AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM — “FOOTPRINTS N THE SAND”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Nov 232020
 

 

Irreversible Mechanism made a strikingly good impression on us in 2018 when Blood Music released their second album, Immersion. For one, my comrade DGR lavishly reviewed the album and then positioned it at No. 8 on his year-end list. In his assessment, the band moved from “the ‘everything and the kitchen sink’ style of writing in their debut album” toward “something that sounds like a head-on collision of Fallujah, Rivers Of Nihil, and a handful of other post-metal groups currently working on the fringes of the tech-death scene”.

And for another, I added a track from Immersion to the 2018 edition of our Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs. It wasn’t an album that I initially expected to be a contender for that award, because it’s such a massive record, not only in its length but also in its near-constant all-out assault on the senses, so densely packed with ideas that it lends itself to new discoveries every time you dive back into the hurricane. Given that the songs also tend to flow into each other, it’s also an album that’s probably best experienced in a single session, and it’s tough to carve out individual tracks from the one that preceded or followed it. Nevertheless, the more time I spent with the album, the more addicted to it I became and the more convinced I became that something from the album belonged on the list.

And now we have the opportunity, two years later, to revisit the music of this talented group from Minsk, Belarus. They’ve made a play-through video for a song named “Footprints in the Sand” that appears dead-center in Immersion’s track-list, whose lyrics have an eerily prescient connection to our current pandemic age, and it’s our pleasure to share it with you today. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 31): ALLFATHER, APOPHYS, IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  1 Response »
Feb 212019
 

 

Apart from the main criterion for this list (“infectiousness”), there’s no stylistic organizing principle to the three songs I chose for today’s installment. The genres represented here are all different from each other, though on second thought maybe there is something in common: They’re all electrifying, with explosive energy bursting through the speakers when you listen.

By the way, I guess it’s worth mentioning that I haven’t ranked the songs as I’ve rolled out the list. The fact that I’m posting songs at this point, near the end of the list, rather than closer to the beginning, doesn’t mean I think they’re less infectious or less good than the tracks which preceded them. I’ve been figuring out the list as I go along, and so the ordering is pretty random.

ALLFATHER

Britain’s Allfather delivered a polemical and sonic powerhouse of an album last year, And All Will Be Desolation. As Andy wrote in his NCS review, “the band’s Sludge-injected, Hardcore-inflected, proto-Death Metal sound remains as potent and punishing as ever, and invites praiseworthy comparisons with the works of High On Fire, Crowbar, and early Sepultura at their very best…. If you like your Metal heavy and heartfelt and not too polished… and you’re looking for an album where you can practically feel every ounce of blood and sweat and tears which went into its creation… then this one is for you”. Continue reading »

DGR’S QUEST TO TURN 2018 INTO A COFFEE TABLE BOOK – ISSUE FIVE: 10-1

 LISTMANIA 2018  10 Responses »
Jan 042019
 

(At last, we reach the fifth and final installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music. It includes his Top 10 albums, plus a list of EPs, and one final non-metal entry.)

Here we go into the final installment. One last grouping of albums and one last collection of thudding riffs, heavy guitars, and enough drumwork to leave one’s head spinning by the time it wraps up.

This final ten is all over the place, in terms of both genre and location. My lists tend to be pretty international always, but the consistent bouncing back and forth that is happening in this part has proven to be entertaining in its own right.

This group also reveals just how much of 2018 turned out to be the year of cathartic release for me. Alongside all the genre-bending, all the experimentation, and all of the well-executed groove, I found that every once in a while this year a disc would hit that would just boil down to a half-hour-plus of yelling, and I would relish every single second of it. I’m sure we could credit that to the wider situation of the world these days but I’ve also always been a sucker for turning music into an instrument of release, and for some reason that approach won me over hard this year.

So let’s begin with the final ten, and then a grouping of EPs I enjoyed this year, my final non-metal (ish) release recommendation, and a small (ish) closing paragraph… because why would I ever stop typing after just finishing the final ten?

That’s for crazy people. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW COLLECTION (PART 4): IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM — “IMMERSION”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 152018
 

 

(Forging ahead with his multi-part effort to catch up on reviews of albums he has enjoyed before the year expires, DGR today reflects at length about the new album by Irreversible Mechanism, which was released in September by Blood Music.)

Speaking of building blocks and blueprints, we land here with an album where nearly every element of it can easily be traced back to its sources yet is executed so well that it might — from your writer’s standpoint — have stealthily grown on me enough to become one of my favorites of the year.

Immersion, the second album from the Belarus tech-death group Irreversible Mechanism, is starkly different from its predecessor, 2015’s Infinite Fields. It is also one whose DNA is so recognizable that it might as well be a Blade Runner-esque holographic projection high above a neon-lit city. Lying somewhere at an unholy intersection between the post-metal, recorded-in-a-hurricane leanings of Fallujah and the groove-precision of Rivers of Nihil, Immersion exists as a pretty solid example of how Irreversible Mechanism can dish out some monstrously hypnotic and dynamic records and make it seem so natural that it’s bound to spark some jealousy.

Immersion is also a record that is going be a very different experience for quite a few people who may be coming to the band hoping for the high-speed precision and everything-and-the-kitchen-sink method that they employed on Infinite Fields, because if Immersion is anything, it is certainly not that. Were it not for its near-constant all-out assault on the senses, Immersion would have a dreamlike quality to it, and at times it does manage to achieve just that. Continue reading »

IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM: “INFINITE FIELDS”

 Album Reviews  7 Responses »
Mar 312015
 

 

(Austin Weber reviews the debut album by Irreversible Mechanism from Belarus.)

The story of how Irreversible Mechanism were signed and the subsequent re-release of their briefly heard debut, Infinite Fields, is an interesting one. I was initially tipped off to the band by Essence Of Datum, an instrumental death metal act based in Belarus, who mentioned them to me in early November. Irreversible Mechanism are also based in Minsk, and are highly technical as well. The band then released Infinite Fields in December, and I only got to hear it in full twice before it was pulled from Bandcamp after only a single day. It turns out that after hearing only one track the night before the release, Finland’s Blood Music immediately wrote to propose the signing and an agreement was quickly reached, though not before the band had launched the album on Bandcamp — for one day. That should give you a hint as to how impressive a debut Infinite Fields is.

On a side note, the way this happened is something I’ve noticed other labels doing recently. It’s an interesting way for newer labels to find talented new bands and help make them more well known.

On my first two listens, I will admit to thinking that I had heard very similar riffs, leads, solos, and drum-beats from Cosmogenesis-era Obscura and The Faceless, with some definable though less prevalent Necrophagist influence as well.  But my opinion of the album has changed and grown, and I’ve become quite fond of this record. Although the two main major musical influences I just cited are at the heart of Irreversible Mechanism’s gravitas, the band really do a lot to add more layers and different influences and they have created something that can definitely be considered its own unique take on technical death metal. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: DEIPHAGO, DOOMAS, IRREVERSIBLE MECHANISM, IZAH, SOLSTICE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Dec 302014
 

 

I’ve fallen a bit behind in my efforts to collect news items and new songs I think are worthy of attention. There was some holiday recently that proved to be a distraction, plus I’ve been spending time on year-end lists of one kind or another. So this collection includes items of interest I spotted over the last 4 or 5 days, presented in alphabetical order, along with a recommendation from NCS contributor Grant Skelton at the end.

DEIPHAGO

I checked — 18 months have passed since the last time I wrote about Deiphago, reviewing the vinyl edition of a 2012 split release they did with Ritual Combat. But as far as I can tell, that split was the last recording these Filipino marauders released, and we’re now more than two years on from their last full-length, the devastating Satan Alpha Omega. Therefore, I’m really pleased to report that Deiphago have recently finished recording a new album with producer Colin Marston that should see release early next year on the Hells Headbangers label.

The name of the album is Into the Eye of Satan, and the cover art by Axel Hermann (above) is a real eye-catcher.

I have no music to share with you yet, only high hopes for a highly anticipated assault of blackened death metal. Continue reading »