AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): CURSED CEMETERY — “MAGMA TRANSMIGRATION”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 172024
 

(written by Islander)

In the nearly 15 years of our site’s existence our changing cadre of writers have listened to a mountainous quantity of metal, but if any of us have spent time with the music of the Romanian band Cursed Cemetery we must have kept our thoughts to ourselves. Because until last month, their name has not been mentioned in any of our 15,918 articles, despite the fact that since 2007 they released four albums.

But now Cursed Cemetery are on the eve of releasing a fifth album (on the Dusktone label), and finally we’re paying attention, and wondering what we missed across the years when the first four dropped.

The new album, Magma Transmigration, is a mountainous piece of music itself, a massive and daunting range with four imposing peaks, just four songs but each of them exceeding 10 minutes in length and two of them topping 15. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE: OAK, ASH & THORN; FRACTAL GATES

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 172024
 

(This makes the fourth, and apparently final, installment of DGR‘s effort to clear out a backlog of reviews he’s been pondering for releases spread across earlier months of the year, clearing the decks for the year-end NCS orgy ahead.)

It is wild, staring at the review collective and realizing you’re down to the last two.

The best time to write one of these is not directly after one has woken up, I’ve learned. Something about the brain still trying to wander itself out of the fog with nary a static radio signal and flashlight for help tends to make one’s writing look as if it slid off the side of a mountain.

The artist’s curse is still a minor player at the poker table though, given that some of your best ideas usually arrive in the shower, the drive home from work, or the second before you hit deep sleep, so that’s not to say I still won’t be attempting to do so as if writing right after I’m waking up for the day is preserving some sort of the mental cacophony I’ve tried to piece together for the final one of this initial review pile. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: VÖLVA — “THE TOWER”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Oct 162024
 

Sweden’s “avenging witches of black metal,” Völva, opened a lot of eyes and ears with their 2020 debut EP Promises Unfold as Lies, and they will open more with their forthcoming debut album Desires Profane, now set for release on November 28th by Grind To Death Records (CD) and Fiadh Productions (vinyl).

The album is described as “ten hymns to the lost souls of their persecuted sisters, incinerated upon the murderous bonfires of Christianity,” as “a scalding assault of vehement rage,” and as a pursuit of “themes of Satanic feminism both in a spiritual cosmic sense as well as using your free will, body and lust as vessels to sin for a higher purpose”.

As a vivid sign of what the new album brings, today we premiere a video of Völva performing a song called “The Tower,” which opens the album, filmed in the setting of Studio Quaalude, a recording studio located in Malmö. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: TROLLWAR — “BANE OF THE UNDERWORLD”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 162024
 

On November 15th the Quebec-based melodic symphonic metal band Trollwar will release their fifth record, an EP named Tales from the Frozen Wastes. It doesn’t take much guesswork to assert that the EP’s cover art will seize the attention of listeners, even those who haven’t yet encountered Trollwar‘s previous releases. In addition to depicting a fantastic setting it also connects to the album’s music.

As Trollwar have explained (and as you can see): “The artwork represents the journey to the underworld, with a desolate land, ruled by a higher force, where darkness looms over all. Yet still, through this evil sky, light can be seen piercing the night…. This visual representation perfectly captures the essence of Trollwar’s music – epic and hopeful, yet dark and malicious.”

You will have a good chance to investigate these claims today through our premiere of a song from the new album named “Bane of the Underworld“. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: ELDINGAR — “ARES”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 162024
 

(written by Islander)

When the Greek metal band Eldingar released their debut album Maenads in 2021, our own Andy Synn extolled it in his review as embodying a “sense of seminal spirit and elemental exuberance which dates all the way back to the dawn of the Hellenic scene.”

He called it an album that “sits proudly at a nexus point between Black Metal, Melodic Death Metal, and good old Heavy Metal, and practically revels in its hybrid identity,” a “tribute to the metallic majesty of a bygone era” and one that might “also help return it to its former glory.”

We are thus fortunate that Eldingar will soon return with a second album, and its name is Lysistrata. What Andy wrote before holds true again. As before, the music is stylistically multi-faceted and emotionally powerful, viscerally affecting in many ways. Also as before, it’s rooted in compelling philosophical concepts that have a current-day relevance, even though often expressed through ancient Greek traditions and mythologies. Eldingar‘s label describes the themes this way: Continue reading »

SCHAMMASCH – THE MALDOROR CHANTS: OLD OCEAN

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 162024
 

(Andy Synn plumbs the depths of the new album from Schammasch, out next Friday)

Let me tell you something – I regard Schammasch‘s stunning second album, the now decade-old duology entitled Contradiction, to be one of the finest, yet also most underrated, Black Metal albums of the post-millennium period.

And while I understand and appreciate (and, to an extent, share) the love for Triangle – their even more ambitious triple-disc follow-up – and the way it allowed them to explore three subtly different aspects of their sound,  the truth is that nothing since then has quite managed to achieve that same balance between esoteric creativity and focussed fluidity (with 2019’s Hearts of No Light in particular being a collection of artistically intriguing tracks which still, somehow, felt like less than the sum of its parts).

So when I say that Old Ocean is, in my opinion at least, the band’s strongest, most consistent, and most captivating work since 2014… you’ll understand how much that means.

Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: DETEST THE SUN — “SILENT SUFFERING”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 152024
 

(written by Islander)

Detest the Sun is a Louisiana-based one-man project started by Howl in 2023, devoted to “the true spirit of southern melodic black metal”. Following a two-song demo self-released last April, Detest the Sun will now see the release by Void Wanderer Productions of the project’s first album (or EP, depending on how you consider a half-hour runtime).

The new record is named Moonspells and Everlasting Sorrow, and Void Wanderer portrays it in these terms:

“As darkness claims over the Earth, with it Detest the Sun unleashes its debut album of pure cold, melancholic grimness. With the beauty of melody behind the ice, wielding invective curses behind each verse, you shall be locked within a trance. A trance so abysmal as a buried spirit beneath the deepest cavern, but with this trance, you shall become victim to its nocturnal rite.”

As a more tangible sign of what the album encompasses, we’re now premiering one of its X tracks, a song named “Silent Suffering“. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): DEAMONOLITH — “THE MONOLITHIC CULT OF DEATH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Oct 152024
 

(written by Islander)

The debut album from the Polish band Deamonolith is unusual. First, it comes with cover art by Michał “Xaay” Loranc (based on a concept by the band’s two founders) that will stop most people dead in their tracks when they see it.

Second, the album is just a single song — a single track that’s 35 minutes long.

Third, and most important, although the members of Deamonolith have been active in the metal scene since the 1990s and have made death metal the core of their first album, it’s far away from some kind of “OSDM” re-tread. Instead, it’s an enormously ambitious and thoroughly jaw-dropping extravaganza that pulls freely from multiple genres of music, both within and outside of extreme metal.

That’s a conclusion you might infer when you discover that the album’s music includes such ingredients as saxophone, classical guitar, piano, clean male and female vocals and choirs, and dark ambient accents. But you needn’t rely on inference, because today we’re premiering The Monolithic Cult of Death in its entirety, just a few days away from its co-release by Godz Ov War Production and Ancient Dead Productions. Continue reading »

VOMIT FORTH – TERRIFIED OF GOD

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Oct 152024
 

(Andy Synn says that when you’re as heavy as Vomit Forth it doesn’t really matter what they call you)

It’s funny how the use of certain words, certain terms, can prompt such drastically different reactions.

Case in point, if I were to call the new album from Connecticut crushers Vomit Forth a “Death Metal” album there’d be a bunch of people who’d immediately go and check it out purely because of that… and just as many people ready to string me up for daring to call it that.

But if I were to call it a “Deathcore” album? Well, those self-same people would either immediately hate it… or get mad at me for insulting the band.

The thing is – after having listened to it a hell of a lot over the last week or two – Terrified of God absolutely is what I’d call a “Deathcore” record… one which has just as much in common with the likes of The Acacia Strain and Black Tongue as it does Cannibal Corpse or Suffocation… but that’s nothing to be afraid of!

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: KAM LEE (MASSACRE)

 Interviews  No Responses »
Oct 152024
 

(Our Comrade Aleks is best-known at our site for interviewing musicians in the genres of doom and black metal, but he dived deep into the molten core of death metal with this interview of the legendary Kam Lee. Maybe it was the shared love of Lovecraft that created the connection?)

Kam Lee doesn’t need a special introduction. Being one of the most prolific American death metal vocalists, he started with Mantas and Death in 1983, and performed with a lot of bands including Bone Gnawer, Massacre, The Grotesquery, and many more. Lovecraftian horrors, horror movies and related cultural influences were the fundament of his lyrics for almost 40 years and became a trademark of the bands in which he was involved, as well as his primordial growl.

His return to Massacre in 2019 opened a new chapter in the band’s career, as Kam, with the help of Mike Borders (bass) and ultra-prolific Rogga Johansson (guitars), breathed new life into the old entity. The most recent demonstration of their fruitful collaboration is the Necrolution album, which will be released by Agonia Records on November 8th. I’m grateful to Kam for his patience and this great interview we managed to do. Continue reading »

 Older Entries