SEEN AND HEARD ON A BANDCAMP BLACK FRIDAY: HOST, GOATBURNER, ÚZKOST, FORMLESS ARCHITECT, SLEGEST, ONHOU, TCHORNOBOG, ABYSSAL

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 252022
 


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When you combine a Black Friday with a Bandcamp Friday the result is a goddamned typhoon of new music and videos, with bands and labels not only launching sales but trying to take further advantage of the situation with new releases, some of them out today and some now up for pre-order.

Correction: As Nic pointed out in a comment on the post following this one, Black Friday was NOT in fact a Bandcamp Friday, and now I’ve forgotten why I thought it was. On the plus side, I get to do something like this again on December 2nd!

I can’t say I’ve waded through all of it to make your shopping experience easier (I’m only one bedraggled human and speed-cloning is a generation or two away), but I did make my way through some of it, and have these recommendations for you.

I also did try to provide some genre scatter in the choices, knowing that not everyone loves everything, and to provide a range of radar elevations among the bands. As vivid proof of that, I’m leading off with… Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: GOATBURNER — “VORTEX OF CHAOS”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 092019
 

 

Unless Goatburner are clairvoyant they probably couldn’t have known, when this premiere was arranged, that their song “Vortex of Chaos” — which is about the obliterating power of an immense hurricane — would be released barely one week after the monstrous Hurricane Dorian absolutely destroyed portions of the Bahamas, leaving more than 70,000 people homeless and a death toll of 44 (at this writing) before moving on to ravage the Outer Banks of North Carolina and now far-eastern Canada.

On the other hand, their debut album Extreme Conditions thematically focuses on the extreme and unpredictable weather events that are increasingly plaguing the current world. If Hurricane Dorian had not followed the completion of the album, some other horrific extratropical or tropical cyclone undoubtedly would have. But this Finnish duo composed of Keijo Niinimaa (Rotten Sound, Morbid Evils, Age of Woe) and Jaakko Forsman (Ratface, Skulmagot) are aware of Dorian now, and Keijo provided this comment not long after that hurricane’s tragic destruction in the Bahamas: Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: RUSSIAN CIRCLES, KASSAD, BEYOND GRACE, PHANTOM HYMN, GOATBURNER

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jul 022019
 

 

Surprise! After a busy June in which I was only able to complete four of these round-ups over the entire month, I’ve now finished two, back to back, in just the first two days of July. One must make hay while the sun shines, although in my case I treat that proverb as less of a command than a suggestion, and one that I don’t follow much more often than “why do today what you can put off until tomorrow”.

As in the case of yesterday’s post, I’ve culled these selections to provide variety, in the hope of appealing to a range of tastes, and mixing at least one widely known name with others that should be better known and still others that are brand new.

RUSSIAN CIRCLES

“Milano” is the name of the second advance track from this powerhouse instrumental trio’s new album Blood Year, which will be released on August 2nd by Sargent House. As compared to previous releases, the album is billed as “Russian Circles at their most brutalising”, “fully embrac[ing] the most forceful aspects of the band’s repertoire”, in which “blissful respites and ebbs of calm are fewer and farther between”. Continue reading »