TWO MORE FOR 2024: FRONTIERER AND SACRAMENTO

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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 »

THINGS YOU MAY HAVE MISSED (BUT SHOULDN’T)

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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.

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON NEW YEAR’S DAY: AVULSED, CRAWLING CHAOS, ARGWAAN, SERPENTS OF PAKHANGBA, AWRIZIS, STRESS TEMPLE, GROUND SWEAT, HUSMANSKOST, BYFROST

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
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 »

BEDSORE: “DREAMING THE STRIFE FOR LOVE”

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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 »

SHADES OF BLACK: BEEHIVE REVOLT, EDEN RAYZ

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
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 »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: MEFITIS, CLOUDS, SIKARIO, LABYRINTHUS STELLARUM

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 282024
 

(written by Islander)

This is a good time to take stock of where we are (“we” being NCS, not the squirming hive of humanity that continues spinning helplessly through the void). I thought we would have the final installment of our year-end lists from writers and other friends on Monday, but a late-breaking e-mail creates the possibility there will be one more after that. Whether we finish Monday or a bit later, there’s one more segment of LISTMANIA still to come, i.e., my own list of 2024’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. More on that in a minute.

Next week we’ll also have Andy‘s monthly Synn Report and five song premieres (at last count), plus at least a couple of interviews that have been patiently (or impatiently) waiting for an opening. After next week, most of which will still be a holiday for most people, things in metaldom will ramp back up into the usual churn of news announcements and new releases, and we’ll again have the usual weekly volume of premieres, reviews, and interviews from then until 2025 starts winding down. Continue reading »

MÖRK GRYNING: “FASORNAS TID”

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Dec 262024
 

(Below you’ll find a review by our Oslo-based contributor Chile of the new album by the Swedish black metal band Mörk Gryning, which was released earlier this month by Season of Mist.)

The times of horrors are truly upon us. With the approach of everything everywhere gnawing all at once, there is something comforting in the knowledge that we as a civilization are still capable of putting out almost nine thousand metal albums each year. Listening to all of them, well, that’s a different story, maybe it will go down as a New Year’s resolution for the coming turn of the calendar. Until then, you are welcome to all the great writing on this very site.

Among those thousands, we are first and foremost focused on the quality in our selection, a logical statement if there ever was one. Enter Swedish band Mörk Gryning which has been around for some time now, and saying that would be an understatement, at the very least. Three decades deep into their career (although with a decade lost in a hiatus from activities), they have released some bona fide classics in albums like Tusen år har gått… or Maelstrom Chaos cementing their place in the pantheon of Swedish metal and surely black metal in general. 

The well-received comeback album Hinsides vrede released in 2020 has put the band back into the spotlight and with it also hopefully brought a new generation of fans. Since fans only want one thing, Mörk Gryning are returning after four years with their new album titled Fasornas tid out now on Season of Mist. The album, more or less, keeps the format of the previous one with twelve tracks in total, although with fewer interludes and a bit longer running time of 44 minutes. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (CHRISTMAS DAY EDITION): SKAGOS, WĘDROWCY~TUŁACZE~ZBIEGI, ZÉRO ABSOLU, THE MAN AND THE ABYSS, ISTAPP

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
Dec 252024
 

(written by Islander; photo by Islander)

I hope you got a holiday today. If you did, I hope you’ll be able to spend the time happily, however you choose to spend it and whatever it may mean to you. If you didn’t, from all of us at NCS the same wishes still apply.

I wasn’t able to compile a SHADES OF BLACK column last Sunday. I didn’t think about trying to cure the omission during this week, but then DGR said I should run it today “for kvltness so cheesy it would qualify as proper parmigiano.” It’s nice that he picked “the king of cheeses”, and also fitting that it’s often served shaved or grated, since that’s what some of the following selections might do to your brain.

As an aside, did anyone notice that we served up lists from a Grover and a Gonzo yesterday? I wish I was clever enough to have done that on purpose, but I was just following my habit of posting lists from our writers and other friends in the order received. Sometimes the stars align. (And thanks to Dan Barkasi for pointing out the Muppets connection to this dummy.)

And now, onward with some gifts we were all given as the year’s nights turned longest, and which will keep things dark even with the solstice now behind us. (My family’s all old enough that we don’t give gifts any more, so I had some money to spend on this music, and hope you’re not too broke to do that yourselves.) Continue reading »

DREAMING OF A BLACK CHRISTMAS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Dec 242024
 

(Whether you’ve been naughty or nice, Andy Synn has three early Christmas presents for you)

I know not everyone out there celebrates Christmas – either as a religious event or an example of crass commercialism – but for me this period of the year has (with the occasional exception) always been about stepping back and taking some much-needed time to rest and relax and reconnect with family and friends.

Not everyone, of course, is so lucky, which is why today I’d like to share my many blessings with those who are less fortunate… by bringing them a black Christmas, featuring two bands I mentioned during “List Week” (but hadn’t had a chance to cover beforehand) and one whose latest album I didn’t manage to include at all (an omission I am hoping to make up for here).

Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: OBSCURE SPHINX, THIS GIFT IS A CURSE, SH-BO-OO-OM, BANK MYNA, MISANTHROPÆ

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Dec 212024
 


Obscure Sphinx

(written by Islander)

It seems like the end of the year is coming up in a big rush. It’s now four days before Christmas and the start of Hanukkah and 10 days before New Year’s Eve, a block of time when many people do something different from what they normally do (like taking time off from work), and other people feel grumpier about what they normally do because they’re still having to do it (like working).

We’re still here of course, and not even feeling grumpy about it. For a bunch of reasons I won’t bore you with, it’s the fanatically commercialized “holiday season” that makes me feel grumpy, and it’s continuing to pound away on this blog that helps get me through it.

Part of what we’re pounding on, of course, is year-end LISTMANIA. Even on a Saturday I nailed another list to the door. Next week we’ll have lists from at least four more of our writers, plus a bag of odds and ends from Neill Jameson.

But for now, just more new music — quite a lot of it actually. Continue reading »

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