SHADES OF BLACK: VIRCOLAC, IARMHAIRT, TORTURERS’ LOBBY, JZOVCE, PORONIEC

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Mar 172024
 

Yesterday I read that in the annual St. Patrick’s Day parades in the Irish Channel of New Orleans, float riders toss cabbages and potatoes to the people on the street, a unique twist on the Mardi Gras practice of throwing strings of beads to revelers.

Although a flurry of cabbages would be entertaining, I’ll have to aim some other things at your head on this Paddy’s Day — spiky obsidian things dipped in poison or hallucinogens, some red with heat and some freezing.

Of course, I felt compelled to lead with music from a couple of Irish bands before crossing the waters east and west.

P.S. This column is late-appearing because I can’t hold my Saturday night Jameson shots and Guinness back like I used to. and my spouse and friends kept me up way past my bedtime. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): BACKSTABBER — “PATTERNS OF DOMINATION”

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Mar 142024
 

On March 15th — tomorrow! — the Quebec band Backstabber, now featuring a revised lineup since their last album, will release their new EP, a four-song assault called Patterns of Domination, but today we’re giving you a chance to hear all of it without delay.

Before we get into some detailed thoughts about the music, here’s the band’s description of what the EP represents:

“Loosely based on James Redfield’s The Celestine Prophecy, Patterns of Domination delves into the 4 patterns that serve as means to canalize someone else’s attention and energy. Together, they form an endless cycle of consumption that completely breaks down the victim from the inside out. Like fresh air. These are the first songs with the new members of the band and they contributed a lot to this album.” Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ACOD, ISCHEMIC, LOCKTENDER, LOKA, NECROT, NEVER THE DEAD, PAIN, POPIOŁY, SHADOHM

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Mar 092024
 

Like yesterday, I had enough time to compile a very big roundup of new music for this Saturday. It includes two full EPs and seven individual songs, most of them from forthcoming releases, presented in alphabetical order by band name.

Like yesterday, there’s so much to hear here that I’ve attempted to cut back on the usual volume of impressionistic words so I can finish this before I turn into a pumpkin. Also like yesterday, I think there’s a lot of variety in the music I picked.

Unlike yesterday, I decided to focus on more obscure names from different corners of the metalverse.(P.S. For newcomers here, there will be yet another roundup tomorrow, focusing on black metal and its kindred.) Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: PELICAN — “ADRIFT / TENDING THE EMBERS”

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Mar 012024
 

It’s another Bandcamp Friday today, and the electronic ether is flooded with new possibilities. I have dozens of recommendations I could make, in addition to the dozens my colleagues and I have been making every day since the last one of these Fridays. But the one I decided to pick out from the virtual deluge is here because… it takes me back….

In looking through our many past writings about Pelican, I found the first appearance in a list posted by one of the two other people who started NCS with me more than 14 years ago, a list posted just two weeks after we began (with no idea where we would go or for how long). And of course that wasn’t the last time we highlighted Pelican‘s music — many more features followed.

Even 14+ years ago, Pelican weren’t newcomers. Just a few weeks before that list I mentioned, they had released their fourth album, What We All Come to Need. Since then, two more albums have followed, and a few EPs, but the pace of the releases hasn’t been as intense as it once was.

That’s not shocking, given that the life of the band is now about 23 years, and the slower pace of output just makes the appearance of something new even more welcome. The new thing we have now, as of today, is a two-song EP named Adrift/Tending the Embers, and although nostalgia has admittedly played a role in why I decided to help spread the word about it, that’s not the only reason. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ABYSSLOOKER, ASPHALT GRIEVING, THEY CAME FROM VISIONS, TWILIGHT SUN

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Feb 252024
 

I have a lot to get to for this Sunday column as I continue to benefit from my day job at least temporarily leaving me alone. I hope it will be a benefit to you too. I’ll try to make this a bit easier to get through by calling out tracks to sample from the three full releases I’ve included.

ABYSSLOOKER (Russia)

I made a point of including music from a Ukrainian band in yesterday’s roundup, yesterday being the second anniversary of the egomaniacal thug Putin’s invasion of Ukraine. I wanted to make a point of including a Russian band today, the point being that sometimes blame can be painted with too broad a brush, and we ought not do that. Continue reading »

OBSCURA QALMA: “VEILS OF TRANSCENDENCE”

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Feb 142024
 

(We bring you DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Venetian band Obscura Qalma, which was released earlier this month by the Dusktone label.)

The nice thing about Italian symphonic death metal group Obscura Qalma is that they make absolutely no pretense of the style of music they’re going to make nor are they hiding who their influences are.

Obscura Qalma have been kicking around since 2018 and already have two albums and a few EPs – though one of each of those is the instrumental and orchestral version of songs from a previous album, much in the same way Fleshgod Apocalypse have taken to including the purely symphonic tracks as bonuses to their full-lengths recently. Adding to their name, all you need to do is look at a press photo of the band and you can tell there’s likely going to be a rich vein of SepticFlesh running through the group’s DNA.

Obscura Qalma don their lab coats and joyfully smash their death and symphonic elements together, cackling all the while, with lightning crashing in the background. Drawing heavily from the occult for lyrical inspiration – recently pulling large buckets up the well from the Aleister Crowley mines – Obscura Qalma are playing in a very wide musical sphere. The group’s latest EP Veils Of Transcendence punches in at four songs and a little under twenty minutes of boulder-heavy death metal with a huge symphonic and synth line buttressing the events and doing the melodic heavy lifting. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): STELLAR REMAINS — “WASTELANDS”

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Feb 132024
 

Let’s pretend you can’t listen to Stellar Remains‘ new EP right now, even though you can if you just scroll further down the screen you’re now looking at.

Let’s take our game of make-believe a move further and pretend you have no idea who this band is and have never heard a note of its music. That requires less suspension of disbelief, because Wastelands is in fact the first release of Stellar Remains, and only one song from the EP has been available for streaming before today.

Moreover, all that most of us know or could find out about the band (apart from that one song) is that it’s the solo work of Brisbane-based Dan Elkin, who has no resume on Metal-Archives yet.

So, if you indulge all this pretending, then you have to put some amount of weight on what we now have to say about Wastelands. How nice for us. Continue reading »

PERSEFONE: “LINGUA IGNOTA: PART I”

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Feb 132024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by the Andorran band Persefone, which was released not long ago by Napalm Records.)

A guarantee with Andorra’s Persefone is that you are going to get a lot of music. Persefone have made a career out of albums hybridizing progressive metal, melodeath, and as wide a smattering of other genres as they could into a form of tightly controlled chaos with multiple vocal approaches serving as the icings on the cake.

They’re a full-album band and very rarely, throughout a surprisingly long career, have done any sort of single or EP as part of their discography. Persefone have always dealt in releasing densely packed albums, and as of 2022’s Metanoia were up to a grand total of six.

With all of those elements making up Persefone‘s career it is surprising that the band have seen relatively little change on the lineup front – especially since they really found their groove with 2013’s Spiritual Migration. Since then, other than a re-recording of their first album Truth Inside The Shades in 2020, the band have refined upon the eastern sprituality subject matter and massive keyboard-wall approach to their writing style.

Which is why it is both fitting and very interesting that the group’s newest release is just an EP but also has a ‘Part I’ tacked onto its name. Continue reading »

GHOUL: “NOXIOUS CONCOCTIONS”

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Feb 092024
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of a new EP by Creepsylvanian splatterthrashers Ghoul, out now on the Tankcrimes label.)

If you’ve been trawling around the underground long enough, you’ve likely crossed paths with the crazed crossover thrash and death metal hybrid that is Ghoul; they’re a name that probably needs little introduction at this point – having battled out a career for years that is combination tongue-in-cheek shock horror, community theater, public-access TV, pirate radio, and puppet show.

The band, in all their murderous muppety glory, seem to appear out of the ether at shows and crank out crazed sets before vanishing into the night. You’d never know that they’ve been subsisting on a series of splits and singles since 2016’s Dungeon Bastards and prior to that had been on a slightly more sollid rotating albums/eps collection every three or four years.

The upshot of this is that Ghoul have five full-lengths to their name already, but their most recent EP Noxious Concoctions is the most substantial collection of material – four originals songs, one cover, for a grand total of eighteen and a half minutes of music – that the masked madmen have cranked out in almost eight years. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, JANUARY 2024

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Jan 312024
 

(Gonzo returns with another end-of-month roundup of recommended releases, this time shining a light on albums and EPs released by six bands in January.)

January is such a bullshit month.

It’s cold as all fuck, everyone’s burned out – financially, emotionally, professionally – and shows/tours are few and far between. To pile it on, it’s also customarily a terrible month for new music. I wasn’t expecting to unearth much during my monthly search of metal’s grimy underbelly to include in this feature.

Lo and behold, I was dead fucking wrong. 2024 has already seen so many good releases in just over three weeks that I actually had to figure out what not to include here. (Coincidentally, three of the releases are from France, so make of that what you will.)

Regardless of geography, the sharp rise in early-year quality in 2024 is making me rethink old paradigms. Is the January curse on its way out? Am I reading too much into this? Is reality a lie? Are the machines reading my thoughts? Fuck. Continue reading »

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