Here are a few things I saw and heard last night and this morning that I thought were worth your time.
Of course, I don’t know exactly what you do with your time, or how valuable your time is, or what potentially horrible consequences might result if you spent time listening to this music instead of doing what you would be doing if you weren’t listening to this music. So, I guess you could say I’m being presumptuous. I prefer to believe that I’m enriching your miserable lives with the beauty and joy of good metal, compared to which most things are drab and stultifying, including your lives.
ITEM ONE: NEKROMANTHEON
This item came my way from KevinP, who believes that I do not need erectile dysfunction drugs because I pop wood over almost every metal band on the planet. He sent me a link about a band named Nekromantheon. The fact that I like their music in no way validates his own opinion about it, because my own standards are so low. Perhaps sending me links such as this is KevinP’s subtle way of trying to raise my standards. If so, that’s a mission doomed to failure. I like what I like, and if you don’t like it, fuck you. (I’m not talking about YOU when I say that; I’m referring to that one person who stopped reading NCS because he thought my standards were too low. Of course, there’s only one such person, ever, or ever will be.)
Nekromantheon is from Norway and the style of their music is a certain kind of thrash. But it’s not let’s-get-drunk-and-fuck thrash. It’s more like let’s-find-innocent-children-and-sacrifice-them-to-Cthulhu thrash.
Despite my low standards, thrash is generally one of my least favorite genres of metal. I like the riffage, but generally don’t like the traditional vocal style, and I find that the music of most of the nu-thrash/re-thrash bands who’ve been popping up like a rash of hemorrhoids is kinda samey. But the few songs I’ve heard from Nekromanthean just sound raw and evil, including the acid-bathed vocals.
That’s especially true of their newest track, “Blood Wisdom”, which premiered on DECIBEL’s site yesterday. It’s from the band’s new album Rise, Vulcan Spectre, which will be released on January 31 by Indie Recordings (pre-order here). Immerse yourself in the filthiness by going over to DECIBEL for a listen. I’m putting the SoundCloud player here for posterity, because eventually this will work when DECIBEL’s exclusivity period expires.
Nekromantheon – Blood Wisdom by Decibel Magazine
And here’s the title track from the band’s 2010 debut album, Divinity of Death.
ITEM TWO: KRODA
If you’ve been reading NCS for very long at all, then you know about Kroda. We’ve written about Kroda often enough that one might think we’ve anointed ourselves the band’s unofficial, unpaid publicist. But really, we just love the fuck out of the band’s HelCarpathian black metal, which is a fusion of folk-tinged melodies and pure hellfire. (Our latest mention of Kroda’s 2011 album Schwarzpfad was in Andy Synn’s list of the year’s Critical Top 10 albums).
On December 18, Kroda played a live set at the OSKOREI festival in Kiev, Ukraine, and video of the show has already surfaced. Here’s a clip of Kroda playing a song called “Universal Provenances”, which is the second track on Schwarzpfad. More clips from this show can be found on YouTube.
ITEM THREE: INTERVALS
Intervals is a Canadian band who today have released a debut EP called The Space Between. I found out about the band from TheMadIsraeli, who pointed out that the album was mixed and mastered by Adam “Nolly” Getgood, one of the progenitors of the djent movement and the guitarist in a UK band called Red Seas Fire, whose debut EP we reviewed here.
The Intervals EP is now up on Bandcamp (HERE) and can be downloaded for free or with a “name your price” option. I’ve been jammin’ the EP this morning and am enthralled. It’s instrumental music, but it’s so well-executed and so variable that vocals would be a distraction more than an enhancement.
It will get slapped with the “djent” label, no doubt, because it includes those trademark, Meshuggah-style rhythmic punches, but it’s equally an offering of mood-changing progressive metal with ambient keys (that don’t get overused), impressive guitar leads and solo’s (that occasionally break into bouts of jazz fusion), and a rhythm section that’s tight as a drumhead. I’m really diggin’ this noise.
Interval’s Facebook page is HERE. And this is the EP: