SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ENSHINE, CRYPTOPSY, NECROSAVANT, FOREVER OBSCURED

 

(DGR steps up for round-up duty, and he prepared a really big round-up, so big that your humble editor decided to divide it into two parts.)

In case you missed it, Friday was a kind of slow date for the site. We’ve had times like this before, where various outside influences conspire to make sure that we post with the speed at which animals are able to escape the La Brea Tar Pits. That doesn’t mean we weren’t up here in space, lookin’ down on you and keeping track of various rumblings going throughout the web.

I’ve gathered together eight fairly recent developments in the heavy metal world for you all to enjoy. As usual, I’ve tried to catch stuff that has flown under the radar and mix it in with a few things that have likely made a big splash across the web already. This collection of stories covers a pretty good swath of the globe in terms of distance but has a foot heavily planted in the death metal and doom metal realms, making a few labored grasps to the outside genre world.

ENSHINE

In case you missed it, we here at NCS have a bit of a soft spot for the melo-doom band Enshine and all their related shenanigans. The group recently allowed us to premiere their song “Adrift”, and that song was an awesome teaser of things to come for the group’s upcoming album Singularity. Recently, Enshine uploaded another song to the web in the form of “Resurgence” and boy, in NCS parlance, is it a doozy.

 

 

There are two things you’ll notice immediately about “Resurgence” in comparison to “Adrift”, as well as most of Enshine’s prior output:  The first is that “Resurgence” is a faster song, and the second is that “Resurgence” also comes across as heavier because of it.

The opening section calls to mind Monolith-era In Mourning before descending into some apocalyptic doom and screaming. While Enshine have had an ethereal beauty to their sound before, the synth keyboards and symphonic effects take on a more sci-fi bent, staying in higher registers and playing colder-feeling melodies than before. The best parts of the song, though, are in the last two or so minutes, when things calm down for a brief second before the opening section returns in absolutely furious fashion, becoming a hammering rhythm to close out the whole affair.

To put it politely, I am really, really fucking excited for the new Enshine disc if “Adrift” and “Resurgence” are representative of what they have to offer to us. I need a soundtrack for when Winter comes to Sacramento and we hit a nice cool 85 degrees.

https://www.facebook.com/enshine.band

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CRYPTOPSY

Cryptopsy have been riding pretty high since their successful campaign to fund the group’s upcoming series of releases, The Book Of Suffering. As it stands right now, the group have set Tome I to release at the ass-end of October with four hefty songs splayed out within its bindings. Right now, you can pre-order Tome I via the group’s Bandcamp page and receive the song “Detritus (The One They Kept)” right now.

Speaking of “Detritus”, the group recently uploaded a music video for said song to this thing they call the internet, and it consists of performance footage interspliced with enough video-editing software filters to leave you blind. Judging by the opening alone, it seems like Cryptopsy are throwing themselves back to the era in which the opening minutes of their songs were just violent hurricanes of noise, as “Detritus” really doesn’t hit a groove to attach yourselves to until about a minute-fourteen in. Prior to that, the whole video is just the metaphorical filming of instruments being absolutely destroyed — with the bass guitar getting an especially hefty workout.

“Detritus” proves itself to be a mammoth of a song, though, stomping around and leaving naught but crater-sized footprints behind it. It seems like Cryptopsy are gunning to make sure people know that they’re one of those bands that make tech-death with the ease that a trained chef could make scrambled eggs.

The song, at the very least, leaves your brain with a similar consistency.

https://www.facebook.com/CryptopsyMetal

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

NECROSAVANT

We now take a quick breather from music that has been vomited forth recently to something that is on its way. Necrosavant is a solo project headed by musician Jonas Martinsson, who most recently has been sitting behind the kit for the band Majalis and in the case of Necrosavant is playing everything. He is trying to build up funding for Necrosavant’s upcoming album Aniara MMXIV.

We posted about Necrosavant what feels like ages ago at this point, and since then things have been relatively quiet on that front, up until about a week and a half ago when Jonas decided to launch a Kickstarter to help fund the release of said debut album. I have been excited for this project for a little while now, as the samples he’s been posting online have all sounded excellent and the roster of vocalists contributing to the album (beyond his own vocal work) has been an all-star collective of musicians in a seemingly small circle that seems to contain the guys from In Mourning, Ikhon, and Spasmodic/Volturyon.

In this case, he’s managed to get help from In Mourning vocalist Tobias Netzell, October Tide/Spasmodic/Centinex/Volturyon vocalist Alexander Högbom, and Ikhon/Majalis vocalist Daniel Jansson. Long story short, including his own voice, Jonas has managed to recruit a roster of voices from a handful of bands that I genuinely enjoy quite a bit, and even for the brief guest spots they may be filling, those guys are an arsenal.

Jonas describes the project on the Kickstarter page as follows:

My fascination for Harry Martinson’s amazing space poem Aniara. A Review of Man in Time and Space from 1956 inspired me to the point that I interpreted and composed music to it, in my own and unique way. Already in the mid-1950s, Harry Martinson wrote about that human existence and our destiny is in our own hands. That we must break our destructive behaviors for our own and our planet’s sake. That we must begin to realize the consequences of our actions. The poem may be just a poem, but if we do not do something about our and others’ actions, this planet will go straight to hell. This composition is a lamentation from the perspective where one foot is in the Harry Martinson’s brilliance, and the other foot in my personal musical fusion on the basis of the genre blackened death metal. My version and interpretation is entitled Aniara MMXIV. (Obviously, permits to this composition is fixed, and the rights holders to the text and the concept will get their share of the cake if or when Aniara MMXIV reaches the public eye.)

I started this project in 2014 and I finished now, a year later. It is no news to compose music to this poem. However, it has not been made in this unique way. I’ve done it in the genre blackened death metal. I have written and recorded everything himself and I play all the instruments. And I have invited fantastic guests such as Alexander Högbom (October Tide, Centinex, Volturyon, Spasmodic), Tobias Netzell (In Mourning, Majalis, Ex-October Tide) and Daniel Jansson (IKHON, Majalis). Recitation by Gabriella Åström (ME THE TIGER).

Right now, there are a little over sixteen days left for him to meet his modest goal of about $2,428 USD — which translates to about kr20,000 SEK, as Kickstarter describes it — and he is currently at $608. We’ve seen bands take this kind of approach before, with Kickstarters for tour vans, full-album financing, shirts, and everything in between, and in this case the Necrosavant project is basically functioning as an up-front pre-order.

I’ve pitched in my money as one of the early-bird t-shirt/CD backers, which added about twelve bucks to the order since it has to ship to the States, and I’m seriously hoping that he is able to clear this goal — because judging by the samples this project has put out so far, Aniara is shaping up to be a hell of a release.

Necrosavant Kickstarter here

https://www.facebook.com/Necrosavant-313728108792834/

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

FOREVER OBSCURED

Forever Obscured are a death metal band hailing from Modesto, California, who deal in the sort of death metal that is focused entirely on beefy, maddening guitar riffs and utter brutality from behind the drum kit. The group recently released a new album titled Insufflation Of Miscreation and have made a music video for the song “Sever The Taste”.

“Sever The Taste” serves as a good introduction to the band, as the whole song is just this violent swarm of different parts bolted together with whatever nails and screws the band could find. It’s a pretty good summary of just how heavy Forever Obscured can get. It’s ugly-dude death metal with a little bit of a sci-fi monster polish, heavy emphasis on gore and all. The video itself has an amateur charm to it, but this is one of those situations where you’re in the theater for Godzilla and whatever happens around it is a nice bonus. In this case, Godzilla happens to be the song.

Forever Obscured have been slowly adding Insufflation to a variety of different services, so there’s no full Bandcamp stream yet, but I’ve seen it up on Spotify, iTunes, and Amazon. However, the group do have the song “Upon The Scales Of The Serpent” available, so I’ll be stitching that beast of a track below the “Sever The Taste” music video.

http://foreverobscured.bandcamp.com/releases

https://www.facebook.com/Forever-Obscured-201287839883311/