PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS PIGS: “DEATH HILARIOUS”

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Nov 262025
 

‘Now we hunt Hippopotamus’ by Aaron Johnson. done in a style they call “reverse painted acrylic polymer peel painting.”

(Vizzah Harri dives deep into and around the latest album by the UK band Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs Pigs, which was released this past April by Rocket Recordings.)

Bands with PR in three settings across the globe can hardly be considered underground, though postern gates with stairways leading down to caverns advertising treasures would at least induce a probing glance or load-bearing check of the first step.

If opener Blockage was your introduction to this band or their approach, as it was the case for me, you’re in for a trip that results in an antonymic flush. You are forgiven, however, for still being fixated on Aaron Johnson’s stirring phantasmagoric artwork.

Lifted from the Jeremyriad blog is this quote from the artist about the origins of the piece:

“Now We Hunt Hippopotamus is a convergen ce of disparate influences, specifically including The Hippopotamus Hunt by Rubens (one of my favorite paintings by one of my favorite painters), Indian firecracker graphics (which I discovered traveling in India in 2005, a trip that completely exploded my color palette), and the David Lynch film Wild at Heart (the title of this piece comes from torrid moment when Isabella Rossellini stares down the barrel of her pistol pointed at the camera shouting ‘Now We Hunt Buffalo!’).”

Continue reading »

TUMBLEWEED DEALER: “DARK GREEN”

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Nov 202025
 

(Our site has had a long and warm relationship with the Canadian musician Seb Painchaud, whose year-end lists have always provided eclectic cornucopias of music for all of us to investigate. His band Tumbleweed Dealer released a fascinating new album way back in February of this year, an album that really needed the unusual voice of Vizzah Harri to express a review of it — which at last he has managed to do. It was worth the wait.)

Sometimes if we don’t carefully watch our daily intake of the ‘terribles’ online, it can seem a bit too much Everything Everywhere All At Once (warning, flashing images). It is good to keep oneself updated if any online life or profile exists because outside of our daily intake of horror, two pretty big leaks of personal data happened over the space of about 8 months. The Internet Archive (NPR link) was one, and on Saturday June 21st this one got confirmed too. It’s an AP link, not an attempt to hack you.

You won’t exactly need a machete to hack your way into the shadowy thickets of marshy vegetation when imagining the source material; but Tumbleweed Dealer’s album Dark Green pays tribute to one of the greatest pieces of fiction stemming from the 20th century, Swamp Thing.

Now that I’ve primed your frame of reference with the perils of the internet and mentioned horror at least once, well, Alan Moore is known amongst other things as having been the mind behind the resurgence of said comic book back in 1987. It is available to borrow or buy on the internet archives (it is probably safe by now) and Moore’s introduction to The Saga of the Swamp Thing has some passages that are worth sharing here for still being applicable in today’s climate, and also regarding the record being discussed: Continue reading »

CKRAFT: “UNCOMMON GROUNDS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 122025
 

(Settle in, make some time, prepare for detours into a labyrinth of rabbit holes, and eventually reach a wildly inventive discussion of wildly inventive music. In other words, we have another remarkable review by Vizzah Harri, this time focusing on a remarkable album by the French band CKRAFT that was released way back in January of this waning year.)

One type of madness is to take pattern-seeking to the level where one actively looks for connections. It’s been pretty stormy in my neck of the woods this year. Not being able to account for how others experienced a year filled with despair for many, no-one can claim to be able to right or mend all wrongs on our earth in the current zeitgeist. There is however a criminally underplayed and underrated album that demands attention. It will be revealed after a bit of a detour. People that groan about nothing good coming out anymore are living under a rock and probably still send each other this meme for kicks.

Every now and then you hear a melody that reminds you of something else. Only recently becoming acquainted with Emerson, Lake & Palmer led me to listen to their Tarkus album and when Stones of years came around I was pinching myself to make sure I wasn’t dreaming. I heard that vocal melody before. I was like, this is Hail Spirit Noir, but it very obviously was not. Continue reading »

VAELRAVYN: “THE VEIL” AND “SUN GOD”

 SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Nov 072025
 

(In this feature our friend Vizzah Harri shares his thoughts about two singles this year released by the Tennessee collective Vaelravyn.)

Wikipedia lists nearly 150 sun gods throughout human history, roughly 17%, or 26 of them, are Filipino in origin. Interesting fact number one, The Philippines have around 1000 deities listed on the page for Filipino mythological figures. Way more water gods than lords of light, wonder why? Must be wet there or something, perhaps they don’t even have a word for drought? They do, it’s ‘tagtuyot’. Absent father jokes aside, I lost count at around 981 seeing, as I refuse to use LLM’s, and Wikipedia lists both mortals and immortals in their mythological figures of The Philippines article, and quite a few of the gods like Diwati aka D’wata and Kabunyan aka Kabunian crossbred across islands and waterways putting Zeus to shame, so the actual number of gods is hard to count.

Fact number two, if your name is Alan, I have only known two in my life and they both left impressions on me of being pure souls that took life by the horns and lived it to the full, but if your first or last name is Alan, you might want to go read that Wikipedia article up there cos you might get some weird looks if you ever decide to visit the wonderful country of The Philippines. Of the two gods with that name I spotted, one was a shapeshifting corpse thief and the other one a cannibal; someone needed to do the honest work of scouring the internet to make a weirdly adjacent point after all.

I’ve been in Vietnam too long, and one complaint I’ve often heard from students when they bemoan one of their most hated subjects, literature, is that the authors always had this wild-goose-chase tactic in their storylines, going all around the forest to come back to the tree of import. Guess it rubbed off on me. Continue reading »

I DON’T DO DRUGS, I AM DRUGS: “I DON’T DO DRUGS, I AM DRUGS”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  No Responses »
Nov 052025
 

(Vizzah Harri is both back home and back at NCS after a hiatus and has brought with him a group of reviews, with the following typically fascinating one focused on the 2025 album by I don’t do drugs, I am drugs from the UK.)

Delaying things can cause them to grow in size from a molehill into an impassable reach. That sheer face presenting its final summit you can’t even process for the valleys, outright tears and fissures in the earth leading up to it, woods less penetrable than a despot’s drive toward self-preservation, and stacked with ghoulish specters of the darkest deepest reaches of self-nebulized phantasmagoria of your brain that need more than a score of filthy twenties to roll to beat. Internalizing these beasties and challenges as this big thing you’ve got to surpass to attain a summit that does not exist in anyone else’s mind. And that is the scariest part.

Time is only the enemy if one so chooses to enter in melee against it. Harrowers of darkened benthic silts. Grubbing and raking, digging deep with numb appendages in them already murky waters of untruth, to meet that sweetest slice and gash, that prick and tear, that hack and rip, of the bloodletting surety of the acidulous blades and pincers of veritas. Fleeting elation as that sinking in and setting of sedimental disdain for the passage of sands still nascently swishing in the alluvial flow of streams and seas of air. Continue reading »

SMIQRA: “RGYAĠDŹÉ!”

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Nov 042025
 

(NCS contributor Vizzah Harri, domiciled in Vietnam since his first appearance here, has now returned home to South Africa. But the change of scene hasn’t affected his unmistakable and inimitable writing style, as you’ll see from his review of the first album by Smiqra, which is a different guise for the person behind Ὁπλίτης [Hoplites].)

I’ll be honest, I’ve been sitting on this review for a long time and it came to the point where I realized it might never happen. It perhaps stems from a feeling of inadequacy. I don’t think anyone will be able to write about this album with an honesty and attention to detail without missing something. The unpronounceable Rɡyaɡ̇dźé! might not make it to the top of many AOTY lists this year, apart from the underground, for music that takes a few leaps outside the bounds of what our usual comprehension of what a ‘type’ of music should sound like can be seen as simply an oddity, flash in the pan.

If an album starts on musical hijinks as an inside joke, breaking the 4th wall so to speak, for heading to Bandcamp the track loaded into the player ready to fire is number 9, Major Revision!; it’s a nice way of informing us that what we’re dealing with is a meme of the highest order. Continue reading »

WE INTERRUPT YOUR USUAL FLOW WITH THE SOUR RISKS OF A CEMETERY TRIP DOWN MEMORY LANE

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Sep 232025
 

(We are delighted that Vizzah Harri (South Africa born and Vietnam resident) has returned to us after some time away, and has brought with him a typically distinctive review of Sour Risk, a new album released in September by Cemetery Trip, preceded by typically distinctive reviews of all the Cemetery Trip releases that have preceded it.)

There are times when we just want more of the same, stuff of old that we grew up with or last year’s best but perhaps by now worn out overplayed. We are all creatures of habit and we can all fall for the trap of thinking deviating from course would be less fruitful than staying it. In metal lore there are the supposed big shifts of note when bands take an avant-garde or post-ish turn, perhaps they stopped growling or even using riffs for that matter! Gasp, the horror.

There was a time that I was appalled by the idea of change. Continue reading »

THE ABCs OF REPRESSION — TWO SINGLES AND AN EP BY ZNOUS AND TRANSGRESSIVE

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jul 312025
 

(The following essay and its Appendix were written by our South Africa-born and Vietnam-located contributor Vizzah Harri.)

This is not going to be an easy read. If you are triggered by words that end in -isms, especially abstract concepts that have real-world consequences on the life and liquidation of innocents, you know, the ignorant kind, then you won’t get further than the next paragraph.

Abusive, brainwashed, callous.

Archaic bellicose construct.

Avaricious bloodsucking cowards.

Abhorrently bootlicking chauvinists.

The ABCs of Repression Fascism

“كانت يديه تضفر أحشاء الكاهن

، إذا لم يكن لديه حبل ، لخنق الملوك”

“וידיו היו קולעות את מעי הכהן,

בהיעדר חבל, לחנוק מלכים”

“And his hands would plait the priest’s entrails,

For want of a rope, to strangle kings.”

 – alternative translations of the infamous Denis Diderot quote. Continue reading »

THE SUN DOES NOT SET ON THE “SONS OF SET”: A REVIEW OF LYCOPOLIS’ NEW FULL LENGTH

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Jun 262025
 

(After a months’ long hiatus our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri has arisen again to write (as only he can) about a new album from the Egyptian black metal band Lycopolis, and many other wide-ranging subjects that the music led him into.)

Let’s play a game?

The adults running things are playing lots of games out there these days that started out as silly and became rather fucking terrifying of late.

Our game is simple.

Go to Bandcamp.

Type Sons of Set.

Play Eldest Son.

Try to sit still.

Fuckit, I’ll spare you the effort, here it is:

Verify human?

Success! You’re not a robot if you failed, though if you were absolutely comatose the past 117 seconds, please call a doctor.

Continue reading »

CHRONICLING CORRODED CRENELATIONS OF RESONANCE – LONGFORM MUSINGS ON KOKESHI, MESARTHIM, IMPERIAL TRIUMPHANT, LYCOPOLIS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jan 202025
 

(As the title of this post signifies, our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri shares some thoughts about new music by kokeshi, Mesarthim, Imperial Triumphant, and Lycopolis, but in this month of beginnings and transitions he also shares a great many other abundantly-linked thoughts before getting there, many of them concerning “theft and intertextuality within music.”)

“The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far.” – ultimate guitar user quote… originally by H.P. Lovecraft

It was 210 days left in my 40th year when I started writing this. One of my exes recently said the reason I’ll remain single for life is because I refuse to grow up, probably also why my articles read like they were written by a teenager on crack. 210 is a Harshad number. Harshad originates from the Sanskrit harṣa (joy) + da (give), meaning joy-giver. I for one rejoice in the bliss of discovering new music gushing in from my headphones.

2024 was the year of the dragon, a word which finds its origin in the Greek drakōn or ‘serpent’. 2025 will be the year of the snake, from 蛇 or Shé in traditional Chinese, or Hebi in Japanese Kanji which refers to “the winding thing.” This bodes well for what is to come for the dragon sharing so much of its hoard with us in music. And their etymologies being so linked one could only imagine 2025 to be as prodigious in output. Continue reading »

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