May 072016
 

Denouncement Pyre-Black Sun Unbound

 

Some people may have noticed that I failed to compile even one round-up of new music all of this past week (unless you count that little Warriors in Forests thing). I’ve still been spending hours every afternoon or evening in a hospital ICU trying to help support my injured friend and her family.

For those of you who have been following my scattered references to this tragedy, my friend came out of her coma yesterday, though she still drifts in and out of consciousness and is now beset with other medical issues in addition to her injury.  It’s too soon to tell exactly how seriously impaired she will be as a result of the injury to her brain.  She can answer some simple yes or no questions by moving her fingers or foot, but she hasn’t attempted to speak and doesn’t move much. I’m trying to remain hopeful, but this is still heart-breaking.

Though I haven’t had time to do much for NCS this week besides write introductions to premieres, I have been keeping a list of new song and album streams and videos that I’ve noticed. As usual, there’s a shitload of them, far too many to write about in one post. I picked a handful to include in this post (and Austin Weber wrote an introduction to one of them as well). I’m also planning to prepare a Shades of Black post for tomorrow to collect others. Continue reading »

Apr 202016
 

Formless-Eon

 

(Austin Weber brings us the premiere of a new song by Formless, with this introduction:)

It seems like just yesterday that I first became familiar with Connecticut-based technical death metal unit Formless when they dropped their sick three-song demo EP back in 2010. Over the years, their name continued to spread and be mentioned among the tech-death faithful, all the while we waited for the band to release something new. Well, the long wait is finally over, as the band’s debut full-length, Eon, is finally dropping on Tuesday, May 10th! And we’ve got the exclusive premiere of a brand new song off it called “Prism”.

Much like the band’s music in the past, “Prism” culls influences and ideas from all over the larger tech-death and death metal styles around to form a multi-faceted synthesis all their own. So it shreds, it stomps, it soars, and even offers up sparse moments of beautiful clean singing from guitarist Annie Grunwald amidst the myriad of ideas that “Prism” is composed of. As a song title, “Prism” perfectly describes this kind of layered technical death metal composition, full of many shades and colors. Continue reading »