BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART ONE: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
Dec 162024
 

(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)

It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.

At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large –  so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.

Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: MENTAL TORMENT — “CONCLUSION”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Sep 202021
 

 

In late August of this year we published an interview by our Russian colleague Comrade Aleks with members of the Ukrainian doom/death metal band Mental Torment. The focus of the interview was the band’s forthcoming second album, ego:genesis, which will be released on September 29th by Metallurg Music. As described in the interview, the album unfolds as a story, with each song as a chapter. And as the press materials further explain, it represents “the attempt to explore that depth of despair and horror that inexorably approaches us every day closer and closer – no one can escape death. But at the same time, it is also a search for answers that can help to accept the inevitability of the outcome of earthly existence”.

In creating this musical narrative the band employed elements of classical doom and death metal, but didn’t confine themselves to those. As related in the interview: “The main approach is that almost all our songs do not have typical verse-chorus-verse-chorus structure. Each song has its own beginning and its own end. This time, we tried to mix classic Doom Metal with nearest genres as well as unrelated modern ones.” The songwriting approach used what was necessary to tell the tale: “Because it’s really similar to real life. Nothing is linear. The whole human path is a set of uphills and downhills.”

These insights ring true when you hear the crushing but beautiful song we’re premiering today, a track named “Conclusion” — though it’s not the one that ends the album. Although no two songs on the album are exactly in the same musical vein, this one should especially appeal to lovers of funeral doom. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MENTAL TORMENT

 Interviews  No Responses »
Aug 242021
 

(Here, Comrade Aleks presents his interview of members of the Ukrainian band Mental Torment, whose new album Ego:genesis will be released on September 29, 2021.)

Mental Torment (Kyiv, Ukraine) was born 12 years ago. Back then the doom/death scene in the ex-USSR territories had already started to grow and develop, yet the guys took their time. Thus Mental Torment’s debut album On the Verge… saw the light of day in 2013. They pointed in the direction they wanted to follow, and though such a doom/death piece couldn’t offer any innovative ideas, it was ok. The band was silent for a few years playing occasional gigs and announcing a rotation in the lineup but out of nowhere Metallurg Music proclaimed the release of Mental Torment’s sophomore work, ego:genesis.

The official press kit sounds curious: “The album will bring a fresh view of the traditional Doom Metal genre. From acoustic ballads and funeral vibes to sludgy and modern progressive music.”  As you know “traditional doom” is associated with clean-singing bands whose names are known to any doom-cultists, and at the end of the day I tell you that the second part of this official statement is correct, as Mental Torment really add the afore-mentioned sludge and post elements to a classic doom death fundament.

So, ego:genesis turns to be absolutely another new chapter in the band’s discography, and Mental Torment‘s collective mind is ready to give us some clues about how all of this happened. Continue reading »