I have to remind myself that less than half of our visitors had a Thanksgiving Day holiday last Thursday. I checked, and only the U.S. and Brazil celebrated the holiday that day. Here in the U.S. it launched a 4-day holiday, because most people who are relieved from working on Thanksgiving get Friday off too, so it’s a time when lots of people check out of their routines.
It’s not an entirely lazy holiday for a lot of people because the Thanksgiving Day tradition usually involves getting together with family and friends and cooking, and the day after is the ridiculous shopping splurge of Black Friday. But for me, the holiday does make me feel lazy.
I didn’t completely check out of all my routines. We still had lots of NCS posts on Thanksgiving and Black Friday, because I’ve never believed in honoring holidays at our site, and for our writers outside the U.S. those were just two more nothing-special days.
But I admit I did succumb to long bouts of laziness and therefore didn’t listen to much new music the last couple of days. I thought seriously about taking today off from NCS, but as you can see, the old compulsion wouldn’t surrender.
BALEFIRE (U.S.)
I couldn’t easily figure out a good way to organize today’s picks based on how the music might evolve, so I resorted to alphabetizing. Turns out that worked out pretty well, at least my the goal were to keep you off-balance.
I paid attention to the first song from Balefire‘s debut EP because it’s a new project led by Chuck Sherwood, longtime bassist of Incantation and former bassist of Blood Storm.
Dictionaries define “baleful” as “foreboding,” “menacing,” or “threatening evil,” and that is definitely true of “Sands of Gemini“. From the grisly, writhing riffage and the freakishly swirling solo that helps open the song, and onward to the gruesome gutturals and thunderous drumming, the music is undeniably evil.
But as the band’s name portends, the song is also fiery, accelerating into a convulsion of demented fretwork frenzies, augmented by blast-beats, double-bass mania, and hideous gurgling.
The Balefire EP (self-titled) will be released by Iron Bonehead on January 31st.
https://www.ironbonehead.de
https://ironboneheadproductions.bandcamp.com
https://www.facebook.com/ironboneheadproductions
BENEATH MOONLIGHT (U.S.)
Here’s another band with a forthcoming self-titled debut EP. This one is another project of people in the Ordo Vampyr Orientis circle, which includes Bat Magic, Bad Manor, and Beastial Majesty.
The EP is described as “the first part of the Henricus Institor saga, so named after the German churchman who in 1487 published a document known as the Malleus Maleficarum – a veritable how–to guide for the inquisitioning and dispatching of accused witches.” In this telling, he was cursed with lycanthropy and turned to black magic to cure his affliction — hence, the cover art.
The first song released so far, “None Before God“, had its premiere at Decibel, which included one of the band members’ observation that the song’s intro was intended as “an extravagant tribute to Beethoven.” And with that electrifying intro, you’ll also quickly see why Beneath Moonlight‘s music is characterized as “pianistic Black Metal.”
The classically influenced piano performances might be the signal hallmark of the song, though the melodic bass-work is also a scene-stealer, but it is indeed also black metal, as signified by terrorizing shrieks, the raw, high-toned buzz of tremolo’d riffing, and maniacally hurtling drumwork.
The song generates a sinister and supernatural aura, and the ecstatically swirling guitar-work makes it even more supernatural — a representation of devilish sonic sorcery.
Beneath Moonlight will be released by Debemur Morti Productions on December 20th.
https://ordovampyrorientis.bandcamp.com/album/beneath-moonlight
DREAMING DEATH (Australia)
Next up I have the title song from Sinister Minister, the debut record from Dreaming Death. The band is a trio that consists of Pahl Hodgson (guitars, vocals) and Ross Duncan (bass, vocals), known for their work with Beyond Mortal Dreams and Oath Of Damnation, and drummer Matt “Skitz” Sanders.
The opening phase of this song, like that of the first one in today’s collection, is baleful — but also dismal. And as horrid howls rise up, the guitar slowly worms, like a representation of some fattened maggot. But then the downtuned riffing becomes frantic and feverish as the drums vividly batter and bash, and a sonic feeding frenzy then ensues.
Fronted by gnashing, lycanthropic barks, the song rushes ahead, sparked by utterly demented soloing, electrifying drumwork, and ravenous riffing. Bursts of ghostly keyboard-quivering and rapidly darting fretwork add to the song’s horror-show portrayal, with room for another solo, even more spectacularly deranged than the first one, and a final one that wails like crazed specters.
Sinister Minister will be released by Lavadome Productions on December 20th.
https://lavadome.bandcamp.com/album/sinister-minister
https://store.lavadome.org/
https://www.facebook.com/DreamingDeathAU/
FRACTURED INSANITY (Belgium)
Now 20 years into their career, Belgium’s Fractured Insanity have a new album on the way named Age Of Manipulation, and it has gotten a strong preview thanks to the chilling spectacle of “Exaltation of a Fallen Glory“.
Here, Fractured Insanity‘s riffing immediately creates a mood of frantic misery, degraded and demented, and then they un-cage an attack of bestial snarls, hammering drums, and whirring fretwork that, as it rapidly rises and falls, seems to straddle a hellish line between cruelty and agony.
These are disturbing and distressing sensations, and they become even more fraught with torment and despair as the song evolves, though the performance also delivers a tyrannical dose of jackhammer brutishness and haughty growls, plus expulsions of circle-saw evisceration and a guitar solo that wails like a stricken soul.
The album will be released by Xtreem Music on February 18th.
https://www.xtreemmusic.com/
https://www.facebook.com/FracturedInsanityOfficial/
KONKHRA (Denmark)
My next choice for today is a video for the title song to Konkhra‘s new album, Sad Plight of Lucifer.
The video gives us great views of Konkhra performing the song, which delivers heavy-slugging, neck-snapping death metal laced with eerily darting and frantically screaming fretwork and fronted by truly monstrous growls from deep in the belly.
The track is a big, hard-charging muscle-mover, with jabbing and jolting fretwork that proves to be addictive. It’s capped by an exhilarating black magic solo that spins up to ravishing heights, and further includes heroic chants and top-shelf drumwork.
Sad Plight of Lucifer was released just yesterday by Hammerheart Records. I haven’t heard the rest of it yet, but it’s streaming at Bandcamp.
https://konkhra.bandcamp.com/album/sad-plight-of-lucifer
https://www.facebook.com/konkhraofficial
OCELOT OMELET (U.S.)
It’s been a very long time since I last wrote about the unconventional music of Seattle’s Ocelot Omelet — more than 10 years, in fact. Back then I reviewed an EP named Present in the Dark. They did release an album named Pleasure Trauma in 2017, but nothing since then (as far as I know). Now they’ve recorded a new album named Stereotypical Loser Trip that will be released on December 12th.
As a friend of the band’s leader Os from many years ago, I know a little about his own trip since 2014, which included a journey through some dark times to brighter days. You might get a sense of that from the lyric video for one of the new songs, the name of which is “Blackout Decade“.
As you’ll discover from this song, Os has a high-flying singing voice (sometimes crystal-clear, sometimes with grit in the gears) that will make you sit up and pay attention, and a formidable way with words. The song also has a viscerally compelling drive-train consisting of big-body moving bass-grooves and vivid skull-rattling beats.
Around all those attention-grabbing sensations, the band weave piercing sounds that swirl, sear, and wail — borderline psychedelic in their atmosphere and also tormented in mood — along with notes that eerily clang and twang in the song’s slowest phase, where the singing sounds haunted.
https://ocelotomelet.com/
https://ocelotomelet.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/ocelotomeletband/
PLAGUEFEVER (U.S.)
Two weeks ago I spit out some words about a couple songs from Flail Of Pestilence, a new album by these blistering black/thrashers from Virginia. One of those songs was “A.M.N.D.” Since then, Plaguefever made a video for that same song, which promptly got kicked off YouTube because it was deemed too violent. So they loaded the video into Vimeo, where it has survived — at least as of this morning.
The irony is that, apart from shots of the band performing live, the video is simply a stitching together of film excerpts that factually document the violent ferocity of human beings directed against each other (and a few shots of nature’s violence). The clips do show dead people, but they’re not gratuitously focused on gore or mutilation. Oh well, YouTube wouldn’t want to upset anyone with… reality.
I’ll repeat what I wrote before about the song: After a chiling intro, it is sheer racing savagery, propelled by a punk gallop, laced with berserk guitar delirium, and voiced with serrated-edge screams. The riffage slashes and boils, frantically scissors and swarms, and gets a listener’s blood frothing.
Flail Of Pestilence is another album in today’s collection that was released just yesterday (by Elvte Kvlt Recvrds). Plagued by bouts of laziness, I still haven’t listened to more than 3 songs, but they’re all killer.
https://plaguefever.bandcamp.com/album/flail-of-pestilence
https://www.facebook.com/plaguefever
https://www.instagram.com/plaguefever
PRIMEVAL MASS (Greece)
This is the best example (actually, the only example) of how alphabetizing today’s choices worked out well in the flow of the music. After that Plaguefever gets your engine revving, Primeval Well‘s new two-song EP Saqqara’s Rite will keep it up in the red zone.
The first song, “The Silent and the Wild (Saqqara’s Rite)“, is a great example of the band’s ability to throw listeners through a gauntlet of racing, pulse-pounding demon-thrash, with particularly beastly vocals, but adding intricate fretwork filigrees that sound madly jubilant — flashing and darting, swirling and blaring.
But that’s not all! Near the end, the music repeatedly shifts gears and goes through even greater head-spinning contortions — the kind of wildly ingenious mutations that most thrash bands wouldn’t think of, much less be able to execute.
The other song, “The Way of the Sorcerer (In Ecstasy of Doom),” is a close kindred to the first one — also a blood-rusher, also vocally vicious, also an enormous and exuberant head-spinner (including the quirky maneuvers executed by the drummer and bassist). This one might be slightly more fiendish and menacing than the first song, but it also includes a suitably freaked-out guitar solo, on top of all the other deliciously freaked-out dual-guitar interplay.
If these songs don’t leave you with big evil grins, I’ll be very surprised.
https://primevalmass.bandcamp.com/album/saqqaras-rite
https://www.facebook.com/primevalmassofficial
PYRE (Russia)
To close things out today I picked a music video for the first advance track from Where Obscurity Sways, the first new album in four years by the Russian death metal band Pyre.
And woe is me, I’ve run out of time! And so all I can say about “Murderous Transcendence” is that it’s damned good — from the raw and ragged howls of the vocalist to the vicious whirring of the riffage, the skull-cracking and horse-racing beats, the crushing impact of the distorted low-range chords, and the spectacular soloing, which morphs from weirdly whirling to white-hot to stricken with misery.
Where Obscurity Sways will be released by Osmose Productions on January 31st.
https://bit.ly/pyre-shop
https://osmoseproductions.bandcamp.com/album/where-obscurity-sways
https://www.facebook.com/pyredeathmetal/