TENTACULT: “UNTAMED REVULSION”

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Mar 172025
 

(On March 11th Transylvanian Recordings released a disgusting new album by Sacramento-based Tentacult. It’s fitting, therefore, that Sacramento-based NCS slave DGR is reviewing it today.)

Like any good proper umbrella genre that has absolutely exploded you can take the phrase “death metal” and draw ever finer concentric triangles from it into a pyramidic tower of subgenres with each sprouting two to three more lines from it until eventually you reach descriptors long enough that you run out of breath before you finish defining the sounds that make up a group.

By the end of it, you can construct a very pretty geometric structure of lines that’ll entrance your local social media “spiritual” influencer. At times it can be like trying to speed-read aloud a complicated dinner recipe in a single breath, your very last utterance of “blank-death metal” usually followed by the sound of you collapsing to the floor due to lack of oxygen and blood flow to the brain.

In layman’s terms though, you can often break down the view of death metal into four categories: Continue reading »

CANTU IGNIS: “THE FATHOMLESS DOMINION”

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Mar 132025
 

(In mid-February the Colorado-based metal band Cantu Ignis released their second album, adorned by wondrous undersea cover art by Mark Erskine. DGR came across it and found the music pretty wondrous too, as you’ll see from his review below.)

Much as we would like to pretend that we are cooler than having a schedule or anything resembling a routine, the year in heavy metal has developed a flow to it. Some things you could set your watch by, while others are a bit more nebulous but are still guaranteed to happen. Metal’s obsession with water and chthonic depths is one such predictably recurring aspect. Even when used as base set-dressing for album art and title, there is some sense of a certain heavily-referenced mythos weaving its way in through the cracks. As cliffs will all eventually break down into piles of sand via the crashing of the waves, you can expect at some point within the year we’re going to head into the depths below.

If anything, what is shocking is that it took until the middle of February to stumble upon one, though you could argue that even then the kind of group drawn to it is to be expected as well. What is alien in the galactic sphere is also alien in the waters below, and if there’s anything the modern age of tech-death groups love it is something alien. They can bend realities to their will in song form and subject matter, and the latest to lap from that particular font of inspiration is Colorado’s Cantu Ignis with their second full-length album The Fathomless Dominion. Continue reading »

SADIST: “SOMETHING TO PIERCE”

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Mar 122025
 

(What we have for you here is DGR‘s review of the tenth installment from Sadist, just released last week by Agonia Records.)

We’ve reached an interesting period in heavy metal wherein it seems as if every Sadist release is going to be the last one, as if Sadist are held together by fierce determination and super glue – though it’s not clear which one is doing the most work.

At this point in their career the entity bearing the Sadist name has been reduced down to its two founding members: vocalist Trevor Nadir and multi-instrumentalist Tommy Talamanca. Drummer Romain Goulon seems to have bowed out after a four-year stint with the band – which, granted, brought us a pretty mean release in 2022’s Firescorched – and it does not appear that Sadist have settled on a permanent rhythm section since then.

The group nowadays seems to be largely reinforced by the Italian death and groove band Fate Unburied, with three of its four members taking up live duties with the band and its rhythm section performing session work with them as well. Which is the way we loop back around to how Sadist is being held together and what they consist of these days – because clearly someone believes in this band’s angular and bizarre take on death metal. A large part of the explanatory weight is left to the group’s newest material then, an early March unleashing of death metal entitled Something To Pierce. Continue reading »

SYNAPTIC: “ENTER THE VOID”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Mar 102025
 

(This is DGR‘s review of the debut album by the German band Synaptic, which was released in January by Lifeless Chasm Records.)

Dwelling in the earlier part of the year has so far presented a handful of pleasant surprises but none came out of left field quite like the first full-length from Germany’s Synaptic, a tech-death, thrash, and melodeath hybrid that has resulted in a sub-thirty-five minute blistering whirlwind of an album known as Enter The Void.

Synaptic have existed in one embryonic form or another for over twenty-plus years of on-and-off activity but up to this point have only had one release to their name, a twenty-seven minute EP dating back to 2008 entitled Distortion Of Senses. Since then, the whole lineup has changed save for one main project-driver, and it seems as if the entire sound of the group has shifted from those days. It means that in a lot of ways Enter The Void is a full relaunch of Synaptic – now a three piece – and is the sort of release that makes it seem as if the seventeen years between releases were put to good use.

Even though there’s only an eight-minute difference between Synaptic‘s full-length and the aforementioned EP, there is a lot more packed within those thirty some-odd minutes than you might expect. Continue reading »

EMPTY THRONE: “UNHOLY”

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Mar 072025
 

(At the end of February Downfall Records released the debut album from a group of U.S. metal veterans who’ve taken the name Empty Throne, and today we have DGR‘s extensive and enthusiastic review of what they’ve accomplished on this first full-length.)

One of the most appreciable things about Empty Throne and their new album Unholy is that within the first minute of the opening song “Abbey Of Thelema”, you have a pretty good idea of exactly how this album is going to go and what the band sound like. It has been some time since we’ve had a release that has so clearly laid its cards on the table with an opening furnace blast of music quite like Empty Throne do up until the quiet guitar break in that opening song.

You’ll have a sense of just how much of the group’s death metal with a hint of melodicism, blackened thrash, and gnarly razor-sharp guitars you’ll want from the band right about that point. That’s not to say that Empty Throne aren’t happy to provide other things, but that opening minute lays out the core of a very ambitious band who across six songs and forty minutes have a lot to say — and as it turns out, at a very fast and teeth-shattering tempo as well. Continue reading »

SEPTICFLESH: “AMPHIBIANS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Mar 062025
 

(In advance of their recent North American tour with Vltimas and Ex Deo, the Greek band SepticFlesh released an EP named Amphibians, and our DGR gives it a review here.)

If you’ve been following the news around tours for the past five or so years you’ve likely noticed an increasing trend of groups surprise-releasing singles – sometimes collaborative ones, which are immense fun – or EPs just prior to the tour happening. Aborted did it for their most recent tour; Machine Head did a combo song with the vocalists of Unearth, In Flames, and Lacuna Coil making appearances; and Lamb of God combined forces with Mastodon for their full album playthrough tour not too long ago.

The genesis of these songs can often lay in the cutting room floor from previous album sessions since creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum and are highly unpredictable, but whereas it felt like groups constantly needed to have something to get them out on the road, now it has morphed into something more akin to revitalizing the current album cycle for a few more rotations around the sun.

Just as equally though, you do get lucky and a band will find time to sneak into the studio for a few and crank out ideas that’ve been haunting them like shadows ever-present in the corner of their vision. Bearing in mind that SepticFlesh‘s newest release crashes ashore a bit over two and a half years after their album, it would be hard to guess what led to which. Continue reading »

SOUL TOMB: “DROWNING”

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Mar 052025
 

(After a bit of a lull DGR returns to NCS with a review of a great discovery, the second EP by the Swedish one-person band Soul Tomb.)

After years of doing whatver you might refer to this as, you sort of develop a sense that the year in heavy metal has a flow to it. There are plenty of peaks and valleys and often Summer can feel like a massive deluge of releases as hardcore festival and touring season gets underway, but there is one thing that has proven to be as equally reliable as the end of the year clusterfuck season or the time set aside for the brave souls who defy the odds and attempt a December release: January is a weird month.

January comes to us at the end of a whole year’s closing, partially feeling like the recovery from a hangover rather than the opportunity to appraise things anew and appreciate the potential of upcoming opportunities. The month is not bereft of releases; in fact the reason why January tends to consistently feel strange is the opposite.

There are a ton of releases in January, but truth be told you never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes it’s by big, recognizable names but more often January gets to be a month of gambles and discoveries – which is how the year started on this end. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2024’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: THE DGR ADDENDUMB

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2024  2 Responses »
Feb 032025
 

(Last week Islander finished his month-long list of 2024’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It included 69 songs in all. Today DGR has provided an addendum. It includes… 70 SONGS! Though there is some small overlap with Islander‘s list.)

At the time this article is being published we’ll have drawn our Most Infectious Songs of 2024 rollout to a close. There are likely a handful of questions surrounding how such a list gets put together or why I am once again exhuming the corpse of 2024 for a few more stick-whackins that are swirling around your mind.

To put it bluntly, the idea of doing an addendum to the 2024 song list was offered to me by the NoCleanSinging head honcho, in part due to a desire for differing opinions from his own but also to highlight, once again, just how wide the spread of music was in the 2024 world of heavy metal and just how much you’re likely to miss no matter how much you try to keep up. It’s fucking impossible.

Originally, this was just going to be an Andy shindig as a sort of quick “here’s a few more that might’ve been overlooked,” but then I was asked to contribute as well so I thought it might be a fun exercise to peel the curtain back a bit and show just how much the internet cabal decides who is going to break through and be famous this year.

The answer is, simply put, “fuck all”. Continue reading »

THE HALO EFFECT: “MARCH OF THE UNHEARD”

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Jan 222025
 

(Not long ago Nuclear Blast released the second album by the Swedish melodic death metal band The Halo Effect, and today we have DGR‘s review of the record.)

We are now a couple weeks removed from the release of The Halo Effect‘s newest album March Of The Unheard and the one thought that keeps rattling around the ole’ brainpan is a discussion of what exactly you might come to music for.

This can seem repetitive of course because everyone has a chosen purpose that music might fulfill for them, whether it’s simple enjoyment or some deeper resonance with the artist. I am more often part of the second club, which is why you’ll see many screeds penned that spend more time pontificating about why a specific piece of art might have arisen versus the actual general quality of it. Yet in the case of a group like The Halo Effect I’ve found myself firmly in the former camp.

When it comes to The Halo Effect, I’m not seeking anything deeper and I’m present for the simple enjoyment of whatever the band are creating, and it seems that largely, the band feel the same way. There’s nothing deeper here. No inner quest, nothing revealing itself, and no long-lasting message with which we can walk away from March Of The Unheard feeling fulfilled, with our lives changed. March Of The Unheard is musical red-meat at its finest and, for lack of better term, a perfectly fine ‘pop’ album. Continue reading »

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 »

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