Jan 312022
 


The Lurking Fear

 

We’ve had an unusually high volume of content at NCS on this last day of January, but our flood of posts on this Monday now comes to an end with this one, though not in the way I originally expected.

I had vowed to myself and to you  to close the rollout of this Most Infectious Song list today. But over the weekend I realized just how much I had overlooked, even after 20 installments and 65 songs (all of which you can find here). In part this was a result of consulting with my long-time NCS comrades Andy Synn and DGR (this is, after all, called “Our List”, even though the song choices are always my own decision). And so I’ve decided, after all, not to end the list today.

How much longer I’ll continue isn’t something I’ve figured out yet, but at least for a few more days and possibly to the end of the week, but not past that.

With all that said, here are five more songs for the list. Continue reading »

Sep 212021
 

 

Even by my own standards I went a little crazy from Friday through Sunday. By my count, the posts I made on those days about new music and videos (including the Shades of Black column on Sunday) included recordings by 29 bands — more than any reasonable human (other than myself, because I’m unreasonable) could possibly have paid close attention to. Even having done that, I already have a huge list of other discoveries that I could begin launching today — but decided instead to scale things back to a somewhat more manageable size.

And so, this is a smaller handful of recommendations. Of course, it’s still eleven bands and divided into two Parts — I’m not going to change my spots that quickly! — but it could have been bigger. For example, though I’m beginning with what I consider “a big name”, in the hope that it will lure people into testing other music they might otherwise overlook, I did omit a few other big names — but you can find new songs and videos from Carcass, Pig Destroyer (covering a Perturbator song), Insomnium, and Full of Hell by clicking those links I just left you.

Part 2 will come tomorrow.

THE LURKING FEAR (Sweden)

This band of Swedish stalwarts, whose line-up includes well-known members of At the Gates, have a second album on the horizon, led by the first song and video I’ve chosen today. On the one hand, it’s a hard-charging assault of pummeling, chainsawing Swe-death mayhem. On the other hand, when the band shift gears a bit, it sounds spooky, and then blares like sirens. If you need a quick fix of adrenaline, this is your prescription. Continue reading »

Sep 082017
 

 

(TheMadIsraeli prepared this review of the debut album by Sweden’s The Lurking Fear, released on August 11 by Century Media.)

Let’s revisit what Swedish death metal royalty group The Lurking Fear had to say when they announced their formation:

“We want our Death Metal ugly, twisted and possessed. We miss the urgency, intensity and ‘realness’ in a lot of the modern Death Metal, therefore it is natural for us to stray away from the streamlined sounds of today, but rather focus on bringing sheer, natural weirdness and horror back to the table…””

This band has a ton of prestige-level pedigree behind it. Besides being fronted by Tomas Lindberg, the king of the mid-range vomitus bark, the members have history in bands such as The Crown, Edge Of Sanity, Marduk, Cradle Of Filth, God Macabre — the list is fucking long. I also appreciate very much TLF’s mission statement because I agree that death metal nowadays is very much lacking the urgency, intensity, and realness it speaks of. I’ve reviewed, and others here have reviewed, plenty of exceptions to this rule of course — our site thrives on the deathly arts — but trust me that what we give praise to here is a baffling minority. Continue reading »

Jul 172017
 

 

(DGR takes over round-up duties again, with this collection of new songs and videos from eight bands.)

The end-of-the-week news flood was insane, as we have settled well into summer now and a lot of bands are either gearing up to hit the road or are already out making numerous loops on the festival circuit. Of course, this also means that there are a lot of albums in the hopper, getting ready to come out within weeks, or you’ll start seeing a lot of press for albums set to hit when the first leaves of fall drop.

That’s how you wind up with posts like this SEEN AND HEARD that helped kick off the weekend — not even counting our own fuel that we added to the fire, and the one that you’re reading now, which is basically just a gigantic dragnet for bands that had premieres elsewhere throughout the tail end of last week, or just blasted that thing right out to the world to see.

This episode of SEEN AND HEARD is eight (!) bands deep and skews death-metal heavy, so prepare yourselves for a lot of gigantic grooves, growled vocals, enough blasts to reach gunfire status, and enough chainsaw guitar destruction to fuel the planet. Continue reading »

May 152017
 


Origin

 

(DGR steps in for round-up duty with a collection of deathly advance tracks from forthcoming albums that detonated late last week.)

2017 has been a year that has moved in fits and starts, with huge batches of releases and then a period of calm, then another huge batch and so on. It’s a different feeling from last year’s torrential flood, but it also means that promotional stuff moves in fits and starts as well — which is how we wound up with the back half of last week bringing one big release after another from some fairly recognizable names for those who love their death metal and high speed.

It was a pretty intense flood of death metal washing over the metal community, much of it coming from some fairly big names — a hefty collection of mainstays, old guard, and standard-bearers. We tried to collect some of them into our usual three-to-four part series of bands, but eventually it seemed like everyone wanted to get in on the game, and that’s why you have a SEEN AND HEARD headline with five recognizable names within it, all deploying material virtually at once. Continue reading »