SHADES OF BLACK: RAAT, PAYDRETZ, STARER, GEISTERFAUST, HAND OF OMEGA, SALQIU, MANṢŪR, MORK

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jul 302024
 

Hopefully you noticed that we began the last NCS Sunday with a premiere. That song and video by Weald & Woe were well worth the time required to prepare the write-up, and it would have fit well into the usual Sunday roundup of new black and black-ish metal, but it did leave me with less time than I needed to pull together the usual Shades of Black column.

So, I’ve taken an extra two days to finish gathering together what I wanted to recommend this week. I’m very happy with these eight selections and hope you’ll also find all of them well worth your time. (Yeah, there’s a lot here — bookmark it, try a little here and a little there, in between trying to make a living, drinking yourself silly, washing your cat and your clothes, bathroom breaks, sleeping, etc.)

RAAT (India)

As steadfast visitors to our site are well aware, I’ve been enthusiastically following the progression of Raat‘s music since early days, and thus was eager to delve into the band’s fourth album, Enchantment, which was released about 10 days ago. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: MYLINGEN, PALACE OF WORMS, MORK, STRJA, ETHIR ANDUIN, TIDELESS

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Feb 192023
 

I didn’t oversleep today, so there’s a lot here. And I don’t just mean the volume of music, but the stylistic range of it too. Black metal has become a vast canvass, but I’ve often gone off the edge of the canvass too. And I’ll add that there are more variants of doom in this mix than usual.

MYLINGEN (Sweden)

To begin today, I’ve chosen At Night I See Demons, the head-spinning debut EP released last month by the Swedish black metal band Mylingen, a collaboration between multi-instrumentalist V.J. (from Apathy Noir) and vocalist G.C. According to Metal Archives, their name is based on the word “myling“, which in Scandinavian folklore was “the phantasmal incarnations of the souls of unwanted children killed by their mothers and forced to roam the Earth until they could persuade someone to bury them properly.” Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (PART 1): MORK, AGRYPNIE, TOTALITARIAN, LYKHAEON

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jun 272021
 


photo by Terje Johansen

 

You might have noticed that I didn’t publish the usual Saturday round-up yesterday. I’ll spare you the reasons, but will say that I spent hours going through dozens of new songs and videos that I’d added to my enormous listening list over the last week. Some of those were black metal songs of different styles. I made some hard choices about which of those to include in this usual Sunday column, but still wound up with enough for a two-parter.

What you’ll find in Part 1 are four new videos, two of them for songs from releases that have been out in the world for a while and two of them for tracks off forthcoming albums.

MORK

I learned about the first video through a press release by Peaceville Records that arrived yesterday. I had to scroll through lots of text and photos about Darkthrone’s new album before coming to the Mork news, and I haven’t yet seen any reports about the video on social media or elsewhere. Maybe I’m jumping the gun a bit in writing about it, but the press release treated the video as something that had already premiered, so it seems fair game. I assume word will spread further on Monday.

The song featured in the video, “Født Til Å Herske”, happens to be one of my favorites on Mork’s newest album, Katedralen, which is packed with strong songs. “Født Til Å Herske” includes a guest vocal appearance by Kampfar’s Dolk (who also appears in this video), and the additional tonal texture and feeling he adds to the song is one reason why it stands out to me. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: PALUS SOMNI, RITUALS OF THE DEAD HAND, CONSTANT NAUSEA, COLDCELL, HEGEROTH, MORK, VIPÈRE

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Feb 212021
 

 

In exploring what I might choose for today’s column I wound up going down a weird rabbit hole. By chance, the first few tracks I picked put me in a chilling frame of mind, and in sorting through others I decided to just stay there, immersed in a mood of cold, frightening eeriness. However, I did decide to pick a couple of more carnal (for want of a better word) selections to finish off this compilation, to shake off those other moods like a wet dog shedding water.

There’s obviously a lot of music here, but maybe not as much as you might guess because until the very end these are all advance tracks rather than full releases. So don’t be daunted… dive all the way in….

PALUS SOMNI (UK/US)

I’m beginning with “Unholy Cosmic Quintessence“, the first advance song from the debut album of Palus Somni, a trio that combines (to quote the label) “the twisted dissonant riffs of Stroda (known for this work on U.K. based Industrial / Black Metal act Decoherence), the thundering vicious percussions of Eoghan (known for his work on U.S. Black Metal bands Akhlys and Aoratos) and the distant cold icy screams of Imber (from U.S. based record label Noxial)”. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: OTHRS, BURDEN MAN, MORK, BLURR THROWER, FLOOD PEAK

 SHADES OF BLACK  2 Responses »
Jan 172021
 

 

I’ve gone off on a tangent in this week’s column. Nothing here will strike you as conventional black metal, and in many of the songs the black metal ingredients are dwarfed by others (among other things, rock beats dominate over blast-beats). But all this music struck a chord with me (many of them, in fact), and I also thought they made a pretty good playlist all joined together like this.

OTHRS / BURDEN MAN (Australia)

I have Rennie of starkweather to thank for spending time with the songs that are now streaming from this new split named Grievance, two songs by each band.

The first two are from a band named OTHRS, which is a project of Melbourne-based M.R, known for his work in Spire. Here is he joined by vocalist V.S., also a member of Spire as well as Void Stare. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MORK

 Interviews  4 Responses »
May 072019
 

 

(Our Norway-based contributor Karina Noctum has brought us this interview of Thomas Eriksen, the man behind the Norwegian black metal band Mork, whose new album Det Svarte Juv was released by Peaceville Records on April 19th. The interview was conducted close to Mork’s performance at this year’s Inferno Festival, and is accompanied by photos of the performance by Silje Storm Drabitius, to whom we are grateful for his permission to use them.)

 

How did you get to sign on Peaceville Records, which has in its roster some pretty legendary acts such as Darkthrone and so on…?

The first time I approached Peaceville Records I was told that they did not sign new bands. They said that they stick to the old bands, and then some time passed and I was contacted by other big labels that wanted Mork, but I didn’t really like the deals that they were offering me, so I declined some of them. Then I told Peaceville that it was now or never. If you want us now, you can have us, but if not we can go to another label. Then they started to think, and my good friend Nocturno Culto, from Darkthrone, he actually gave them a nudge. He made them realize that Mork was something worth investing in, something worth checking out, so that was the way it worked out.

Peaceville signed me for my third album which came out in 2017, Eremittens Dal is the title, “Valley of the Hermit” in English. Last year they re-released my first two albums Isebakke and Den Vandrende Skygge. Meanwhile the fourth and my latest one called Det Svarte Juv was released on Friday, April 19th. Continue reading »