SHADES OF BLACK: OCCULTA VERITAS, TODESSTOSS, MOUTH OF CEDAR, HORNED ALMIGHTY, SÓLSTAFIR, HEXEN HOUSE

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jun 162024
 

To follow up on yesterday’s personal report: The food cooked deep underground turned out extremely well. Our fire continued to roar. The beer and wine didn’t run out. The forecast thunderstorms and hail didn’t arrive, though ominous clouds constantly raced across blue skies, and in the late afternoon they paused long enough to provide a brief drenching.

That did put a literal damper on our outdoor picnic, followed by scenes of people warming their backsides next to the fire bowl, with hilarious sights of steam coming off the butt-side of wet jeans. Not long after, people started going their separate ways just before sunset.

So, what might have been another late night for me turned into a relatively early collapse into bed. Yet I listened to no music yesterday other than vibrant songs from Mexico and Guatemala pumping from a boom box, with lots of marimba, accordion, and tuba in the mix. Today is also Father’s Day.

With all that, today’s collection of metal like yesterday’s isn’t as extensive as I’d like, but still worth your time (I hope you’ll agree). I’ve launched it with a trio of mind-benders, Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: HORNED ALMIGHTY, SEAR BLISS, KRALLICE, HOULE, KRÅBØL, HEILUNG

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jun 022024
 

After a bit of a festival-induced hiatus in these Sunday columns, I’ve returned, and have had time to pull together a pretty good-sized selection of new blackened sounds today.

I’m leading off with three veteran bands who have managed to withstand the ravaging gales of time, and then I’ll move into newer collectives. I’m not sure there’s any organizing principle in what I chose, other than my own strong positive reactions to each choice. They include advance tracks from five forthcoming albums, some of them accompanied by videos, and one recently released full-length.

HORNED ALMIGHTY (Denmark)

The mighty Horned Almighty are returning to strike fear into the hearts of men, women, beasts, and probably plant life. Their new album, the seventh in a 20+ year career, is Contagion Zero. The first frights from it come in the form of a daunting and extremely dire song named “Ascension of Fever and Plague“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLAZE OF PERDITION, HORNED ALMIGHTY, MÆNTRƏ, VAALTOVASHE, BEGGAR, LYRA

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 282019
 


Blaze of Perdition

 

“I spent most of my life believing a gauzy, kindergarten version of Thanksgiving, thinking only of feasts and family, turkey and dressing.” So wrote a New York Times columnist today, near the end of an essay in which he explained in gruesome detail why, in this view, he “was blind, willfully ignorant, I suppose, to the bloodier side of the Thanksgiving story, to the more honest side of it”. His reminiscences of childhood Thanksgiving might have been my own words, but whether you remain among the blissfully blind or have become hardened by the truth, I still wish you a Happy Thanksgiving on behalf of all of us at NCS. Regardless of the reason for the occasion, happy days are hard to come by and wishes for more can’t hurt, can they?

Of course, one of the long traditions at this site has been to ignore holidays in our labors. Taking days off from posting just subtracts from the opportunities to spread the word about new metal, which continues to arrive every day, heedless of holidays. So I’ve picked some of the new arrivals to recommend. Maybe they’ll make this Thanksgiving Day a happier one for you. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2014’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS: PART 3

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2014  20 Responses »
Dec 262014
 

 

We bring you Part 3 of our list of 2014′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. For more details about what this list is all about and how it was compiled, read the introductory post via this link. For the other songs we’ve previously named to the list, go here. Today we add two more songs — and I’ve paired these two for reasons that will become obvious.

GOATWHORE

We published two reviews of Goatwhore’s new album Constricting Rage of the Merciless, Andy Synn’s three-line, 14-word haiku review and DGR’s 1337-word tome. I’ll quote excerpts from each review:

“Rabid dogs learn some new tricks”

…

“In comparison to the group’s previous albums, Constricting Rage Of The Merciless is the most pit-fueled and ballsy of the Goatwhore albums. There is some serious stomping swagger on this record, like outlier ‘Baring Teeth For Revolt’. That song has a bluesy rock and roll riff made heavy by the rest of the band and a gallop designed, it seems, for the sole purpose of making people run in a circle.” Continue reading »

HORNED ALMIGHTY: “WORLD OF TOMBS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 022014
 

 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album by Denmark’s Horned Almighty.)

Horned Almighty know what they want, and they know how to make it happen. From the shit-kicking swagger of the album’s title track — replete with pumping, jackhammer riffage, brutish, bellowing vocals, and rib-cracking drum work – through to the ominous grind and blackened groove of closer “Blessed By Foulness”, the Danish deviants unleash a sickening torrent of rabid hostility and ugly misanthropy over a chaotic cacophony of pustulent riffs, choking bass-lines, and neck-snapping drums.

The band’s sound, a thrashed-up and scathingly savage form of Black Metal, delivered with a perverse, punkish energy and a rumbling, clanking Death Metal backbone, is instantly recognizable and instantly gratifying, and picks up pretty much right where their previous album, the damningly aggressive Necro Spirituals, left off.

If anything, World of Tombs might even be a little darker and a little more depraved than its predecessor, immediately grabbing the listener by the throat and proceeding to drown their screams and struggles beneath a torrent of blackened bile and metallic filth. It’s undoubtedly ferocious and pestilentially infectious, and utterly, unrepentantly, nihilistic to the core.

It’s the sort of album that just wants to watch the world burn… Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HORNED ALMIGHTY, VAIYA, MARE COGNITUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Aug 042014
 

I’ve spent the last three days having a fantastic time at the Denver Black Sky festival, about which I’ll have more to say and show in the coming days.  My traveling companions and I will be headed back to Seattle soon, and so I doubt I’ll be posting much on our site today, but I wanted to get you a few new things to hear before I once again enjoy the wonders of airport security in the 21st Century, even though I don’t have time to say much about the music itself.

HORNED ALMIGHTY

This Danish black metal band have recorded their fifth album, and the first since 2010′s Necro Spirituals. The new one is named World of Tombs, it features cover art by Mark B. Hansen, and it’s scheduled for release on September 1, 2014, by the band’s new label, Scarlet Records. In June I wrote about the first killer single from the album, “Diabolical Engines of Torment”, and today brought us a second one — “In Torture We Trust Pt. II”.

Through the use of my superior deductive skills, which have justly become famous throughout my own mind, the song title suggested to me that a song named “In Torture We Trust Pt. I” might exist somewhere. Undoubtedly its existence would be well known to fans more familiar with Horned Almighty’s full discography than I am. But this is why Satan created Metal-Archives. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: HORNED ALMIGHTY, HYPERIAL, CONDUCTING FROM THE GRAVE

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Jun 202014
 

In this round-up I’ve collected a few new songs and videos I noticed over the last 24 hours from a variety of metal sub-genres. I really like all of ’em. Hope you will, too.

HORNED ALMIGHTY

This Danish black metal band have recorded their fifth album, and the first since 2010’s Necro Spirituals. The new one is named World of Tombs and it’s projected for release waaaay down the road on September 1, 2014, by the band’s new label, Scarlet Records. Yesterday brought a stream of one of the new tracks, “Diabolical Engines of Torment”, and it kills.

It kills in two ways — with electrifying thrash riffs and punk rhythms (which will grab you by the neck right from the first second), and with a down-paced pounding so irresistible that heads cannot help but bang. The vocalist alternately sprays acid and roars like a death metal beast, and the production makes the music sound especially powerful (and clear). Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 45: HORNED ALMIGHTY

 THE SYNN REPORT  4 Responses »
Mar 312014
 

(In his 45th Synn Report, Andy Synn looks back at the discography of Denmark’s Horned Almighty.)

Recommended for fans of: Mayhem, Aura Noir, Goatwhore

Time for something beautifully filthy, brutally heavy, and just downright nasty.

Horned Almighty are a four-piece Satanic coven from Denmark who deal in a ragged, ugly form of Black Metal which melds raw thrash intensity with a Satyricon-esque sense of groove, and a primal punk-ish passion for perversion. There’s even a hint of Death Metal to the band’s sickening sonic synthesis – their gargantuan guitar tone and booming bass lines are delivered with the same crushing, tank-track aggression of early Obituary – while the bowel-shaking, gut-level heaviness of the band’s low-end rumble is pure Celtic Frost.

With four albums of malignant musical menace already under their collective belt, the band are currently in the studio laying down the foundations for their next full-length World of Tombs, so now seems like the perfect time to introduce you all to their brand of balls-to-the-wall blackened misanthropy. Continue reading »

INFERNO FESTIVAL – DAY ONE

 Concert Reviews  6 Responses »
Apr 032013
 

(NCS writer Andy Synn has returned from Oslo’s Inferno Festival, held on March 27-30, 2013, and brings us a multi-part report of what he saw and heard, along with photos. Check out his Opening Day report here.)

Kicking off the festival-proper at the early time of 17:30 Horned Almighty were like a veritable boot to the face of the assembled audience. Nasty, brutal, and brimming with feral punk aggression, the group come across as a bad-boy version of the Misfits, raised on black metal nihilism and death metal misanthropy, and kick up a hell of a racket, with a truly demolition-strength guitar tone. Material from across their four albums bulked out the set, with the strongest focus being on Contaminating The Divine and Necro Spirituals.

Frontman S. didn’t let the fact that the band were opening the festival proper intimidate him, spitting necrosadistic venom at the crowd with his spiteful, belligerent snarl, while the aptly-named Carnage on bass was a stalking, twisting revelation of spindly fingers and malevolent contortions. Give these guys a longer set and a bigger stage someone! Continue reading »

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