(Andy Synn presents three short but savage releases to terrify your eardums)
Look, a while back I promised I’d be better at covering more EPs this year.
And, let’s face it, I have failed in that task pretty abjectly.
But I’m trying… which is why today I want to draw your attention to three recently-released (or upcoming) bite-sized portions of brutality courtesy of Disentomb, Emasculator and Persecutory.
(written by Islander)
Every one of us follows a personal collection of bands who by our lights just never stumble. They may be ground-breakers or they may not. They may make bold steps from one record to the next or they may only iterate subtly. But over and over again, long enough to build our confidence, they create music that gets its hooks in our heads, rings our chimes (pick your own metaphor), reinforces the conviction that whatever they do next, the odds are high it will be well worth the time (and the money).
In my case the Bavarian band Blackevil are one of those groups. To borrow some words I’ve written before, their past music has been a black-thrashing devil-rush, high-grade adrenaline fuel but laced with an atmosphere of magic and menace. While drawing from well-springs of primal Teutonic thrash and the greats of speed metal, they also bring into play the epic fireworks of classic heavy metal and add mystic instrumental nuances, creating anthems of devilish glory and blood-rushing ecstasy.
They’ve been doing this long enough now, and getting better and better at it with each release, that people like me become greedily excited when seeing the news that they’ve got something new on the horizon. And the horizon is very near now, because on October 25th Dying Victims Productions will release the band’s spectacular third album, Praise the Communion Fire for the Unhallowed Sacrament, which you’ll be able to hear in full today. Continue reading »
(This is DGR‘s review of the debut album of “Death Pop” by High Parasite, fronted by Aaron Stainthorpe of My Dying Bride, produced by Gregor Mackintosh of Paradise Lost, and released by Candlelight on September 27th.)
There’s an acceptance that comes with the idea that people aren’t required to listen to music the same way you do. You can bang the drum forever about how to experience something but in reality sometimes people just want to be able to throw something on and let it whip past them without a second thought.
The reality of which is perfectly fine. Not everyone needs to be able to fantasy-draft a death metal band together like Nader Sadek does with his releases. Not everyone needs to be able to fold an album over again, and again, and again, such that it eventually resembles a musical and intellectual rolled omelette. This of course being the long walk toward a simple question:
That being, have you ever listened to a release that has caused you to think about it way more than you could possibly justify any reason for? Thinking about it far more than the album might reasonably deserve? Because that may be what’s happening here with High Parasite’s debut album Forever We Burn. An album that has somehow caused the gears to turn here far more than one could intellectually justify. Continue reading »
(We present NCS contributor Didrik Mešiček‘s review of the first album in nine years from the Egyptian metal band Odious, which was released earlier this month.)
Have you ever thought about how much of the metal you listen to actually comes from about five, or at most ten, countries? And while those countries are great at producing some quality bands, it’s a shame massive parts of the world have a poorly developed metal scene, and a lot of those nations have unique takes on music as well as cool instruments that could fit wonderfully within metal.
This is why I’m often very excited when there are bands popping up in various Asian or African countries and why I’m talking about the new album, Equilibrium Tool, from the Egyptian band Odious today. Continue reading »
(written by Islander)
Today we premiere a full stream of Le Déclin, a new album by the veteran French band Ataraxie that will be released this coming Friday, October 25th, by Ardua Music and Weird Truth Productions.
To make it was an enormous undertaking. The results speak to that: Four songs, each of which is in the range of 16-22 minutes, and a total running time for the album of more than 80 minutes. You could think of it as four EPs released simultaneously, and you could choose to listen to them that way, but thematically they are all connected.
Before you reach the end of this article you’ll find extensive comments about the album from Ataraxie bassist/vocalist Jonathan Théry. As he describes them, the lyrics of the songs are about the negativity and sickness of the modern world — the descent of humanity into ignorance, absurdity, the rejection of science, the glorification of malignant fantasy, the rise of depression and disease, and an unwillingness to confront what could be done (or must be done) to prevent humankind from extinguishing itself.
Given the way that most metal bands make music, it’s unlikely that the lyrics (in French) were written first, and the music written to follow the lyrics. But there is still an undeniable unity between the themes and the sounds. The music itself channels anger, disgust, agony, isolation, and ruin on a global scale, as well as moments that seem to capture the value of what is being destroyed. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn highlights two surprise releases from last week)
Don’t you just love surprises?
Well, the good kind anyway… you know, like the unexpected return of a musical project you thought was gone for good, or another new album from a band who already produced one of your favourites of the year?
Because that’s exactly what we’re looking at (and listening to) today.
(Denver-based NCS writer Gonzo had the good fortune of seeing Blood Incantation perform in Denver on the day of their newest album’s release, preceded by the solo set of Steve Roach, and he’s given us the following show review. We’re also grateful to Denver photographer Jacob Juno for allowing us to use his photos from the show throughout this article.)
Hype is a helluva drug.
And perhaps no band in modern metal is aware of that statement the way Denver’s Blood Incantation are. Their 2019 opus Hidden History of the Human Race was released to a cacophony of effusive praise from every dark corner of the internet, catapulting the band into interdimensional stardom.
Fast forward to 2024. The past five years have seen Blood Incantation’s career become anything but predictable. There are probably fewer words that haven’t been used to describe Timewave Zero than those that have, and the Luminescent Bridge single was a nice surprise that left many (myself included) wanting more.
It felt like a culmination of all of this, then, to have the band play a special one-night-only headlining set at the foot of the Rocky Mountains last week. And to properly commemorate the release of Absolute Elsewhere, they even brought along the king of ambient sound himself, Steve Roach, to open the proceedings.
What followed was a night nobody in the Boulder Theater would soon forget.
(written by Islander)
In the nearly 15 years of our site’s existence our changing cadre of writers have listened to a mountainous quantity of metal, but if any of us have spent time with the music of the Romanian band Cursed Cemetery we must have kept our thoughts to ourselves. Because until last month, their name has not been mentioned in any of our 15,918 articles, despite the fact that since 2007 they released four albums.
But now Cursed Cemetery are on the eve of releasing a fifth album (on the Dusktone label), and finally we’re paying attention, and wondering what we missed across the years when the first four dropped.
The new album, Magma Transmigration, is a mountainous piece of music itself, a massive and daunting range with four imposing peaks, just four songs but each of them exceeding 10 minutes in length and two of them topping 15. Continue reading »
(This makes the fourth, and apparently final, installment of DGR‘s effort to clear out a backlog of reviews he’s been pondering for releases spread across earlier months of the year, clearing the decks for the year-end NCS orgy ahead.)
It is wild, staring at the review collective and realizing you’re down to the last two.
The best time to write one of these is not directly after one has woken up, I’ve learned. Something about the brain still trying to wander itself out of the fog with nary a static radio signal and flashlight for help tends to make one’s writing look as if it slid off the side of a mountain.
The artist’s curse is still a minor player at the poker table though, given that some of your best ideas usually arrive in the shower, the drive home from work, or the second before you hit deep sleep, so that’s not to say I still won’t be attempting to do so as if writing right after I’m waking up for the day is preserving some sort of the mental cacophony I’ve tried to piece together for the final one of this initial review pile. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn plumbs the depths of the new album from Schammasch, out next Friday)
Let me tell you something – I regard Schammasch‘s stunning second album, the now decade-old duology entitled Contradiction, to be one of the finest, yet also most underrated, Black Metal albums of the post-millennium period.
And while I understand and appreciate (and, to an extent, share) the love for Triangle – their even more ambitious triple-disc follow-up – and the way it allowed them to explore three subtly different aspects of their sound, the truth is that nothing since then has quite managed to achieve that same balance between esoteric creativity and focussed fluidity (with 2019’s Hearts of No Light in particular being a collection of artistically intriguing tracks which still, somehow, felt like less than the sum of its parts).
So when I say that Old Ocean is, in my opinion at least, the band’s strongest, most consistent, and most captivating work since 2014… you’ll understand how much that means.