NEW MUSIC FROM KRODA, SKELETAL REMAINS, AND TIAMAT

In this post I’ve collected three new songs I heard earlier today that I wanted to recommend. They’re all quite different from each other, sharing only a common devotion to the darkness.

KRODA

Long-term NCS readers will know this Ukrainian band because I’ve written about them so often (their 2011 album Schwarzpfad was probably my favorite black metal album out of all the ones I heard last year, and I included a song-stream from the album on our list of the 2011’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs). But we continue to pick up new readers at a steady clip, and the band’s new recording gives me an excuse to introduce them to our new followers.

As previously reported at this site, Kroda will be releasing a live album in the form of a combined CD and DVD under the title HelCarpathian Black Metal – Heil Ragnarok: Live Under Hexenhammer, which was recorded and filmed in Moscow. Today the band announced that mixing and mastering of the album is now complete and that it will be released as a digipack edition later this winter. They also released one of the live tracks for streaming.

It’s a cover of a song called “Noregsgard” by the Norwegian band Storm (which included Fenriz [Darkthrone] and Satyr [Satyricon]) from their 1995 Nordavind album. I believe the song, even as originally recorded by Storm, was a metallicized version of a folk tune, and Kroda’s performance, which includes both flute and clean vocals, definitely has a pagan/folk air. But it’s still pretty fuckin’ heavy. I like it a lot.

Check it out:

 

SKELETAL REMAINS

Skeletal Remains are a California band whose debut album Beyond the Flesh will be released by FDA Rekotz on November 9. I’ve just started listening to it, but I can already tell it’s a death metal gem. It has a strong flavor of early Pestilence and Death, delivering the rotten smell of the crypt with a flair of creative technicality, rhythmic diversity, and some attention-grabbing solos and melodies. It’s definitely old-school music, but it’s a cut above much of what’s coming out these days in the surging old-school death metal revival that we’re witnessing.

So far, two of the songs on the album have debuted for public listening, with the second one (“Desolate Isolation”) being released today. I’ll embed that one first, followed by the previously released song, “Extirpated Vitality”. Strong stuff.
 

 

 

TIAMAT

There was a time when I wouldn’t have paid attention to new music from Sweden’s Tiamat. Despite their very long career and extensive discography, the few times in the past when I randomly heard a song or two convinced me that that their style of gothic rock/metal just wasn’t extreme enough to hold my peculiar interest. Yet over the nearly three years I’ve been operating NCS my musical horizons have been (slowly) expanding, and we’ve been including more Exceptions to the Rule than we used to as time has passed — and here we have another one.

Tiamat’s new album is The Scarred People, and it’s scheduled for release by Napalm Records on November 6 (pre-order here). Today, Napalm released a surrealistic music video for the title track starring Tiamat’s frontman Johan Edlund. The song has worked its way under my skin. I’m not exactly in love yet, but intrigued enough to sniff around this album some more. Do we have any Tiamat fans in the audience? If so, what do you think of this?