SHADES OF BLACK: HAIDUK, KANAHN, ANIMA HERETICAE

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Oct 032021
 

 

This week’s SHADES OF BLACK is going to be a bit shorter than usual. For better or worse, I spent a fair amount of time pulling together the two Overflowing Streams roundups that I posted earlier today, and wasn’t able to get to everything I wanted to write about for this column. Still, it’s a fair share of music, with streams and reviews of two new albums and one new EP. I’ll add that all of these selections include black metal as only one of several genre ingredients.

HAIDUK (Canada)

Haiduk‘s fourth album Diabolica (released on September 21st) consists of 11 tracks, all but two of them less than three minutes in length. Both individually and collectively, they deliver such full-bore intensity they may suck the wind from your lungs. You can imagine being caught in the midst of a gale-driven firestorm, or desperately hanging onto the wing of a jet aircraft that’s blazing straight up into the skies. The dense, swarming riffs and maniacal leads are themselves a superheated blaze of head-spinning, mind-mutilating sound. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 3): HELFRÓ, HUSK, HAIDUK, HOWLING WASTE

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Dec 242018
 

 

I need my head examined, but what else is new? Here we are on Christmas Eve, when fewer people than usual browse metal sites such as ours, but even after already raining a heavy deluge of blackened metal upon your heads in Part 1 and Part 2 of this column, I’m still not content to finish. It is undoubtedly an obsessive-compulsive disorder, but undoubtedly untreatable. So here we are.

As mentioned in Part 2, my plan was to use the third part of this column to round up a few more full releases from late 2018 that I wanted to recommend before the year ends. The four I’ve focused on here in these brief reviews don’t exhaust everything I’d like to mention, but perhaps you can figure out why I decided to combine these four (hint: today’s the 8th day before the year ends). Maybe I’ll get to more later — after all, we do have 7 more days before 2018 expires.

HELFRÓ

Of the four records in this post two of them come from bands I’ve written about before and two are newcomers, including this first one, a new Icelandic black/death metal project organized by members of Ophidian I. Their self-titled album, released on December 21st, was recorded in part by Studio Emissary’s Stephen Lockhart and was mixed and mastered by him, and that’s why I paid attention to it. Glad I did. Continue reading »

SATURDAY SEEN AND HEARD: GRAVE, DECEASE, MOLOKEN, HAIDUK, HORN

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  9 Responses »
Sep 192015
 

Grave-Out of Respect For the Dead

 

It’s a rare Saturday morning here on my metallic island. My head isn’t hammering and my stomach isn’t heaving. I managed to resist the usual Friday night temptation to celebrate the end of the work week by destroying myself. The feeling is so unusual that I decided to get my head hammered and my stomach heaved this morning with some metal instead of a night of strong drinking. Here’s what I found:

GRAVE

For me, it’s hard to think of a better way to start a weekend of listening than with a new song by Grave, especially when it comes from an album adorned with the artwork of Costin Chioreanu. The album is Out of Respect For the Dead, scheduled for release by Century Media on October 16, and the new song (presented through a lyric video) is “Mass Grave Mass”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SYLOSIS, PIG DESTROYER, HAIDUK, AND KAWAK IJEN BY NIGHT

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Sep 152012
 

Here are a few things I spotted last night and this morning that I thought were worth passing along.

SYLOSIS

October 9 is the North American release date for Monolith, the new album by Sylosis (Oct 5 in Europe). We’ve previously featured two of the songs from the album — “Dying Vine” and “Born Anew” — and “Born Anew” is being offered as a free download by Nuclear Blast at this site.

Now, someone has posted a teaser reel on YouTube that includes minute-long samples from each of the album’s 11 tracks. I can’t tell if this was an authorized compilation and upload or not. I guess we’ll find out. But for as long as it lasts, it provides a pretty good tasting of an album that a couple of us here at NCS have been spinning and enjoying quite a bit. You can find that teaser reel right after the jump.

As you may know, Sylosis are also opening for Lamb of God, In Flames, and Hatebreed on their North American tour beginning in October. I’ve put the tour schedule after the jump, too. Continue reading »