Jan 272024
 

After three weeks away from home working my day job I’m finally back. It was a stressful and often bizarre experience, made worse by the absence of my spouse and cats, and worse still because I had no time to listen to music, much less write about it.

That may sound weird. There’s always time to listen to music, isn’t there? In my case, it just didn’t fit what I was doing, too much of a distraction instead of a companion. Especially when it comes to metal, my brain’s not wired to combine even less raucous variants of music with trying to concentrate hard on something else. So I was forced to take a very long hiatus, the longest one in the 14+ years I’ve spent in devotion to NCS.

Andy and DGR stepped up and kept the site from going dark, and a few other writers continued sending things in too. But we’ve still got a backlog of un-published material to bring to the surface, mainly a big slug of interviews from Comrade Aleks. Other backlogs will never be fixed. Continue reading »

Nov 032022
 

 

I know I sound like a broken record, but this has been yet another week when the job that pays me (not NCS) has rudely interfered with my ability to recommend new music via round-ups such as this one. Even today it will interfere, and so even though I’ve decided to fill this round-up with full releases rather than advance tracks, I’m unable to say as much about them as I’d like. But fortunately, you can heed the wisdom of your own ears.

SALQIU (Brazil)

To begin, here’s a new album named خماسين الوباء from Nuno Lourenço in his guise as Salqiu. We’ve already learned that although Salqiu is prolific, we’re not going to get the same thing twice from album to album, a conviction reinforced by this new one, which has themes drawn from places far away from Nuno‘s homeland. He explains: Continue reading »