put out. The throwback riffwork of swede-death project Grand Cadaver has flown under the radar among many in metal fandom, and it has reached a point where you can’t help but wonder if people are unintentionally robbing themselves of an awesome time by just breezing past the group and chalking them up as another band pining for older days.
Grand Cadaver have proven to be a rock-solid foundation of music since their founding in 2020; the five years since have seen the group chalking up an array of singles, EPs, and two full albums to their name, all of which, yes, look backward in order to progress forward, and have either been stealthily melodic or pushed at the boundaries of floor-stomping death metal enough to keep the events interesting. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Not long ago we were musing around here about the emergence of silver linings around the black clouds of death and dissociation that shrouded the world during the covid pandemic. The lockdowns were miserable for many and welcome for some but disruptive for all. They shut down certain species of communal creative activity but spawned others. They forced a suspension of many plans, but by the same token that gave people room to ruminate about how to fill the unexpected open time in their lives.
The Swedish band Grand Cadaver, forged during the 2020 lockdown, was one of those silver linings. It led five old friends from Gothenburg and Stockholm to collectively indulge their shared a love for old-school, HM-2-drenched Swedish death metal: vocalist Mikael Stanne (Dark Tranquillity, The Halo Effect), guitarist Stefan Lagergren (The Grifted, ex-Treblinka/Tiamat), guitarist Alex Stjernfeldt (Novarupta, CHILD), bassist Christian Jansson (Pagandom, Dark Tranquillity), and drummer Daniel Liljekvist (Disrupted, Vorder, ex-Katatonia).
We’re told that their debut EP, Madness Comes, was recorded in just three days, and it was released in 2021 by Majestic Mountain Records. The band soon followed that with their debut album the same year, Into the Maw of Death. And fortunately for fans like us, Grand Cadaver still weren’t finished, even after the covid clouds passed.
More singles followed, along with a second album (Deities of Deathlike Sleep in 2023), and now Grand Cadaver have a new EP named The Rot Beneath due for release on August 15th via Majestic Mountain, giving us the occasion for the 10th (!) article/review we’ve written about Grand Cadaver since their spawning (the evidence is here). This time we’re premiering a song off the new EP named “Darkened Apathy“. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Well, I’m back here at my usual post on Saturday, having survived Maryland Deathfest after surviving Northwest Terror Fest. I only have one slow-healing knee scab and moderate soreness as detrimental physical signs of the adventures — and, amazingly, no respiratory viruses.
I have a habit of whining about how hard it is to choose music for these weekend roundups because there’s always so much to choose from, but after missing two weekend roundups in the last month the whining would reach ear-bleeding levels if I let loose today. I feel like if I laid all the song and video links I’ve saved up end to end they’d stretch up to where Musk’s latest rocket experienced “a rapid unscheduled disassembly” as it skimmed space last Tuesday night.
So, no whining, and no explanations for why I picked these out of the 100 or so possibilities, though the reasons will probably become evident. I’m very happy with this collection and hope you will be too. More picks, of the more charred variety, coming tomorrow…. Continue reading »
Saturdays after Bandcamp Fridays should be named just like hurricanes. I’m left staring hopelessly at the wreckage of the NCS in-box and the high-water marks left by the musical flood, which still hasn’t really receded.
In case you were wondering, an international committee of the World Meteorological Organization maintains and updates the annually rotating list of hurricane names, with one name for each letter of the alphabet, except for Q, U, X, Y, and Z. This year the list begins with Alberto. However, I see no reason not to use the letters omitted by the WMO, so let’s call this Saturday Quorthon.
Let’s listen to these 12 songs, all but the last of which breached the surface of the flood during the last week, while we wait (hopelessly) for the carpet to dry out. Continue reading »
(Our man DGR takes on the new album by the Swedish death metal group Grand Cadaver in the following extensive review, just a few days before the record’s August 25 release by Majestic Mountain Records.)
Grand Cadaver are one of a large handful of throwback Swede-death metal projects that popped up over the last couple years. The stars must’ve aligned just right for the combination of the ‘thirty-year nostalgia cycle’, the trapped-at-home anxiousness of much of the pandemic, and the general creative explosion that seems to have emerged from a lot of people determined not to let Bloodbath have all the fun over the past few years, that we’ve wound up with quite the resurgence of that particular style.
You can always argue that it never stopped, and like much of heavy metal, there is never going to be any one style that actually fully ‘stops’. Given the genre’s obsession with corpses, murder, and the shambling dead therein, it would make sense that it would also continue to lurch along in the underground while the spotlight focuses on other trends.
The recent uptick of such bands, however, also includes groups of seasoned musicians who’ve largely made a career out of other styles of music coming back around to what they grew up with and cut their teeth on, which is largely why it seems like lately you’ve been able to see bands with incredible resumes to their varying parts. Grand Cadaver are one of those, and they’ve kept pretty busy since launching in 2020, having issued one album and an EP up until now, and now this year we’re being treated to the group’s second full-length, Deities Of Deathlike Sleep. Continue reading »
(If you’re a death metal fan and you haven’t yet heard The Grifted‘s new album, released in April by Personal Records, you have some excellent listening ahead of you, and you’ll probably be even more interested after you read Comrade Aleks‘ excellent interview with guitarist Stefan Lagergren.)
NCS’ constant followers will remember The Grifted‘s track premiere in March (here). This absolutely classic sounding death metal band from Stockholm drew our attention not only with the killer single “The Maggots Feast” and their debut album Doomsday & Salvation itself, but also with heir shockingly civilized image, very organic and impressive.
The Grifted was founded in 2020 technically, but it’s the renamed version of the Mr. Death collective which used to record two proper full-lengths works and two EPs in a period from 2007 to 2020. Moreover, Juck Thullberg (bass) and Stefan Lagergren (guitars) were founders of the pre-Tiamat band Treblinka and took part in recording of Tiamat’s debut Sumerian Cry (1990).
And it’s right to note what their colleagues Jonas Ohlsson (drums), Jocke Lindström (vocals), and Staffan Skoglund (guitars) certainly know a few things about how to turn everything upside down and unleash the sheer death metal madness upon our doomed world.
This interview should have been done earlier, and I kept it on my mind for almost four months, so I invite you to join our conversation with Stefan Lagergren with a sense of relief and the feeling that the right thing is done. (And thanks to Nathan Birk, Suspicious Activities PR, for organizing this interview.) Continue reading »
I was supposed to premiere and review an EP today. Despite knowing better, the label and band decided to publish the stream and circulate it to fans without waiting on us. Not the first time something like that has happened around here, but I no longer ignore it when people care so little about our unpaid efforts to help. Time is better spent in other ways, and so rather than finish that premiere write-up I decided to pull together this round-up of new songs and videos that mostly surfaced just this week.
I’ve not put much thought into some clever way of arranging the flow of them, in part because there are so many stylistic twists and turns in what I chose. Just think of yourself as a tennis ball thrown into a dryer with a lot of other tennis balls and start tumbling.
GRAND CADAVER (Sweden)
This week Grand Cadaver released a third single from their new album Deities Of Deathlike Sleep. They sum up the album as “Swedish Fucking Death Metal, the way we love it”, and the lack of pretension extends to the name of the newest song: “Vortex of Blood“. Continue reading »
This has been a rare week when we didn’t have at least one premiere on the calendar every day. That gave me the time to do not one, not two, but three round-ups of new songs and videos, including this one. And I ought to have time for a fourth one tomorrow.
The timing has been fortuitous, because the past week or two has been jammed with new singles and advance tracks from forthcoming records that have piqued my interest (and should pique yours), including the following four, with news of a new reissue at the end.
NIGHTMARER (U.S./Germany)
This tremendously impressive band moved from strength to greater strength over the course of their Chasm EP (2016), their debut album Cacophony of Terror (2018), and their Monolith of Corrosion EP (2021), and now they’re returning with a second album named Deformity Adrift that’s set for release on May 5th via their label Total Dissonance Worship in the US and Vendetta Records in Europe. Continue reading »
I intended to complete and post this round-up yesterday, but my fucking day job rudely interfered. In the meantime I’ve been alerted to a bunch of other new songs and videos that surfaced yesterday. Trying to include them now would result in further delay, so I’ll just have to save them for later. Almost half of what you’ll find below came my way via DGR, and one more from a friend and former NCS writer, and the rest I somehow found on my own.
THE HALO EFFECT (Sweden)
“IT’S GLORIOUS. I mean this is like it fell right out of a time machine from the Colony sessions.” That’s what DGR wrote when he alerted some of his fellow NCS slaves to the existence of this first song, which is the title track to The Halo Effect‘s new album, Days of the Lost. And if you don’t know, one reason for the Colony reference is that this band includes a bunch of former In Flames members (Jesper Strömblad, Niclas Engelin, Peter Iwers, and Daniel Svensson) plus Dark Tranquillity‘s Mikael Stanne behind the mic. Continue reading »