Nov 132016
 

draugsol-album-cover

 

Once again I find myself drowning in attractive new black metal. I’ve assembled some of my new discoveries in this post and have in mind pulling together a second round-up for tomorrow — but yes, I do remember how foolish it is for part-time, half-witted metal bloggers to make forecasts of what they’ll do in the future. I’ll just say… maybe.

This is one of those times when all of the underground bands featured here are newcomers to our site, and I’ve bent the framework of this series a bit with the last band, which is more in the vein of death than black metal. Hope you find something to like…

DRAUGSÓL

Oh look! Another Icelandic black metal band! There seem to be more of them than there are snowflakes in Iceland, but on the other hand, I haven’t yet been disappointed by any of them. I was particularly unable to resist the lure of Draugsól (as if I wanted to) when I saw the fantastic cover art by Moonroot Art for their debut album, Volaða Land. Continue reading »

Sep 302014
 

(We welcome guest contributor Gorger, who explains himself and the objective of this new series as follows… )

Let me start off with a short presentation of myself. For almost a year I’ve been running a Norwegian metal site with a focus on reviews of metal releases. The site is split into two forms of reviews. There are the standard reviews, where I listen a plethora of times before writing a medium-long, moderately indept description with a dice-scaled rating, and then there are what I call “Impressions”, where I listen to an album a few times before writing short and somewhat impulsive description with a classification as Approved (V), Dissapproved (X), or Intermediate (VX).

Like Islander, I know what lack of time is. I have a wish of making a parallel, English-language version of my site, but that ain’t happening any time soon. When Islander told us all he’d be leaning back between two loud-speakers and enjoying some full albums for a change, I decided this was a perfect time to both give something back to this enlightening site and also do a “pilot” of English translations, to see how that would work. I plan to present 16 releases from the past two months over three posts, and the criteria are these:

-Only albums that have not earlier been presented in any way at NCS.
-Only music that fits the NCS profile (i.e., no clean singing)
-Only music that fits the NCS concept (i.e., only recommendable releases)

We are all excited to see which records will be reviewed by our host. In the meantime (yes, time is mean indeed) I hope you’ll find something interesting here. For those with Scandinavian linguistic skills, check out Gorger’s Metal.

I’ll put it all in chronological order. Now, let’s get started, shall we? Continue reading »