LATE DECEMBER AND EARLY JANUARY GEMS (PART 3): PARIUS AND KERATOCONUS

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jan 242017
 

 

(This is a delayed Part 3 of what started as a planned  3-part series by Austin Weber about noteworthy January releases and a few from the end of last year. However, during the interval between Part 2 and Part 3, the series has expanded to 5 parts — so more lie ahead.)

Parius – Let There Be Light

Parius are a Philadelphia-based melodic death metal band, one that was unknown to me until last week when my friend showed me their newest release that dropped on January 17th, Let There Be Light. Continue reading »

KERATOCONUS: “INANE LIVING CONDITIONS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 132014
 

 

(As part of our week-long series of new reviews by DGR, today we bring you his write-up on the debut album by Keratoconus.)

Few things in the world make me happier than getting to run ridiculous cover art on the NCS frontpage for a few days that will at the very least make someone scrolling along the page do a double-take. It was one of the reasons I enjoyed reviewing GenocideGenerator’s 2013 release this year, because aside from the music, the knowledge that the artwork would be going on the frontpage was enough to carry me on cloud nine for a couple of days. Thus, we find ourselves with Keratoconus‘ big ol’ blotch of blue for its new disc Inane Living Conditions splattered all over our canvas of red and skulls that make up the NCS page.

We found Keratoconus, a one-man project run by one Sam A. Mudd based in the UK, after the main man behind it reached out to us on our Facebook page, describing the music as something of a mixture of death metal and grind, while also having a random smattering of electronics throughout. Which, if anything will go to show you that we do notice the folks posting on our FB page — we just get backlogged super-quick, but we do give everyone a chance. In the case of Keratoconus, the project is very interesting, but if discovering it accomplishes nothing else, at least it has provided me with the joy of putting that artwork up on the front page.

Inane Living Conditions is the first release that S.A. Mudd (as most of his accounts go by) has put out underneath the Keratoconus name, a release that has slowly been in the works over four years and has gone through constant reboots and different changes. This is going to sound like Greek to a lot of you but upon listening to it, the first thing it reminded me of was the British flip-side of the coin to Brandon Duncan’s The Sequence Of Prime project and its album -Inter. Both discs are one man-releases that at the easiest you could probably describe as very “On edge” — like the person behind it was slowly losing his mind and decided to scream about it over a bunch of bouncing guitars and hammering drums. Continue reading »