OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 27): OBSCURA AND SOREPTION

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  No Responses »
Feb 142019
 

 

There’s probably someone out there who was thinking, “Is this list STILL not finished? It’s the middle of fuckin’ February — when is that lunatic going to stop?” And then that someone saw the title of this installment and thought, “Oh wow. Didn’t realize he hadn’t gotten to Obscura or Soreption yet. I guess it’s okay if he goes on for a bit longer.”

OBSCURA

All of us here were big, big fans of Obscura’s latest album Diluvium — and it seems like everyone else who listened to it felt the same way. In his review, Andy recognized it as “the culmination of a decade’s worth of work and growth by this ever-evolving entity” and considered it home to “some of the most nuanced and natural-sounding songs of the band’s career” — “another win for Obscura, as well as a more than fitting conclusion to their epic endeavour” (it eventually made Andy’s list of the year’s Great albums).

For his part, DGR (in his year-end write-up) also thought the album was great — “predictably dense, but not in the stuffed-to-the-gills way that a lot of tech-death albums have been, but more because this was an album that really saw Obscura exploring their chosen sound” — and gave it a very high recommendation. Continue reading »

WAXING LYRICAL: SOREPTION

 WAXING LYRICAL  2 Responses »
Jan 192019
 

 

(In this week’s edition of Waxing Lyrical Andy Synn elicited thoughts from Soreption vocalist Fredrik Söderberg.)

If you don’t know, and love, Soreption, then you don’t belong on this site.

There, I said it. Now get out.

Of course if you’re still reading this then you’ve clearly either a) realised I was joking with the above statement, or b) are a total contrarian who has decided to carry on just to spite me.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, it was just over a decade ago when I stumbled across Soreption‘s debut EP, Illuminate the Excessive, in my local record store, and I’ve been an avid fan of the band ever since, following their progress through all the ups and downs of their career, even to the point of selecting their second album, Engineering the Void, as one of the best albums of 2014.

The band’s latest release, last year’s Monument of the End, continued their run of top-notch, high-octane Technical Death Metal mastery, so I’m particularly pleased to have been able to get hold of the group’s long-time vocalist Fredrik Söderberg for this latest edition of Waxing Lyrical. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE THREE: 30-21

 LISTMANIA 2018  1 Response »
Jan 022019
 

 

(Here’s the third installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music.)

Now that I’ve broken it out from the tremendous bulk of the rest of my year-end collective, I’m amused by how much world traveling this specific subset of the list does. It spends a surprising amount of time in France (which has done very well for itself these past few years), some time in the States, some time in Australia, and even manages to touch base with both Canada and Sweden for a few. It is also probably the most varied intsallment so far — the tech-death crews make a strong play here, but you’ll also start seeing some of the prefix-core resurgence that happened recently, as well as some ugly-as-fuck grind (on two fronts). And then there’s however in the hell Author & Punisher might be described.

Oh, did I spoil that Author & Punisher is making an appearance here? Whoops. Well too bad, Beastland is fucking killer but if you want to know why you’ll have to read on and see just where the San Diego noise-engineer found himself. There’s still a lot of list left to go, and knowing me, at least two-thousand more words of intro paragraph left to be written somewhere so let’s get the third chunk of this motherfucker going. Continue reading »

REVOCATION / ARCHSPIRE / SOREPTION / RIVERS OF NIHIL: LIVE IN BIRMINGHAM 17/12/18

 Concert Reviews  2 Responses »
Dec 192018
 

 

(Andy Synn continues his campaign to make many of us jealous over the shows he’s getting to see in the UK, this time witnessing a duo of American tech stalwarts, a Canadian one, and a Swedish one, and documenting the event with video.)

Looking back over the last twelve months I can see that I’ve been lucky enough to attend a number of awesome shows, festivals, etc, this year, with the last couple of months in particular being an incredibly busy (not to mention fun) period, especially where frantic, fret-melting technicality is concerned.

Just in the last few weeks I’ve got the chance to catch Beyond Creation/Gorod prog out and Aborted/Cryptopsy blast faces, and two nights ago saw things get kicked up yet another notch with the fatal four-way of Revocation, Archspire, Soreption, and Rivers of Nihil at Mama Roux’s in Birmingham. Continue reading »

A DIRTY HALF DOZEN: GRAVITON / HEMELBESTORMER / IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT / ORATOR / ORDINUL NEGRU / SOREPTION

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 132018
 

 

(In this post Andy Synn has packaged together six new reviews of six outstanding new albums across a range of metal sub-genres.)

I don’t know about you, but this year I’m finding it far harder than ever before to stay on top of all the new and upcoming releases proliferating throughout the Metalsphere.

Partially this can be attributed to the growing pressures of my day job, combined with the fact that I’m currently renovating my house and working hard on Beyond Grace album #2 (with an eye also turned towards future work for both Twilight’s Embrace and Apathy Noir too), but a lot of it is just down to this simple truth… there’s simply too much music, and not enough hours in the day, to cover it all.

Still, it wounds me to think of all the great (and good) albums and artists out there who our readers might otherwise be missing out on, so consider this another desperate attempt to redress the balance somewhat. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): BEHEMOTH, CAST THE STONE, SOREPTION, ABORTED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Aug 062018
 

 

(DGR steps in for round-up duty to begin our posts for this new week.)

In case you missed it, one of the recurring themes around the NCS corner of the interwebs is that if the Comments section doesn’t come for us, then it’s the day job that will. Such was the case this weekend when our esteemed editor (who is likely back home by now) found himself on the self-described whirlwind trip to New Mexico for a few days. As will inevitably happen, of course, that means there is going to be a massive blast of new music that we’ll likely catch a good amount of, but not all of, and so those of us who are able to will step into the role of news person.

And so the metal sphere gathered up four very big names and decided that this weekend would be a fucking fantastic time to jam out a whole bunch of news and try to catch us off-guard. Well not us, I say… at least we’ll get to it on Monday maybe. So I’ve gathered up the aforementioned four very large news stories from bands with albums upcoming (one of which actually came out last Friday!) for you folks to start the week off with, all in one handy post that… as is standard…is pretty fucking heavy on the death metal. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BONEHUNTER, HATE, HORRENDOUS, INFERNAL COIL, MESARTHIM, SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jul 132018
 

 

This is obviously a big end-of-week round-up. Today the size of the round-up will be in inverse proportion to the volume of words in my descriptions of the music, because I have three premieres to write and there would have been more except I exercised some rare restraint and started saying No.

What is it about this day that makes it so popular for premieres and releases? Could it be that there is only one other Friday in 2018 like it (and that one occurred three months ago)?

I arranged the music in alphabetical order by band name because I couldn’t think of a more logical way to stitch these sounds together.

BONEHUNTER

This time Bonehunter chose to keep the rampaging bear’s penis less prominent on the magnificent cover of their new album (rendered by Joe Petagno), to the disappointment of some and the relief of others (as long as they don’t look to closely at that tongue). But how does the music on Children of the Atom compare to the tunes on this Finnish band’s more prominently erect last record, Sexual Panic Human Machine? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: POUND, SOREPTION, HADAL MAW, GRAVEWARDS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jun 202018
 

 

I’m in a hurry at the moment, with barely enough time to throw these five new songs and videos at you along with some basic background info, but not enough minutes to provide my usual introductory impressions. Enjoy the music — I sure as hell did.

POUND

The Seattle duo Pound (who used to go by Lb!) have turned in some of the most electrifying live performances I’ve seen here in the Pacific Northwest. The sights and sounds of guitarist Ryan Schutte delivering a tornado of chaos and groove on a baritone 9-string guitar while David Stickney switches back and forth between two drum kits in riveting displays of percussive vulcanism is the kind of mind-blowing experience I don’t think I’ll ever get tired of. (You’ll get an idea of that experience in the second video below, but without the bowel-liquefying volume that comes in a live Pound performance.) Continue reading »

SOREPTION: “ENGINEERING THE VOID”

 Album Reviews  14 Responses »
Jan 212014
 

(Here we have TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new album by Sweden’s Soreption, which will be released on February 18 by Unique Leader.)

I first heard about Swedish tech-death Cthulhu Soreption when Vildhjarta mastermind Daniel Bergstrom told me to check them out, hailing them as the new flagship name of technical death metal. I listened to their 2010 debut Deterioration of Minds and was blown away by their brand of mechanical madness. Not only were these guys tighter than advanced machinery, they knew how to write technical death metal that was engrossing on a musicianship level, yet still concise and to the point. That’s a pretty hard thing to do in this style, considering that the vast majority of kindred albums mainly suffer from the writing of songs that just meander through riff sprees and never stick out.

Soreption definitely nailed it with their debut, and now with the band’s sophomore effort Engineering the Void they have created the sonic equivalent of a planet destroyer. Seriously, the record is what I imagine the Earth getting crushed by a giant machine built for grinding planets into dust would sound like. It’s so cold, so devoid of mercy, that this would put anyone not up to the listen into a corner in the fetal position. It’s an autonomous meat grinder, a fucking genocide mechanism, this is tech death at its most pristine and most carnivorous. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THE OCEAN, BEHEMOTH, OBLITERATIONS, SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  5 Responses »
Jan 152014
 

Satan has been a busy little sulphurous bee this week. So many newsy metal announcements, so many new metally songs, more than my addled brain can keep up with. Here are a few of the items I spied over the last 24 hours that I thought were worth sharing. More will come in another post today.

TOURISM: THE OCEAN / SCALE THE SUMMIT / THE ATLAS MOTH / SILVER SNAKES

Who are these people who are constantly blaring that “Metal Sucks” and why are they associating with miscreants such as The Ocean, Scale the Summit, The Atlas Moth, and Silver Snakes? I must add that question to the long list of life’s mysteries to which I must devote my investigative energies. Whoever those people are and whatever obscure impulses motivate them, they are presenting a U.S. tour of the afore-mentioned miscreants, wisely choosing to launch it in The Emerald City, for which I will give thanks by sacrificing a neighbor’s child under the next full moon.

Other less important cities will be visited by this very impressive line-up, and I will list them after the jump for those whose eyesight isn’t sharp enough to discern them on the tour poster above. And speaking of the line-up, though I have been savaged by the first three bands in previous musical performances, Silver Snakes have not had the pleasure of savaging me before, and in fact I was unaware of their existence before those people who blare “Metal Sucks” presented them in this new tour, though I sometimes see silver snakes while on the verge of a blackout drunk. Therefore, along with the dates I will provide a bit of their music, which involves clean singing along with heaviness and lightness. Continue reading »

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