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A MARYLAND DEATHFEST RECAP (PART 4)

Jun 042016

Friday beer/brunch at Alewife with friends.

For those of you just now joining this series about Maryland Deathfest XIV, I’m in the process of highlighting the bands whose performances were the best of the ones I saw and heard in Baltimore beginning on Wednesday of last week.

Rather than doing a day-by-day recap, I’ve organized the bands into four somewhat loosely defined categories. Yesterday’s feature was a “Shades of Black” collection of black metal bands, and before that was one under the heading “Swedish (and Dutch) Death Metal Supremacy”. I’m calling today’s celebration “The Black Death“, not only because that describes the general style of music performed by the following six bands, but also because they all spread a lethal kind of auditory plague.

Presented in the order in which I witnessed the performances over 5 nights and 4 days, and I’ve again included my photos of each band (most of which are gathered at the end of this post). Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SHADOW WOODS 2016, PLAGUE RIDER, VAINAJA, EINAR SELVIK AND FRIENDS, PHOBOCOSM, AND TEN VIDEOS

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 10 Responses »

Apr 112016

As we begin the new week, I have some unfortunate news (at least it’s unfortunate for me). Beginning today and continuing through Thursday morning, I have to bury myself in my fucking day job for one of those day-and-night projects that periodically descends upon me. I’ll make time to post what other writers have sent me, as well as a few premieres I’ve agreed to do, but aside from this round-up and one “Short But Sweet” review I wrote over the weekend, I will be missing in action until sometime Thursday.

Before saying good-bye, I’ve collected a few items that I wanted to share — including, at the end of this post, streams of ten recent videos without commentary (because I’ve run out of time for commentary).

SHADOW WOODS METAL FESTIVAL

I’m late sharing this news, but the news is so exciting that I’m following the “better late than never” mantra. Last year’s Shadow Woods Metal Festival was a marvelous event by all accounts — including this account by our guest Captain Karbon. As I reported in February, organizer Mary Spiro and her team (who are joined by Baltimore’s Grimoire Records as co-producers this year) have been planning the second installment of this open-air camping metal party, which will run for three days in central Maryland: from Thursday, September 15th through Sunday, September 18th at Camp Hidden Valley, in White Hall, Maryland. They’ve been announcing performers since January, and now the complete line-up has been revealed — and it’s an eye-popper: Continue reading »

PHOBOCOSM: “BRINGER OF DROUGHT”

Album Reviews 5 Responses »

Mar 302016

With their 2014 debut album Deprived, Montréal’s Phobocosm demonstrated a dawning talent for generating a poisonous, pitch-black atmosphere of dread, pain, and imminent destruction. With their new album, Bringer of Doubt, they have honed that talent, creating music that if anything is even more thoroughly and oppressively saturated with darkness and doom, yet is also even more memorable.

As before, the band have created death metal that’s leavened with elements of doom and dissonant black metal, and the resulting music is unerringly and unceasingly bleak and predatory. The opening track, “Engulfing Dust”, exemplifies the new album’s more prominent use of horrifying doom. It’s a staggering funereal lament that’s cold, desolate, and crushing. The song begins and ends with the sound of wind, rain, and finally distant thunder, and the melody first heard in the slow, sad chords at the start becomes a paean to pain. Continue reading »

PHOBOCOSM: “DEPRIVED”

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Sep 302014

(Austin Weber reviews the new album by Phobocosm from Montreal.)

A lot of modern death metal is shiny, flashy, and in addition, purely cutthroat. Well, the Montreal-based group Phobocosm are nothing like that. They are relentlessly ugly and unforgiving, often content to stew in misery at a slower pace, entrenched in massive, sickening riffs that churn bowels and cause minds to enter a state of hopeless insanity. If a cutthroat death metal record feels like a physical assault, then consider Phobocosm masters of taking that assault directly into your brain, feeding you clouded questions that don’t lead to any answers, submerging you in a sadness and longing that reeks of perversion. Deprived offers an evil and different take on the death metal sound. Yes, there is plenty of lively double-bass, and the album has its frenzied moments, but often this is a skulking, wounded beast — preaching a horror beyond gore, beyond death.

An eerie Immolation and Incantation influence is clear — from the riffs to the grooves to the structuring. However, Phobocosm are far from wholly a clone of either group. Besides those two points of reference, the music sometimes calls to mind the approach of Ulcerate, embracing and reflecting in atmospheric reverberations, sometimes by themselves and at other times mixed within the band’s full-throttle moments. The back and forth sway of the songs on Deprived is one of its greatest strengths, frequently manifesting a battle between faster and lurching tempos.

At still other moments on Deprived a black metal undercurrent is injected into the mix and further poisons the music’s already pitch-black feel. In this respect, the album is reminiscent of Deathspell Omega or Mitochondrion, though the blackened coloring occurs largely within a death metal framework overall. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: PHOBOCOSM — “KNIVES IN THE SENATE HOUSE”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Aug 182014

Last spring I discovered the existence of a Montréal death metal cult named Phobocosm, who had just recently signed with Dark Descent for the release of their debut album, Deprived. In the spring, one song had been posted for streaming. Its name is “Solipsist”, and it’s a monster. The dreadful chiming chords that begin the song are like the bells that herald the final doom, and the rest of the song provides a reasonable approximation of that world-ending event. Today we’re lucky to bring you the premiere of a second track from Deprived. This new one is named “Knives In the Senate House”. It, too, is a monster.

The music creates an atmosphere of choking, poisonous miasma with bleak, ripping riffs that grind and vibrate as if emulating the super-heated process of radioactive decay. Huge bass and drum hammers punctuate the storming onslaught with concrete-splitting force, and a sinuous melody slithers through the toxic storm, giving the music character as well as a potent aura of dread and imminent destruction. The drum performance throughout the song is both acrobatic and brutally effective, and the deep, gargantuan vocals enhance the music’s message of utter catastrophe.

Phobocosm are practicing a very dark art, one that displays mastery in the creation of both oppressive atmospherics and sensations of physically compulsive power. Like “Solipsist”, “Knives In the Senate House” heralds the advent of an album that will be a must-listen experience by all true acolytes of lethal death rituals. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS: PHOBOCOSM, MIASMAL, KRIEGSMASCHINE

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Mar 252014

I haven’t had time to pull together a round-up of new discoveries in a couple of days, but I thought that before I get further behind I would at least call out four recent songs that are worth some attention Two of them are precursors to new albums due for release later this year and otwone come from an album that hit the streets in February.

PHOBOCOSM

Phobocosm are from Montreal and in recent days they were signed by the Dark Descent label for the release of their debut album, Deprived, which was mixed and mastered by Colin Marston (Gorguts, Dysrhythmia, Krallice). NCS scribe Austin Weber brought them to my attention, thinking their music would be up my alley, and man was he ever right.

Just a few days ago the band released the first song from Deprived for public consumption, and it’s a monster. The dreadful chiming chords that begin “Solipsist” are like the bells that herald the final doom, and the rest of the song provides a reasonable approximation of that event. Phobocosm marry crushing riffs and ever-changing drumbeats to bleak, needling tremolo melodies and a gargantuan voice that emanates from some deep pit in the earth. Continue reading »

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