SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: BOLESKINE HOUSE, CROCELL, GÖDEN, UDOLS, WEREWOLVES

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Apr 132024
 

Following up yesterday’s roundup of recommended new songs and videos, here’s another — five more to help get your weekend off on the wrong foot.

BOLESKINE HOUSE (Italy)

The name of the debut album from Boleskine House is Miserabilist Blues. The ringing guitar harmony that opens the long song I’ve chosen to begin today’s collection is indeed miserable and blue, but “Black House Painters” transforms that feeling of aching loneliness by then processing the melody through a lens of frantic blackened riffing, tumultuous percussion, and abyssal roars. Continue reading »

WEREWOLVES: “MY ENEMIES LOOK AND SOUND LIKE ME”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 212023
 

(In the review below, DGR explains at length why he has had so much dumb fun with the latest Werewolves album, which Prosthetic Records released earlier this month.)

Credit where credit is due: Werewolves know exactly what they’re doing in their year-over year churn to see just how much the metal community is willing to let them get away with.

They continue their hot streak of fantastic album titles with their newest release entitled My Enemies Look And Sound Like Me, and when you open one of your videos with a set of knuckles being literally dragged across the ground, the ability to plead the fifth on the accusation of having fun with just how dumb they make their music flies right out the window. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2022’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 18): SPIRITWORLD, WEREWOLVES, THE ANTICHRIST IMPERIUM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  No Responses »
Jan 252023
 

Unlike in a few past years, this year I’ve had time to complete and post a new installment of this list every weekday since I started rolling it out. What I’ve got ahead of me today created a serious risk I wouldn’t get this 18th Part finished in time. So, in a hurry, I’ll truncate the intro:

OK boys and girls, it’s time to tear off your clothes and go running wild into the streets! Unless you’re over 40, and then it might be best if you kept your clothes on, out of consideration for the neighbors.

SPIRITWORLD (U.S.)

If you’ve never seen SpiritWorld live on stage I strongly encourage you to beg, borrow, or steal whatever you need to buy a ticket and get to a show, even if the closest venue is Siberia. I saw them play Northwest Terror Fest in Seattle last year, and man, what a fucking revelation that was. I’d only heard a few songs off their first album, and their second one (Deathwestern) wasn’t due out until five months later, so I didn’t have a very good idea of to expect. I sure as hell didn’t know how they’d be dressed. Continue reading »

GONZO’S BIGASS END-OF-SUMMER ROUNDUP, PART 1

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Sep 012022
 


Final Light

(Our Denver-based friend Gonzo has brought us the first installment in a round-up of new albums that emerged this summer which caught his attention and kindled his enthusiasm.)

Look, I know it’s customary to open these kinds of seasonally themed posts with some quip about “WOW, THE SUMMER REALLY FLEW BY, DIDN’T IT?” but frankly, that sort of cheekiness is an abomination I simply won’t fucking stand for, let alone perpetuate.

What I will say is that this summer delivered. It was the sort of long-overdue event that saw yours truly being able to travel to some US-based festivals, which was something I’d been longing for. Fire in the Mountain was by far the highlight. I also managed to hit an average of two shows a week during all of this, mostly around Denver. On top of all this, I pulled a requisite turn-and-burn in Vegas earlier this month for a single night of Psycho, in which I finally saw Emperor take the stage and proceed to blast my face into another dimension. To say it was worth the 22-year wait would be the understatement of the year.

The point of me saying all this is during all of the above, I was a bad NCS writer and couldn’t quite keep up my monthly tradition of yelling at the internet about the new music I’ve been listening to. So, consider this me making up for lost time:

This is part one of my end-of-summer new music roundup, with albums spanning from June to August. Continue reading »

WEREWOLVES: “DEATHMETAL” AND “FROM THE CAVE TO THE GRAVE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 112022
 


Photographer credit: Rob Brens

(We continue our week-long series of reviews wherein DGR is doing a lot of catching up, and today he tackles not one but two 2022 releases by the same band, the Australian extremists in Werewolves.)

I get the sneaking suspicion that Werewolves‘ style of music works fantastically well for each person one time and after that it’s a little bit more give and take. Your first album with them is the revelation of how gloriously stupid and how intentionally so the Werewolves‘ brand of music is, and then once that becomes the high mark, everything is a little bit more even-keeled in spite how teeth-gnashing and vicious things may appear from there out.

For me, it was the group’s 2021 album What A Time To Be Alive, which was basically an album of deathgrind front-to-back with almost no chance to breathe. It was an album that basically felt ‘needed’ when it landed with, even if the overall approach was one-note as all hell.

Werewolves have achieved a rapid clip in terms of releasing music as well, essentially going year-over-year since the release of their debut album The Dead Are Screaming. 2022 alone has brought us the release of their latest album From The Cave To The Grave as well as a four-song EP simply called Deathmetal. We’re late to the bus on both, so this rumination needed to cover both releases, but that sure as hell isn’t going to stop us now. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SPECTRAL WOUND, WEREWOLVES, MNHG, SOLAR DEMISE, WOLFANGER, FEAST FOR THE CROWS, MATT HECKLER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Feb 202021
 

 

There’s always a kind of random quality about these weekend round-ups, mainly because what I choose to investigate in my listening is itself a very random process. This one may be more random than most because I jumped around in my listening list to make sure I included some groups I knew nothing about, and wound up picking some of those for the last four items in the following collection. I also decided to throw you a big curveball at the end.

SPECTRAL WOUND (Canada)

I easily could have saved this first song for tomorrow’s SHADES OF BLACK column, but it put such a thrill in me when I first heard it this morning that it would have pained me too wait. It’s such a glorious bonfire of sound, a racing whirl of exultant harmonized riffing, scorching vocals, and jet-speed drumming (which occasionally shifts gears). There’s a brief (and unnecessary) interlude in the middle, and then we’re right back in the midst of this brilliant spinning pillar of fire. Ironically, the name of the song is “Frigid and Spellbound“. Continue reading »

WEREWOLVES: “WHAT A TIME TO BE ALIVE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Feb 022021
 

 

(We’re wolves and so are you and so are Werewolves, whose mission in life is to make you wolves with a serious IQ deficit. Nathan Ferreira wrote this completely fitting review of this band’s second album, which is out now on Prosthetic Records.)

Hey there, NCS readers! Do you want to get stupid?

Of course you do, you’re on a website that exclusively covers harsh, heavy music. Well, I’ve got just the band for you: Werewolves. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 2): MASS WORSHIP, KHEMMIS, NITE, ORANSSI PAZUZU, ORPHANS OF DOOM, PANZERFAUST, REVULSION, SECRETS OF THE MOON, SICARIUS, TEMPLE OF VOID, WEREWOLVES

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Mar 142020
 

 

Many of us here in the U.S., as elsewhere, are essentially stuck at home. We’re supposed to stay away from our fellow human beings, and there’s not much to do away from home anyway. Fortunately, the virus hasn’t infected the internet so I can still eject new songs and videos at your head, which I’ve been doing at great volume today — a dozen of them in Part 1 of this post (here), and almost another dozen in this one. I mean, what the hell else do you have to do?

Once again, everything is organized in alphabetical order by band name, picking up from the items in Part 1, and I’ve again truncated my usual commentary.

MASS WORSHIP (Sweden)

Get seduced by the dual-guitar intro, stay for the jackhammering of your neck and the vocal scorching of your face… a bitter and battering experience. Continue reading »

NETRA FEATURING WE’REWOLVES: “DREADING CONSCIOUSNESS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  7 Responses »
Nov 242013
 

I’m probably one of the least qualified people imaginable to review this new EP. However, every day I read about, and occasionally meet, all manner of motherfuckers who are unqualified to do what they are doing, so I don’t know why that should stop me. Besides, unlike all the motherfuckers to whom I refer, at least I’m being honest about my lack of qualifications. Putting to one side the question why you should continue reading this review in light of my disclosure, I shall forge ahead.

The title of this EP is Dreading Consciouness and it was released on November 18 by Canada-based Hypnotic Dirge Records. That label releases an eclectic range of music, but Dreading Consciousness is an odd one even for them. It’s a collaboration between netra (the one-man project of Steven LeMoan, a Frenchman who now lives in Norway) and an underground rap duo (Hockeymask and Konsept) who call themselves We’rewolves. Netra provides the music, We’rewolves the rhymes.

And here’s where my lack of qualifications come in — because I am not well-versed in either the kind of trip-hop backing music that dominates most of the three songs on the EP or hip-hop, yet I do like this. Continue reading »