SEEN AND HEARD: ULCERATE, NOMAD, LIKE RATS, HOT GRAVES, BOMBS OF HADES, CHURCH OF DISGUST, HOLY DEATH

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Mar 022020
 

 

At the risk of overloading our readers with new music in light of what we’ve already sent your way over the weekend and this morning (a risk that obviously means nothing to us), here’s a carefully curated collection of chaos to begin the new week. If death metal is your meat and potatoes, this will explode your gastrointestinal tract.

ULCERATE

It didn’t take long for a new Ulcerate song to cause a flurry of comments within our internal NCS group. Not long after the title track to the band’s new album surfaced this morning, my colleagues uttered such exclamations and opinions as “tasty”, “oh shit”, “this is probably the cleanest and least reliant they’ve been on recorded-in-a-cave-next-door style mixing they’ve had yet”, “it’s DEFINITELY more melodic, and the production is warmer, but those are GOOD things”, and “it’s a natural progression from what they were doing on Shrines of Paralysis“. Continue reading »

LIKE RATS: “II”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Mar 182016
 

Like Rats-II

 

(Allen Griffin reviews the new album by Chicago’s Like Rats.)

Chicago-based Death Metal Quintet Like Rats are set to release their new album II on Southern Lord Records on March 25th. Composed of several members of Grindcore unit Weekend Nachos, Like Rats is a darker and more groove-oriented prospect, and II sees them making waves with their unique take on Old School Death Metal.

The band’s promotional material for this album draws comparisons between the unit and various well-known entities, particularly Obituary and Celtic Frost, and it’s certainly hard to argue with such assertions. Yet, to seasoned ears, Like Rats also seem to have tapped an obscure vein of early ’90s Midwestern Death Metal. Back then, groups such as Green Bay’s Bleed, Toledo, Ohio’s Gutted, and San Francisco’s Epidemic on their final full-length Exit Paradise (not Midwestern obviously, but the sound is there nonetheless) produced awesome, mid-paced Death Metal before the rise of Metalcore made such an approach so blasphemous in the eyes of True Metal fans. Continue reading »