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 »

CATCHING UP (PART 2): SOREPTION, VADER, WATAIN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Dec 112013
 

Continuing my effort to catch up on news and new music I missed while on vacation the last two weeks, here are three more items of interest, again presented in alphabetical order.

SOREPTION

If I had a dollar for every time I’ve seen the phrase “long-awaited and highly anticipated” in a press release about a new album, I could buy a nice new car, or maybe two. But it’s a phrase that absolutely fits this Swedish band’s second album, Engineering the Void. More than three years have passed since the release of their excellent debut album Deterioration of Minds. Even when the band finally released an exciting teaser of new music last June, there was no release date.

Finally, while I was away, the band announced that the album would be released by Unique Leader Records on February 18, and then just two days ago we got a lyric video for the first full advance track from the album, “Breaking the Great Narcissist”, and goddamn, is it good. Continue reading »

TEASED: BLODSGARD AND SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jun 162013
 

In recent days two bands I’m very high on have released teasers of music from albums I’ve been waiting on for a long time (with a level of eagerness that hasn’t diminished as the months have rolled by).

BLODSGARD

Norway’s Blodsgard haven’t yet released a full-length album, only three demos — but the debut album is on the way. Its title is Monument and it will soon be made available both digitally and on CD via a label called The Oath (an exact release date hasn’t been announced). Yesterday, the band unveiled the killer cover art for the album (above), created by one of my favorite metal artists, Mark Cooper (Mindrape Art), as well as excerpts of all the songs.

When I first found out about Blodsgard in September 2011, the most recent demo — a four-song offering called Solve et Coagula— hadn’t even been released for public distribution, and the band had no plans to do so. I got a chance to hear it and then obtained permission to provide a link to a special 3-song download for our readers, which included two tracks from Solve et Coagula plus another even more recent song, as a companion to my review. All three songs, which are still available for free, will appear in remastered form on the forthcoming album. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER, AZURE EMOTE, AND SOREPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Jan 082013
 

Yesterday brought many items of news and new music that caught my attention, so many that I’m funneling them your way in a couple of posts this morning, this being the first.

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER

Last night the above image appeared on the Facebook page of The Black Dahlia Murder, with no further explanation. Preceding the appearance of this visual announcement, the gents at Metal Sucks posted some studio photos and a few more details, speculating that the band would have a new album ready by June — which turns out to be a good guess.

Presumably, the above image is simply a flyer of sorts and not the album cover, yet I’m intrigued by the absence of color and by the album’s title — Everblack. Not that I really needed anything further to cause eager anticipation for the band’s next work. That was a given.

Next, we move from a band whose name has become something of a household word in the realms of extreme metal to one I had never heard of before last night — and whose new album I’m now anticipating just as eagerly as new BDM. Check out this arresting album cover: Continue reading »

A FRIDAY FLOOD OF NEWS AND MUSIC: MORS PRINCIPIUM EST, BLUT AUS NORD, SOREPTION, XENOCIDE, THE FEVERED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 192012
 

For me, where I’m currently located, Friday has barely begun, but it has already brought a flood tide of news and music that I think are worth sharing. So much, in fact, that the only way I can squeeze it all into a single post is to cut my own verbosity to a trickle. This is painful, of course, because it goes against the grain. But I will do my best to be brief.

MORS PRINCIPIUM EST

In late July, I posted a bunch of news about this excellent Finnish band, which included the fact that they were finally recording a new album after many long years following the release of 2007′s Liberation = Termination. And then in August, I learned the album’s title (…And Death Said Live), I found out it would be released this December (on AFM Records), I found the cover art (which you can see above), and I posted about all that news.

At that point I also learned from the band that the album will include guest appearances from shredders Ryan Knight of The Black Dahlia Murder and Jona Weinhofen of Bring Me the Horizon and I Killed the Prom Queen.

And today, finally, we have music from the album. Or to be more precise, Metal Injection has music from the album — a song named “Destroyer of All”. The song kills. Go HERE to listen, and then please come back and give us your reactions. Continue reading »

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