Dec 132024
 

(Daniel Barkasi is back with us again, this time providing reviews of eight recommended albums of varying style that were released in November 2024.)

No, we’re not talking about Halloween III: Season of the Witch, and we certainly won’t be seeing any odd witch masks with a piece of Stonehenge in them. That movie is rough, but also strangely entertaining. It was better than almost all of the subsequent Halloween sequels that came after, though that isn’t saying much, is it? Now that infernal Silver Shamrock song is stuck in my head. Go ahead and click on that link. Now it’s in your head, too.

Halloween has long since passed, and now also Thanksgiving being in the rearview – and a huge thank you to our awesome KevinP for having the wife and myself over. Seeing him and his awesome family on Thanksgiving has become a tradition for us, and one we’re incredibly thankful for. Certainly hope there were some good times with good people, whether you celebrate the holiday or not.

The sheer volume of releases the last few years has been staggering, with 2024 being no exception. Sometimes it’s an overwhelming circumstance, however, as we don’t want to miss much, so there are plenty of long listening sessions. It’s impossible to not miss releases, and once we get into next year, there will always be some that we can hardly believe evaded our ears by perusing the many lists out there. Especially the many lists that’ll be present on this fine site – Andy Synn is on a roll, and he always unearths plenty of gems. Continue reading »

Feb 192020
 

 

(Comrade Aleks has brought us another interview, and this time he amicably interrogates two members of the French death-doom band Lying Figures, whose debut album arrived in 2017 and who are now working on a successor to that one.)

Lying Figures from the French city of Nancy isn’t the most active band in the world. They started to forge their death doom metal slowly in 2008, and their EPs From Nowhere To Nothing and A World Of My Own appeared in 2013 and 2014, respectively. Their full-length work The Abstract Escape saw the light of day three years after, and this Katatonia-inspired material drew the attention of Brave Murder Day fans easily.

Well, Lying Figures didn’t turn int0 a cult band the very day this album was born, but they’re interesting enough to approach them and learn more about the band’s current status. Matthieu Burgaud (guitars) and Frédéric Simon (bass) eagerly helped me with that. Continue reading »

Apr 192017
 

 

As mentioned in the first installment of this mid-week round-up earlier today, I have enough items I want to spread around, and enough time to do it, that I’ve divided the collection into multiple segments. There might even be a Part 3, but we’ll see how the day goes.

Part 1 was a sequence of songs specifically organized as a playlist because of a certain flow and mood in the music, at least as discerned by my twisted head. This Part 2 has no unifying theme, other than my own interest in everything here. There are a couple of news items at the outset, and then some very good music.

JUST BEFORE DAWN

Just Before Dawn will be a familiar name to regular NCS visitors, but for any newcomers, it has been the studio project of Swedish musician Anders Biazzi and his drumming ally Brynjar Helgetun, with a changing array of vocalists and guitar soloists. It’s one of my favorite current purveyors of old school Swedish death metal. And now JBD will be moving out of the studio in order to destroy a few stages. Continue reading »