SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: HALIPHRON, WAR LULLABY, CATTLE DECAPITATION, GOSFORTH, IN MOURNING, PERILAXE OCCLUSION, DRONES FOR QUEENS, KOLLAPS\E

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
May 132023
 


Haliphron

Happy Saturday the 13th. The alternative title for today’s collection is Mental Scatter.

I think I mentioned in the recent past that I’ve been indulging sleep on the weekends to an unusual extent. This seems to work better on Friday nights than Saturday nights, possibly because I tend to drink more on Friday nights to put the work week behind me. Friday-night drinking is also a little reward to me for mostly staying away from alcohol during the work week for the last two months, trying to correct for what happened during the depths of the pandemic when booze became one of my best friends.

Something else has enhanced the bear-in-a-coma nature of the sleep-ins: I’ve started weight-training again, which used to be a best friend but got rudely shoved out the door by seclusion, alcohol, and general malaise during the pandemic. The downside is that now I hurt all over when I wake up. It’s easier to stay in bed when you know that you’ll feel crippled if you start trying to move in an upright position. Man, do I hurt this morning.

Now you know something about my state of mind in trying to decide what songs and videos to recommend this morning — fuzzy-headed, distracted by aches and pains, very tempted to crawl back under the covers even after 9 hours of hibernation. Which is one reason why I think of this collection as the product of Mental Scatter. The other reason is that it will probably scatter your own mind if you make your way through all of it. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2021’s MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 23): THE AMENTA, UNFLESH, IN MOURNING, GATEWAY, ZORNHEYM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2021  2 Responses »
Feb 022022
 


The Amenta

 

When I announced that I was blowing past Monday’s deadline for completing this list I wrote that I might possibly continue it through Friday. Now I would say that’s a certainty. Which means I have three days, including this one, to finish the list.

Today’s choices are a musical smorgasbord, wide-ranging in their styles and moods, and “infectious” in different ways. To check out the songs that preceded these four on the list, GO HERE.

THE AMENTA (Australia)

Release-wise, The Amenta had a busy 2021 after allowing 8 years to go by since their preceding album, Flesh Is Heir. They brought forth the new album Revelator, a split with Aborym, and an EP named Solipschism.

We’re big fans of The Amenta around these parts and accordingly devoted quite a lot of attention to them last year, but our man DGR is probably the most devoted fan. He reviewed both the full album and the EP, and so even though I’m solely responsible for this list, I deferred to him in the choice of song (among several that were strong candidates). Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “THE BLEEDING VEIL”

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Nov 302021
 

(DGR prepared the following review of the new album by the Swedish band In Mourning, just released on November 26th.)

In Mourning have definitely found a sound since the heady days of 2012 and their release of The Weight Of Oceans. Creating their own loosely conceptual lyrical universe, that album laid the groundwork for just about every release of In Mourning that followed it. While early works in the band’s discography would land them on the radar of prog-death fans – and I will go to bat for Monolith being an absolutely fantastic and underrated release – The Weight Of Oceans and its doom and post-metal influences would be where In Mourning would stake their claim.

Both 2016’s Afterglow and 2019’s Garden Of Storms continued along that path, acting as extensions of that musical world, sometimes wandering down a more death metal oriented path and sometimes going full avant-garde, as Garden Of Storms would reach its tendrils into every crevice it found. Now firmly ensconced in their corner of the progressive death metal world and with an even smaller gap between releases, In Mourning are with us once again with The Bleeding Veil, the group’s sixth full-length and the third release so far to contain seven songs in its track list.

Given that the throughline of The Bleeding Veil and its two most recent siblings is so similar, it’s interesting to see what paths In Mourning have decided to chart this time around. The Bleeding Veil is In Mourning in full focusing mode, as the disc takes all of the different directions that Garden Of Storms shot out and hones them down, refining them into a much more tied and tighter release. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 2): GENOCIDE PACT, IN MOURNING, NECRONEMESIS, ROPE SECT, SOLAR CROSS, THULCANDRA

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Oct 062021
 

Picking up here with the second Part of the big alphabetized roundup of new songs and videos I assembled for this hump-day…. If you haven’t yet checked out what was in Part 1, I hope you’ll do that when time allows, because there’s great stuff there too. You’ll find it through THIS LINK.

GENOCIDE PACT (U.S.)

Even though Genocide Pact‘s new album is their third one, they’ve self-titled it anyway. Unless I overlooked something, the first song I’ve chosen to lead off Part 2 of this round-up is the first one to be revealed from the album. Its name is “Perverse Dominion”, and we get to see the band performing it in a video. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 1): AQUILUS, ARCHSPIRE, DER WEG EINER FREIHEIT, ENSLAVED, HYPERDONTIA, HYPOCRISY, IN MOURNING

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Oct 032021
 

 

I’m playing catch-up, as usual. I had hoped to get this humongous round-up of new songs and videos (and one news item) posted yesterday, but the day didn’t work out as planned. Should you choose to go through everything (and you damned well should), it will take a while, because there are 15 items here, divided into two parts. And on top of that I still hope to pull together a SHADES OF BLACK post.

I’ve again alphabetized the selections by band name. There is singing to be found, especially in Part 2, as well as many candidates for my year-end list of Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. To get this done I’ve again limited my own verbiage to just brief scattered comments, without artwork and missing some of the usual pre-order links.

AQUILUS (Australia)

I don’t have any music to share for this first band, merely the long-awaited news (and yes, a 10-year gap between albums qualifies as “long-awaited”) that Horace Rosenqvist has a new Aquilus album named Bellum I set for release in early December by Blood Music. That’s so exciting that I thought it was worth including the news, which I usually never do when there’s no music yet. Also, the cover art by Julius von Klever is great. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2019’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 10): IN MOURNING AND INSOMNIUM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2019  3 Responses »
Jan 172020
 

 

It’s a necessity to find some strategy for the selection of songs for these year-end lists because the universe of worthy candidates is so enormous. And so, as I’ve mentioned before, I make a conscious effort to present a mix of genre styles, and I also intermingle music from both well-known and much more obscure names.

For today’s installment, I’ve paired two very well-known and successful bands, both of whom have made their mark playing doom-influenced melodic death metal, but have also evolved in interesting ways. Not coincidentally, the songs I picked also include a mix of clean and harsh vocals, and both were presented through especially memorable music videos.

IN MOURNING

I was so happy that In Mourning‘s newest album Garden of Storms (reviewed by us here and here) was home to several highly infectious tracks because that allowed me, in picking one of them, to put one of my favorite pieces of 2019 cover art on our page again (credit to Necrolord). Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “GARDEN OF STORMS”

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Oct 032019
 

 

(Accompanied by a full stream of the album, this is TheMadIsraeli’s review of the new album by the Swedish band In Mourning, which will be released on October 4th by Agonia Records.)

I’m kind of in a strange place when it comes to In Mourning. As far as melodic death metal goes, they are one of the genre’s best exports and one of the best bands of the style in a modern era extremely lacking in such. However, I feel that with the band’s last record, Afterglow, they started to make a very deliberate departure from what defined them and revealed an interest in expanding their horizons. I loved Afterglow, but it became impossible not to notice the band engaging in a little more ’70s prog death, and adopting some black metal and more post-y elements into their sound. In Mourning aren’t what I first looked to them for any more, not that that’s at all a bad thing, but the new path they are treading feels like it’s a work in progress.

That isn’t to say the band’s new album Garden Of Storms isn’t good. It’s fantastic, and it’s a super step up from Afterglow in just about every way, but it also definitively signifies that the band are done with their take on the doom-driven melodic death metal style and want to be more of an amorphous progressive band with a death metal foundation. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: ALCEST, IN MOURNING, THE GREAT OLD ONES, SELENITE, JADE, SVPREMACIST

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
Aug 232019
 

 

I’m posting this Friday round-up on my way to Sea-Tac airport, where I hope to depart the area for a mini-vacation in Wyoming with a bunch of other miscreants, returning Monday night. I’m not sure how much else I’ll be able to write for NCS between now and then, and I’ve been scurrying even to get this round-up completed before I disappear into the wild blue yonder.

A ton of new music has appeared over the last 24 hours, much of it from bigger names in the metal cosmos. I’ve included some of that here, but not all of it. There is, for example, a video released today for a new Insomnium song called “Valediction” (here) from the album Heart Like A Grave, out on October 4th, that I haven’t included. I assume it’s proving to be a crowd-pleaser. I’ve only listened to it once, and it did get its hooks in my noggin, but I also have some mixed feelings about it. And anyway, I wanted to make room for a couple of more obscure names in addition to the big ones below.

ALCEST

I’m beginning with a video for a new song by Alcest named “Protection“, from their new album Spiritual Instinct. Here’s what vocalist/multi-instrumentalist Neige had to say about it: Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2016’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 10): IN MOURNING, MISTUR, MOONSORROW

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2016  2 Responses »
Jan 132017
 

 

We have arrived at Part 10 of our growing list of last year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. After the three songs I’m adding to the list today, we’ll be up to a total of 27, with about two and a half weeks left to go before my self-imposed deadline for finishing this thing. To check out the songs preceding these three, click this link.

I probably have some kind of twisted reason for grouping these three songs together, but if I do, it has eluded my conscious mind, and at the moment I don’t have time to plumb the murky depths of my subconscious to determine what it is.

IN MOURNING

On the 20th of last May, In Mourning released the fourth album of their career with Afterglow. My NCS comrade DGR wrote one of his typically lengthy reviews (here), which included a discussion of how the album fits within the band’s evolving discography. I’m going to excerpt his words about the song from Afterglow that I’m adding to our list — “Below Rise To Above“: Continue reading »

IN MOURNING: “AFTERGLOW”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
May 242016
 

In Mourning-Afterglow

 

(DGR reviews the new album by Sweden’s In Mourning, with a full album stream at the end.)

On May 20th, In Mourning released the fourth album of their career with Afterglow. To lay all of our cards on the table up front, Afterglow is a great disc — but to really understand how and why Afterglow is great, you need to take a deep dive into In Mourning’s history so you can see what led the band to this point, because the album feels like the most natural evolution of their sound yet.

In Mourning are one of those bands for whom each album has sounded different from the others. A few genres have combined over the years to define their sound, and one of those key tenets has been a large swath of Euro-doom. The album that sowed the seeds of that was their first release, 2008’s Shrouded Divine. Shrouded Divine is also the disc where the group’s reputation as something of a critical darling was launched, drawing comparisons to bands such as Opeth — likely due to the occasional clean-sung break the group snuck in and the prevelant melo-death sound that wormed its way throughout Shrouded Divine’s run. Continue reading »

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