SKELETAL SPECTRE AND WEAPON

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
May 082013
 

I was just about ready to call it a day here at our metallic island, but then I discovered two songs that have just gone up for streaming, and they hit me so hard upside my head that I just had to put together one more post.

SKELETAL SPECTRE

I really fuckin’ enjoyed this multi-national band’s last album, 2011′s Occult Spawned Premonitions (reviewed here). The band includes an extraordinary extreme female vocalist named Vanessa Nocera whose many projects I’ve covered so zealously here that suspicions of stalkerism wouldn’t be out of place. But that’s not all. The band also includes  Roger “Rogga” Johansson of Ribspreader and Bonegnawer fame (and about 100 other projects, too), and as far as I’m concerned Rogga is death metal royalty.

So, needless to say, I’ve been watching Skeletal Spectre pretty closely as they move forward toward the release of their next album, Voodoo Dawn. I’ve previously posted about the album’s stunning cover art (Adam Geyer), as well as a track called “Bone Dust” that became available for listening late last year. But today brought yet another song. This one’s named “Black Augury Hollow”. If you’re lucking for truly ghastly, pestilential, maggot-infested, beautifully executed, old-school death metal that stomps and romps with an infusion of d-beat energy and a lot of chainsaw distortion, you really need to hear this. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SKELETAL SPECTRE, DARKTHRONE, KAOTOXIN, AND OBLIVION (the movie)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Dec 092012
 

In no particular order, here are things I saw and heard this morning that I thought were worth tossing your way.

SKELETAL SPECTRE

I really fuckin’ enjoyed this multi-national band’s last album, 2011’s Occult Spawned Premonitions (reviewed here). The band includes an extraordinary extreme vocalist named Vanessa Nocera as well as Roger “Rogga” Johansson of Ribspreader and Bonegnawer fame. I’ve been watching Skeletal Spectre pretty closely as they move forward toward the release of their next album, Voodoo Dawn. This morning I saw the unveiling of the finished cover artwork by Adam Geyer, which is up above. Very nice.

I’m still blasting “Bone Dust”, the one song from Voodoo Dawn that has surfaced to date. In case you missed it the first time it was featured at NCS, here it is again; the album is due out in early 2013 from Pulverised Records.


Continue reading »

HELL DIVERS: HELL UNITED, SKELETAL SPECTRE, AND SOPHICIDE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 202012
 

Each of the three metal bands featured in this post have new albums on the way. Each of them have publicly released one song from their new albums. None of them sound quite like the others, but they do have these two points in common: First, all three of the new songs are very fucking good. Second, all three of them will make you feel like you’ve just taken a deep dive into the bowels of hell.

HELL UNITED

Hell United are a band of veteran Polish musicians (two of them playing in an earlier incarnation of this band as far back as 1997) who recently signed with Hellthrasher Productions for the September 11 release of their second album, Aura Damage. Just a few days ago, Hellthrasher started streaming the new album’s third track, “Deathlike Cold”.

The evil in this track starts flowing immediately in the tremolo-laced death-doom chords of the intro, and then it turns into a flood, with a dense wall of spitfire riffing, machine-gun percussion, and vocal outpourings of genuine bestiality. This horrific onslaught of hybridized black metal and brutal death-doom may qualify as war metal (a term we’ve had fun discussing around here off and on). Whatever you call it, it cored out my skull and left me hungry for more. Continue reading »

SKELETAL SPECTRE: “OCCULT SPAWNED PREMONITIONS”

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Sep 112011
 

We were contacted about this three-person band by Karol at Selfmadegod Records in Poland, and man am I grateful for the introduction, because this band’s music has pushed more buttons than I knew I had.

Skeletal Spectre was started in Sweden by the band’s current guitarist and bassist, “Behold the Pentagram”, and features vocals by an American woman, Vanessa Nocera, who also fronts a death metal band called Scaremaker and a doom band called Wooden Stake. The third band member is drummer “Haunting the Beyond”.

Karol hooked me up with a download of the band’s 2011 album (their second, and the first with Nocera on vocals), Occult Spawned Premonitions. From the name of the band, the album cover, and the song titles, I guessed that I was in for horror-themed metal of some kind, and I took the plunge by listening to the opening track, “Scalped”. And then I listened to the rest of the album straight through and immediately started over, without even stopping to wash the putrescent gore off my mangled body or dig the bone fragments out of my hammered skull.

When anyone asks you to list the best female growlers in extreme metal, you will now have to include Vanessa Nocera. Not only can she deliver the horribly bestial, bloody-throated howls and growls you need and want from your death metal, she has a low clean voice, too (contralto?) and sounds uncannily like a young Ozzie Osborne. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »