Feb 062024
 

(Daniel Barkasi returns today with the second of his monthly NCS columns devoted to spreading the word about musical obscurities. What you’ll find below are reviews and streams of 8 records released from around the globe in January.)

To begin, thank you to all who read the first edition of this monthly column. I’m glad folks seemed to enjoy the musical expeditions of my often wacky brain. May you discover something to your liking that’ll (hopefully) give you plenty of enjoyment and respite from the madness of the everyday hustle.

This edition covers records that were released in January, which is how we’ll be covering things month-to-month. This time, we have a cornucopia of flavors to indulge; from atmospheric, epic, and relaxing, to the downright filthy. True that the first month of the calendar is typically a relatively slow month in terms of memorable releases, but this year has started off quite favorably. Plenty of under the surface delights to tear into, so let us begin faster than Jerry Seinfeld’s supposed claim of being quite fleet of foot. We choose to run! Continue reading »

Nov 192021
 

 

In many ways, the album we’re about to present is strikingly different from our usual musical fare at this site. Most obviously, the songs include only singing. Blast-beats are a rarity, and distortion is either completely eschewed or applied to a mild degree. The music often has more in common with prog-rock and hard-rock than heavy metal, and pulls from wells of classic heavy metal when it does venture into metal realms rather than dabbling in the sub-genres of extremity that occupy most of our attention.

And so you might scratch your head about what the album is doing here. Maybe you will wonder less after you’ve heard it. What it lacks in throat-cutting viciousness or mind-scarring abrasiveness it makes up for in so many other ways — in ways that make it utterly captivating. It has visceral “physical” power as well as the power to both channel and alter emotional states in gripping fashion, and it reaches heights of splendor that are breathtaking.

The name of the album is Ideals & Morality, and it’s the debut full-length of Sgàile, the solo project of Scottish multi-instrumentalist and vocalist extraordinaire Tony Dunn, whose resume includes work with such other bands such as Falloch, Cnoc An Tursa, and Saor. It will be released by Avantgarde Music on December 10th. Continue reading »