OUR LIST OF 2019’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 19): SORCERY, WARCRAB, TO DUST

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2019  5 Responses »
Jan 302020
 

 

Well, those of you who’ve been following this list know that I fucked up and didn’t post the next installment yesterday. I had some unforeseen and immediate obligations to deal with in my personal life. It was all I could do to write the premieres I had promised for yesterday. So now (if you’ve been counting), I have two missed days to make up. It’s looking more and more likely that I won’t finish by the end of January after all.

Excuses aside, today’s episode is another one in which I didn’t try to group songs that shared strong stylistic similarities and instead just wanted to make sure that I put these songs on the list before time ran out. Still, I do think they make a great playlist.

SORCERY

I gave a hint not long ago that there would be a Sorcery song on this list, and so there is, just as there was in the 2013 and 2016 editions of this list. Basically, with every album these Swedes have put out since their resurrection after a long dormancy, I’ve become so addicted to their songs that I’ve felt compelled to honor them in this way. Continue reading »

BEST OF BRITISH 2019: DĀMIM / KRYSTHLA / WARCRAB

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 202019
 

 

(Here’s another installment of Andy Synn‘s occasional series devoted to reviews of new releases by UK bands.)

If there’s one thing I often find a little disappointing about the UK Metal scene it’s that many of our “bigger” underground acts seem content just playing it safe and being little more than a big fish in a relatively small pond.

The following three bands, however, are different, in that not only are they each more than capable of taking on the bigger names and more famous faces of the Metal world at their own game, but they also seem more than willing to risk doing so! Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: WARCRAB — “KRAKEN ARISE”

 Premieres  5 Responses »
Jun 192019
 

 

For my comrades and myself here at our putrid site, WarCrab’s second album, Scars of Aeons, was one of the biggest, brightest, and stupendously heaviest discoveries of 2016. Grant Skelton named it to his list of the year’s best death metal albums. I included a track from the album on our list of 2016’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. And Andy Synn praised the album in his review with these pungent words:

“With a sound that can best be described as a humongous hybrid of the chugging, churning assault of classic Bolt Thrower, the swaggering, sludge-soaked grooves of Crowbar, and the sheer, merciless morbidity of Autopsy at their doomiest, Scars of Aeonsis one heck of a weighty listen. There are riffs here which are heavy enough to break an elephant’s back, and slithering grooves as thick and meaty as an anaconda on steroids.

“In fact I’m surprised this album doesn’t come with an attached safety warning and a recommendation that listeners wear a hard-hat at all times in order to prevent cranial trauma. It really is that [expletive deleted] heavy!”

The news that these sludge/death heavyweights would be releasing a third album this summer (through Transcending Obscurity Records) was thus cause in these quarters for a mixture of excitement and dread — the skull fractures from the last record are almost healed, but new ones will undoubtedly now be opened, and there’s no getting back those inches of height lost in the last pounding, only more to lose as WarCrab drive us into the pavement once more. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: WARCRAB — “DESTROYER OF WORLDS”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Mar 232017
 

 

For my comrades and I here at our putrid site, WarCrab’s album Scars of Aeons was one of the biggest, brightest, and stupendously heaviest discoveries of 2016. Grant Skelton named it to his list of the year’s best death metal albums. I included a track from the album on our list of 2016’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. And Andy Synn praised the album in his review with these pungent words:

“With a sound that can best be described as a humongous hybrid of the chugging, churning assault of classic Bolt Thrower, the swaggering, sludge-soaked grooves of Crowbar, and the sheer, merciless morbidity of Autopsy at their doomiest, Scars of Aeons is one heck of a weighty listen. There are riffs here which are heavy enough to break an elephant’s back, and slithering grooves as thick and meaty as an anaconda on steroids.

“In fact I’m surprised this album doesn’t come with an attached safety warning and a recommendation that listeners wear a hard-hat at all times in order to prevent cranial trauma. It really is that [expletive deleted] heavy!” Continue reading »

WARCRAB: “SCARS OF AEONS”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Feb 062017
 

 

(Here’s Andy Synn’s review of the latest album by the British band WarCrab.)

Over the course of 2016 I managed to successfully cover a host of fantastic bands from the UK (often, but not always, under the “Best of British” banner) spanning a wide variety of metallic sub-genres, from the pitch-black perfection of Wode and the doomy proggery of King Goat, to the unfathomable brutality of Unfathomable Ruination, the knee-cap shattering aggression of Venom Prison, and the grandstanding gallop of Wretched Soul… and beyond.

But even with all these, there were still several bands whose works went uncelebrated, and chief amongst them were the mighty WarCrab and their titanic second album Scars of Aeons. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2016’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 17): WARCRAB, HEAVEN SHALL BURN, UR

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2016  13 Responses »
Jan 252017
 

 

In this 17th part of our 2016 Most Infectious Song list, I’m adding three songs that were all made for headbanging, or at least vigorous head-nodding, knee-bobbing, and toe-tapping, even though they’re scattered across different parts of the metal musical map.

WARCRAB

I’ve been meaning to write about WarCrab and their 2016 album Scars of Aeons (released digitally by Black Bow Records) but so far haven’t succeeded. The album did appear on Grant Skelton’s year-end list, where he wrote: “Warcrab’s breed of deathened sludge (sludgened death??) is certain to quench your rapacity for beefy slow-to-mid death metal”. And on May 1 of this year, the album is going to be released on CD for the first time by Transcending Obscurity. Continue reading »