AN NCS INTERVIEW: NEGATIVE VORTEX

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 062023
 

(Today we present another interview by Comrade Aleks, and this time he spoke with both members of the California-based death metal band Negative Vortex, whose debut album was released earlier this year by Sentient Ruin.)

Negative Vortex is a Brazilian, US-based doomed death metal duo created by M.Feschner (guitars, vocals) and Libra (drums, bass, guitars, keyboards) a few years ago. Both men had years of experience in the extreme metal underground, and Negative Vortex’s full-length album Tomb Absolute is their most focused, matured work.

These nine songs aren’t just a nihilistic, intense, and depressing experience of analyzing modern human society performed in the vein of Autopsy and Celtic Frost, but a thoughtful and complex view of it through the prism of literature and socially important cases.

The songs’ lyrics include excerpts from William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe as well as lines from the last woman executed in Czechoslovakia, Olga Hepnarová’s original letter on “Cease to Exist”.

And last but not least, Tomb Absolute includes a good list of honourable guests, like Kam Lee, Nick Holmes, Vik Whipstriker, Moyses Kolesne, Leon del Muerte, and Caleb Bingham, who left their special mark on the album’s songs.

We have done a pretty good interview with both M.Feschner and Libra for the Spanish magazine This Is Metal, and I’m glad to share its full version here. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: METALLICA, NEGATIVE VORTEX, PINCER CONSORTIUM, HYPER PLANET

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Nov 292022
 

Lo and behold, even though we’re two days past the Thanksgiving break my fucking day job is still mostly leaving me alone, so I’ve got time for a quick round-up of new songs and videos this Tuesday. Given the song I picked as the opener, it’s an outlier from my usual proclivities, but don’t worry, it gets a lot more subterranean after that, and then ends with a rebellious song that qualifies as a well-earned exception to our rule about singing.

METALLICA (U.S.)

A good argument could be made that Metallica is the biggest name in metal, and therefore a name very unlikely to appear at this site, where we tend to focus our attention on bands who need (and deserve) more exposure. Even just listening to their new song “Lux Æterna” wasn’t high on my list of things to do. It felt like I’d just be joining a surging crowd of lemmings and wondering just how big a cliff I’d be falling off of.

And then I began to see comments from assorted friends on social media who aren’t given to mindless fawning, even though, unlike me, they spent their formative years listening to Metallica during the band’s best years. One of them thought Metallica were channeling Motörhead. Another wrote that it sounded like a lost Diamond Head cover from Garage Inc. But everyone seemed to be liking it, even if maybe it was pushing slightly different buttons from person to person. So, I gave in and gave the song a shot. Continue reading »