ROTTEN SOUND: “MASS EXTINCTION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 272025
 

(Rotten Sound’s new EP Mass Extinction comes out December 12th on Season of Mist, and in a rare attempt to get ahead of the game, DGR sent in the following review.)

Rotten Sound’s cycle of album and then EP continues unabated for the third time running with the upcoming release of their eight-song auditory assault known as Mass Extinction.

In classic Rotten Sound fashion, they waste absolutely no time in getting going and also have little care for making a song that even bothers clearing the two-minute mark. Sub-ten minutes of fiery grind are on offer here, split off from the grander chaos of the group’s 2023 Apocalypse sessions and made whole as part of a package that songwriting-wise is a little more scattershot, but manages to hit just as hard as the album that preceded it.

It goes without saying that Rotten Sound have continued to be one of the more straight-shooting pillars of the grind scene over the years and any excuse to sit down with one of their bona-fide blastbeat batterings is a good one. Apocalypse stuck pretty close to the tried-and-true for the Rotten Sound crew and it will come as no surprise, then, that Mass Extinction continues that march into oblivion, just with a slight bit more taste for the two-step now that it is a little more free to stretch its wings than Apocalypse’s unrelenting assault would’ve allowed. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MUERTO, LEPRETHERE, ROTTEN SOUND, HEXJAKT, PËRL, MASSA NERA

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 012025
 


artwork by the legend Frank Frazetta

(written by Islander)

I hope those of you who celebrated Halloween got through it with all your fingers intact. Oh wait, that’s a different holiday. But the wish still holds, even if the risks of losing digits might not have been as great. It all depends on where you put them and what you hold and whether some masked goon is firing rubber bullets at your raised fists.

I got through Halloween with all my digits intact, and the three I use for typing have been busily pecking away at this Saturday collection. It comes later than usual because I got a late start and was really confounded in deciding what to pick.

I was pretty thorough in saving links and files this week, which meant there were a fuckload of them staring at me this morning, and I had only sampled a small number of them during the week. I would say that more than half of them were of the black metal persuasion, so I shoved off a lot of those candidates (but not all of them) for tomorrow, which is also therefore guaranteed to be confounding. And there’s a bit of a curveball at the end, of course.

On we go…. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MANTAR, SAVAGE LANDS, FRONTIERER, ASS TO MOUTH, ROTTEN SOUND, RITUAL FOG, SKAPHOS, THE SWORD, SOLIPSISM, PLAGUEFEVER

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 162024
 


Mantar photo by Sonja Schuringa/Chantik Photography

I have my second miserable cold in two months, and how are you doing? I’ve been focusing on music that I thought would help blast the snot out of my head. I’ve included a lot of that below. I can’t tell that I’ve really come un-clogged, but it has made me feel better in other ways, including providing catharsis for being so pissed off that the virus has hit me again so quickly.

As you can see, I had time enough to do lots of listening and watching yesterday and this morning. As usual, the music from the 10 bands featured below isn’t all I heard and liked, but I had to draw the line somewhere. I moved some of my choices to tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column, and others I hope I’ll get too somewhere down the road. Continue reading »

ROTTEN SOUND: “APOCALYPSE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 042023
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the new album by Finland’s Rotten Sound, which is out now on Season of Mist.)

The thing to keep in mind with Rotten Sound‘s newest album Apocalypse – arriving almost five years after the group’s last recorded material in the 2018 EP Suffer To Abuse and almost seven years if you want to stick strictly to full lengths in 2016’s Abuse To Suffer – is that it is the sort of grind album that starts and stops. That makes no sense, you say, every album has a beginning and end, what sort of difference does an album starting and stopping have to do with the descriptor of an album?

To refine it a bit, let’s treat Apocalypse this way: There is no build up to Apocalypse and there is no wind-down in Apocalypse, at any point, at all. You hit ‘play’ on the album’s first song and Rotten Sound are already screaming at a thousand miles an hour and every song after that does the same. The start/stop mechanism is the most perfunctory in existence. It’s a quick blast of feedback and the song is over with not a single song getting close to the two-minute mark. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THULCANDRA, ROTTEN SOUND, CATACOMB, LAMP OF MURMUUR, KAAL NAGINI, OSSAERT, MENSTRUAL VAMPIRES, BÜDDAH

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Feb 152023
 

I’m very happy about all the music in this mid-week roundup. I’m also very happy about the way it all lines up.

A big part of the fun of doing these collections is not just finding new songs and videos that I think are worth recommending, but also choosing the ones that either flow together well or instead ricochet off each other in unexpected ways. There’s a little bit of both strategies in what I chose for today, but mainly this roundup is designed to quickly elevate your adrenaline and then keep it surging. Lots of good cover art today as well.

THULCANDRA (Germany)

I searched out the first time we wrote about Thuldandra at this site. It was in June 2010, when NCS was barely seven months old. The occasion was an extensive review of the band’s 2010 debut album Fallen Angel’s Dominion, in which I included an extensive discussion of the band’s back-story, with notes about the C.S. Lewis space trilogy that was the source of their name. It was evident even then that they held the potential of becoming the truest heirs of Dissection. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SANZU, ROTTEN SOUND, TURBID NORTH, CLARET ASH, CHROME WAVES, VOLLOÍOM (AND MORE)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Dec 162022
 


I’ve been reading my friend Andy‘s writing about metal for more than a decade, and even so, what he’s done this week had been mind-boggling. I marveled at how much music he listened to this year and at his ability to make year-end selections, organize them, and write about them distinctively. I mean hell, I marvel at how much time it must have taken him just to put all the embedded links to the streams in his articles this week!

All of which is to say that his week-long series of lists deserves the spotlight, and deserves all the time it would take you to go through them and make your own discoveries. His series ends today, but LISTMANIA will roll on next week as we begin posting year-end lists from other NCS contributors, including the annual five-part list from DGR.

Last weekend I announced that, by design, we wouldn’t have the normal volume of premieres on the calendar this week in order to keep the focus on Andy‘s series (and a few lists I’ve shared from “big platform” sites). I thought I might take advantage of the lull in premieres by compiling more new-music roundups during the week than I can usually manage. I admit that does seem a bit inconsistent with the goal of keeping the focus on year-end lists, but the lure of spreading the word about new music is a powerful one.

I did manage to get a roundup done on Monday, but failed at the next chance on Wednesday because of interference from paying work. Today, as you can see, I was able to follow through. I’ve also got things lined up for the usual Saturday roundup too. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE FIVE: 10-1

 LISTMANIA 2018  10 Responses »
Jan 042019
 

(At last, we reach the fifth and final installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music. It includes his Top 10 albums, plus a list of EPs, and one final non-metal entry.)

Here we go into the final installment. One last grouping of albums and one last collection of thudding riffs, heavy guitars, and enough drumwork to leave one’s head spinning by the time it wraps up.

This final ten is all over the place, in terms of both genre and location. My lists tend to be pretty international always, but the consistent bouncing back and forth that is happening in this part has proven to be entertaining in its own right.

This group also reveals just how much of 2018 turned out to be the year of cathartic release for me. Alongside all the genre-bending, all the experimentation, and all of the well-executed groove, I found that every once in a while this year a disc would hit that would just boil down to a half-hour-plus of yelling, and I would relish every single second of it. I’m sure we could credit that to the wider situation of the world these days but I’ve also always been a sucker for turning music into an instrument of release, and for some reason that approach won me over hard this year.

So let’s begin with the final ten, and then a grouping of EPs I enjoyed this year, my final non-metal (ish) release recommendation, and a small (ish) closing paragraph… because why would I ever stop typing after just finishing the final ten?

That’s for crazy people. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ROTTEN SOUND — “SUFFER TO ABUSE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 212018
 

 

(The Finnish grindcrushers in Rotten Sound released a new EP via Season of Mist on May 18th, and DGR gives it a detailed review here.)

Rotten Sound’s 2016 album Abuse To Suffer is one of the better examples of a neatly packaged album of grind out there to date, with the band having seemingly found a near-perfect length for their latest vitriolic blast-beast to unleash upon the world. Like many of their songs, Abuse To Suffer ends almost as suddenly as it begins with an almost perfunctory pop of the snare to finally send things off, neatly tying off the near half-hour you get with the Finnish speaker destroyers. Which means that the group’s latest EP — Suffer To Abuse — makes for an interesting proposition, arriving nearly two years after its predecessor and picking up right where the band left off, as if the Rotten Sound crew just couldn’t let go of that disc just yet and so dished out another eleven minutes (spread across seven songs) of hyper-fast and ultra-precise grindcore, leaning heavily on the circle-pit aspect of the -core sound.

The limited edition EP, which saw a staggered release between Europe and North America (for whatever nightmarish reasons, and not the first group this has happened to this year — Centinex also had a month between continents with their disc Chaos Manifesto), can be neatly summed up as exactly what you want you from the group — another quick expulsion of sound that remains relentless throughout, with just enough sludge around the edges to add a little dirt to the group’s latest sweat-fest. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ROTTEN SOUND, WILT, OV SHADOWS, GHASTLY, TARASQUE, OVERACTIVE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Feb 212018
 

 

In the first part of today’s two-part round-up of recommended new music I selected songs that included clean as well as harsh vocals. In this one, it’s all unmitigated savagery… but the savagery comes in varied exciting forms. I really, really like all six of these tracks, and hope you’ll get just as fired up about them as I have.

ROTTEN SOUND

The Finnish grind merchants Rotten Sound, who are favorites around our crumbling domain here at NCS, have a new EP named Suffer to Abuse slated for release by Season of Mist on April 13th in Europe, and on May 18th in North America, because the bastard step-children must apparently wait their turn. Fortunately, we were served at the same time as everyone else with the EP’s first single, “Harvester of Boredom“. Continue reading »

SEEN BUT (MOSTLY) NOT HEARD: TAU CROSS, GOATWHORE, OF WOLVES, F41.0, URN, ROTTEN SOUND, COSMIC REEF TEMPLE, SOLAR TEMPLE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 242017
 


Tau Cross

 

As I begin typing these words I’m on an airplane just entering the air space of Michigan, and if all goes well will be landing in Baltimore in 1 hour and 52 minutes. Maryland Deathfest awaits.

I spent the first part of the flight scrolling through the NCS in-box, adding to my very long list of music to check out. As you know, that’s a ridiculously long list. I don’t expect to get much blogging done while MDF is in progress, so I impulsively decided to write this thing.

Since the wi-fi on this jet isn’t good enough to permit streaming, I haven’t heard most of what I’m putting in this post, nearly all of which I found during that e-mail reconnaissance. I encourage you to leave a comment with reactions, since I have almost none (so far). Continue reading »

 Older Entries