SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ABORTED, BAT, DARKTHRONE, HÄMND, MY DYING BRIDE, NECROPHOBIC, TERMINAL NATION, ULCERATE

A hell of a party awaits below….

All the “big” names in this Saturday roundup of new songs and videos were suggested by my old friend and fellow NCS slave DGR — “big” in quotation marks because no surface-dwelling listener would remotely consider the music “radio friendly”.

But I still decided to throw in a few more subterranean offerings of my own choosing, all of it presented in alphabetical order by band name. That arrangement turned out to create some big twists and turns in the music.

ABORTED (Belgium)

First up, feast your eyes and ears on the music video for “Condemned To Rot” from Aborted‘s guest-studded new album Vault of Horrors. The guest stud on this one is Francesco Paoli from the NCS house band Fleshgod Apocalypse (does anyone remember when I used to call them that every time I mentioned them?). I’ll crib from my friend Andy‘s review of this album:

“Condemned to Rot” (featuring Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s Francesco Paoli) keeps up the pace and the quality, balancing that continued Horror Movie melodicism – especially in its second half – with some seriously chunky, chugging riffs which give the Italian hellion a little more room to strut his stuff (most notably during the punchy pre-chorus refrains, where his parts feel like they were actually written specifically for him)”.

The video is excellent, and fair warning that you aspiring actors (other than the masochists among you) should avoid screen tests with this sadistic director and his comely bespectacled assistant. The album was released yesterday by Nuclear Blast.

https://aborted.bfan.link/vault-of-horrors
https://www.facebook.com/Abortedofficial

 

 

BAT (U.S.)

After that Aborted song and video it seemed entirely appropriate to follow it with Bat‘s short horror movie for their new song “Rite for Exorcism“, especially because B felicitously follows A in the alphabet.

Prepare to get your motor running and your head pumping with this gravel-toned chug-fest, which also includes gut-busting and galloping drum-work, gloriously sinister soloing, and vocals as raw as roadburn.

The name of Bat‘s new album is Under the Crooked Claw. It will be out on May 17th via Nuclear Blast.

https://bat.bfan.link/utcclp
https://www.facebook.com/bewareofthebat

 

 

DARKTHRONE (Norway)

I usually don’t include “trailers” or “teaser reels” of music in these roundups, preferring to wait until we have a complete song, but since it’s Darkthrone that tossed this one into the ether I’m making an exception, partly because it’s Darkthrone and partly because I’m always curious about what the hell Nocturno and Fenriz have decided to do next (always hard to guess), and snippets are better than nothing.

This particular snippet is hard-rocking but diabolical, propelled forward with pulsating and scissoring riffage with an abrasive tone and ugly vocals that sound choked with viscera. Way too soon to be passing any judgments, but this makes me hopeful.

The PR materials include quotes from the two artists which suggest the songs won’t all sound alike (also no surprise there), so we probably couldn’t pass judgment even if we had the complete version of this excerpted song, e.g., Nocturno says Fenriz “did stellar clean vocals on several songs” — but obviously not on what you’re about to hear.

The name of the new album is It Beckons Us All. It will be released on April 26th by Peaceville. It features typically stellar cover art by Zbigniew Bielak.

https://darkthrone.lnk.to/beckons
https://www.facebook.com/Darkthroneofficial

 

 

HÄMND (Sweden)

Here’s another one of my more subterranean picks, this one a song from a debut EP by the Swedish band Hämnd. With a lineup that “rises from the ashes of bands like Siberian, Kollapsed and Vargålder“, they proudly give their nods to the influence of bands like ISIS, Neurosis, and Breach.

This head-moving but nerve-wracking first single off the EP, “Eidhav“, is both the EP’s title track and its closing song. Almost relentlessly intense after a throbbing, tension-building intro phase, it marries riffs of pulverizing heaviness, lead-weighted drum slugs, granite-weighted bass maneuvers, shrill and feverish guitar spasms, and other, softer guitar accents that glitter, simmer, and mysteriously meander but don’t really detract from the inchoate darkness in the music.

Hämnd could have gone in different directions with the vocals on a song like this. I’m happy to say they added to the intensity with raw, ragged howls and scorching screams.

Eidhav will be released on March 26th.

https://hamndband.bandcamp.com/album/eldhav
http://facebook.com/hamndband

 

 

MY DYING BRIDE (UK)

Last week brought us the second single and second video from the next album by these UK legends. This one is “The 2nd of Three Bells“.

In this video we get to watch all the band’s members, and a pair of suspended beauties rotating like living ornaments, one of them wearing a plague doctor’s mask. The song is both elegant and powerfully heavy, and of course utterly bereft in almost every phase — except when the tormented harsh vocals, the feverishly chugging grooves, and the flame-horned fire-breather come out.

The song is from MDB‘s 15th studio album, A Mortal Binding, which is set to be released on April 19th by Nuclear Blast.

https://mydyingbride.bfan.link/a-mortal-binding
https://www.facebook.com/MyDyingBrideOfficial

 

 

NECROPHOBIC (Sweden)

Yesterday Century Media released Necrophobic‘s new album In the Twilight Grey. I assume we will have a tardy review of it to go along with my pithy commentary on a couple of the tracks, this next one being the second.

What we have here, to draw attention to the album release, is a video for “Mirrors of a Thousand Lakes“. The video includes footage from a rare Necrophobic club show in Rostock, Germany (including the set-up and the transformation from a bunch of happy, friendly chaps into a bunch of corpse-painted stage-demons), even though they didn’t play this song that night.

This song provides grand and devilishly glorious music, but it’s also ripping and ravishing and guaranteed to get the blood hammering in your veins, and it’s capped by an extended solo, eventually doubled, that sounds like black sorcery.

https://necrophobic.lnk.to/InTheTwilightGrey
https://www.facebook.com/necrophobic.official/

 

 

TERMINAL NATION (U.S.)

Even if I hadn’t been familiar with Terminal Nation‘s previous album I still would have checked out this next song from their new full-length based solely on the hideous strength of Adam Burke‘s cover art. Like the artwork, the song turns out to be fucking stupendous.

Prepare for riffs so humongous they would dwarf the mastodons, drums that rumble like massive boulders, guitars that explode in seizures of exultant evisceration, and absolutely crazed vocals (a tandem of bestial roars and howls that sound like a rabid panther on fire) — plus a titanic breakdown that will shiver your foundations into fragments.

“Written by the Victor” includes guest vocals by Todd Jones of Nails. Other songs on the album include additional vocals by Jesse Leach of Killswitch Engage, K. Kennedy of Sex Prisoner, Zak Vargas of Elysia, and Dwid Hellion of Integrity.

The song is from Terminal Nation‘s new album Echoes Of The Devil’s Den, set for release by 20 Buck Spin on May 3rd.

https://20buckspin.bandcamp.com/album/echoes-of-the-devils-den
https://www.facebook.com/terminalnation

 

 

ULCERATE (New Zealand)

Two Fridays ago I made an exception to my self-imposed rule of not including newsy items in these roundups unless there is new streamable music to go along with them. The exception was the announcement of a new album by these New Zealand behemoths. Now we actually do have something to listen to.

The first-revealed song is named “The Dawn is Hollow“. The press release we received describes it as a composition in which “Ulcerate skillfully oscillates between ferocious, rapid-fire segments and serene, enigmatically somber passages”.

Or, to put it in my own words, this dawn is indeed hollow. When this sun rises, it sounds like the last one we’ll ever see, a catastrophe that (as in the video) seems capable of melting flesh.

Ethereal, spritely notes do emerge while the grumbling bass hums and the drums skip about, and the guitars do squirm and writhe in gleaming yet dissonant contortions while the drums frolic and fire, creating hallucinatory sonic apparitions as momentary distractions from the calamity that’s still in progress — which harrowing roars and grieving melodies won’t let us forget.

Or, in a nutshell, this is quite an elaborate and relentlessly dynamic piece, ebbing and flowing in mauling and mystifying ways.

The new album, Cutting the Throat of God, will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on June 14th.

https://ulcerate.bandcamp.com/album/cutting-the-throat-of-god
https://debemurmorti.aisamerch.com/band/ulcerate
https://www.debemur-morti.com/en/400-ulcerate-shop
https://www.facebook.com/Ulcerate

P.S. The artwork at the top of this post is “Ronde du Sabbat” by Louis Candide Boulanger, 1828.