(Andy Synn says that the new album from MEM//BRANE is one hell of a way to kick off 2025)
Let’s keep the momentum of the new year going with a new band… or, at least, a band who are new to me… shall we?
Jan 092025
Jan 082025
(In the following article our contributor Didrik Mešiček provides not only a review of Ex Deo‘s new EP, which will be out on Friday of this week via Reigning Phoenix Music, but also a history lesson.)
There’s no band that bridges the gap between ancient history and metal quite as much as Ex Deo. I think it’s not a very contentious opinion to say that the side project of Kataklysm’s frontman Maurizio Iacono has musically surpassed the main band, even though the reach of Ex Deo‘s audience is much smaller. Ex Deo will be releasing a new EP called Year of the Four Emperors, which continues the story from their last album, on January 10th. Let’s hope 2025 goes a bit better than the year 69 CE went in the Roman Empire.
So because this is a release very tightly linked with history and because I’m a history nerd, we’re going to be doing something slightly different and that means including a lot of history into what’s meant to be an article about an EP. Who’d have thought you can come to NCS to learn about things other than music, eh? Continue reading »
Jan 072025
(Andy Synn officially kicks off a new year here at NCS in colourful style)
The big question at the start of every new year is… where do we start?
Should I tell you what I think about the new one from The Great Old Ones? Or This Gift Is A Curse? Maybe Imperial Triumphant?
All big names, in their own way, and ones which I’m sure we’ll get to cover at some point in the near future (I’m definitely going to be writing something about the latter two myself) but our modus operandi here has always been to favour the unsung artists first and foremost.
And so, I thought, why not kick things off with something a little bit more provocative – though, I’d imagine, much of that will depend on how restrictive your view of the term “Black Metal” is – from a brand new artist attempting to put their own artsy, avant-garde spin on a genre more famous for its monochromatic malevolence.
Jan 052025
I had a decision to make that I knew would have a significant impact on how many new releases I could cover in this Sunday column. That decision is discussed in the intro to today’s last item. I made the decision in a way that forced me to cut down the total, and leaves a lot of other songs buzzing in the back of my head as if clamoring for the attention I didn’t give them.
But I better truncate this opening verbiage before I have to further truncate the selections. In short, I’m beginning with three singles, and then moving to a very long demo at the end.
SKALDR (U.S.)
The first single today is a song from this Virginia band’s new album Saṃsṛ (their second full-length overall). I’ve been meaning to include it in one of these columns for weeks, but one thing or another has kept delaying the follow-through on my intentions. The song’s name is “The Crossing.” Continue reading »
Jan 042025
We’ve reached the end of a long holiday period and that left me feeling glum last night, morose over the realization that the rat race will resume on Monday. I felt much better after going through a big batch of songs I wanted to consider for this Saturday roundup.
Apart from enjoying the music, I’m enjoying the idea of how wobbly these eight selections will leave people who make it through all of them; there are many twists and turns along the way.
I arranged the choices in four two-band blocks. This doesn’t mean the selections in each part sound alike, but I did perceive some connections, except in the final two. Those two are together at the end only because I didn’t want to leave them out. Continue reading »
Jan 032025
(Though we’ve turned the corner into 2025, DGR has a couple more records from 2024 he wants to recommend, through the reviews below.)
Ah, it’s the most wonderful time of a website’s year. That brief breather where we get to both get started on stuff coming out in 2025 and kick ourselves in the shins over stuff we missed over the course of the previous year – usually in about equal measure.
It is imagined then, that I shall not be the only one with a few demons still resting on my shoulders that I felt compelled to acknowledge before fully launching myself into the inevitable shitshow that will be the new year. This time around, I’ve managed to dig up two more – one which saw very late release at the end of the year and another that I am in awe I did not come across during my many bandcamp and youtube music rabbit hole tumbles.
So, I shall attempt at the very least to see that they get some sort of spotlight here lest the guilt overwhelm me to the point where I become locked in a paralysis unknown to man up to this time. Continue reading »
Jan 022025
(Andy Synn isn’t quite ready to say goodbye to 2024 just yet)
Well, here we are. It’s 2025 and time to start looking towards what this new year has to bring.
Or, should I say, almost time… because first I want to highlight a quartet of releases which – for various reasons (namely that either they hadn’t actually come out, or I hadn’t stumbled across them yet) – I didn’t have chance to include in my annual “List Week”, but which all definitely deserve some extra attention before we finally consign 2024 to the gaping maw of history.
Jan 012025
Fireworks at the Seattle Space Needle last night (photo by Sigma Sreedharan / KOMO #SoNorthwest Photography)
(written by Islander)
Happy New Year to all of you! May the turn of the calendar page begin leading you to many good things over the coming year, even if it mainly leads you to still write “2024” in your date entries over the next few weeks.
Yesterday we finished the main part of our annual LISTMANIA series, and I posted a “wrap up” for it earlier today. All those lists verified what we already knew as the past year crawled by, i.e., that 2024 was another great interval for metal, even if it was a garbage fire in many other respects.
We have abundant reasons to expect that 2025 will also bring us abundant metallic goodness and greatness, and some of those reasons are already concretely apparent, witness the music I picked for this New Year’s Day roundup (though some of it also comes from the later days of December — and a couple songs are from 2010!). Continue reading »
Dec 302024
(Our South Africa-born, Vietnam-resident, contributor Vizzah Harri wrote the following fascinating essay. It includes a distinctive review of Bedsore‘s new album, but also uses it as a springboard to other connections and reflections.)
“As you read a book word by word and page by page, you participate in its creation, just as a cellist playing a Bach suite participates, note by note, in the creation, the coming-to-be, the existence, of the music. And, as you read and re-read, the book of course participates in the creation of you, your thoughts and feelings, the size and temper of your soul.” –Ursula K. Le Guin
“This means that every person brings themselves to every piece of art. It means we all experience a different piece of art. Each time we return to a story we are creating a different story. Rereading is good actually.” – saxifraga-x-urbium (from Tumblr)
If you didn’t know anything about this album prior to clicking on this article and did not want to go into it entirely blind, then I can attempt to sum it up for you sonically in 34 words: This band’s waking dream of an album is like Hail Spirit Noir alchemized with giallo; Emerson, Lake and Palmer; the most serene Italian chamber orchestra; and a few doses of the holy trinity of proggy-death in Skeptic, Cynic, and Atheist. Continue reading »
Dec 292024
I had ideas ready for this weekly post today, and notes about the music I’d selected. When I was ready to begin writing this morning, my desktop computer shit the bed (basically, it wouldn’t start up and showed an error symbol).
I spent the next two hours following a variety of Apple instructions sourced from my laptop, none of which worked. Now I have to take the computer to the nearest Apple Store this afternoon, which is about a 90-minute commute from where I live. This is a much more miserable way to spend the day than I’d expected, but of course you and I can imagine worse ways.
In a state of extreme mental frustration and with much of the morning gone, I thought about abandoning this column for today, but as you can see, I didn’t. However, it doesn’t included all the selections I wanted to cover, or even all the words I wish I could have written about the ones below. Continue reading »