AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): NAG — “NAGGED TO DEATH”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  1 Response »
Nov 222018
 

 

NAG don’t forgive and forget. They hold grudges. They bundle up their misery and rage, and then let it all out in eruptions of sound that are both enlivening and life-threatening. Their new album, Nagged To Death, is a raw musical catharsis that’s bleak, black-eyed, bruising, and bombastic — and a hell of an electrifying thrill-ride from start to finish.

This trio, who’ve taken the names Arnfinn Nag, Espen Nag, and Ørjan Nag, hail and howl from the west coast of Norway, and we’re told that “to find inspiration for the riffs and lyrics of their new album, NAG formed a pact with none other than the Sea Goblin, known for its furious hatred towards all things human”. It seems that the Sea Goblin can take various forms, and it’s one of those guises that’s represented in the illustration by Theodor Kittelsen (1857-1914) that appears on the cover of this new album. Like that imagining of the creature, the music is both vile and full of fangs. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: AEPHANEMER, CRUCIFIED MORTALS, LUNATIC AFFLICTION, NABAATH, NAG, PIT OF CARNAGE, RUSSIAN CIRCLES, ZQKMGDZ , AUBE GRISE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jul 252016
 

Aephanemer-Memento Mori

 

I had a few ideas for a Monday round-up that percolated over the weekend. And then this morning, when I crawled through what had arrived in the NCS in-box since I went to sleep last night, all those ideas were shoved aside and put on the shelf for later retrieval. I do have poor impulse control, and therefore decided I would devote this post to nothing but what I discovered this morning.

Mind you, not everything I found in our in-box was worth spreading around (e.g., news about a new device for preventing snoring), but an unusually high percentage was. And what I especially liked about what I found was the serendipitous fact that the songs were quite varied in their styles of heaviness.

Now there’s quite a lot of music here, and so I’m going to do my best to keep my verbiage to a minimum. I’ve arranged the tracks in alphabetical order by band name, except for the last one… because I think it’s best experienced as a conclusion to this playlist.

AEPHANEMER

Until seeing the wonderful cover art that I put at the top of this post I had forgotten that Dark Tranquillity’s Niklas Sundin was a visual artist as well as a musical one. This creation adorns a new album named Memento Mori by the band Aephanemer from Toulouse, France. It will be released on September 16, but the band have already made one song from the album available for streaming and free download at Bandcamp. Its name is “Unstoppable”. Continue reading »