(written by Islander)
We’ve arrived at Part 9 of our expanding Most Infectious Song list, with three more songs today. I again didn’t have a cohesive organizing principle in mind when grouping these three together, though I couldn’t resist going necro with the last two (in more ways than one).
To check out the preceding 8 Parts of the list and to learn what the list is about, use this link. Continue reading »
(This is the third installment of DGR‘s year-end Top 50 list, counting down the third group of 10, with the next two groups slated for the next two days ahead.)
I’ve been doing these lists long enough that I’ve developed a genuine fear that I might be repeating myself. I console myself with the fact that no one else seems to have noticed so far since every one of these has been a fantastic exercise in breaking out the thesaurus and learning new words every day – or reminding myself that I used to not be so dumb. I have yet to work “lugubrious” into one of these but you better believe I’m going to damned well take a swing at it at some point.
But it’s the fear of repeating myself that drives me to such inanity, because I am worried that it might seem like I’m wasting your time. I don’t want these to be the ‘if you’ve read one, you’ve read them all’ of the year-end lists. I even gut-checked myself by archiving them all together at one point just to make sure that each stood as its own artistic statement – or at the very least the authorial equivalent of changing the food for the dog every once in a while.
But like I said (twice already), repetition is a big fear of mine. Well, that and accidentally putting releases from last year in here or playing my hand early and putting something that comes out next January on here. Luckily I haven’t been at risk of doing that last one yet, as I don’t think I have any promos from that timeframe in hand nor would I likely acknowledge them. At this point I feel like I’ve taken a round off of the reaper just by making it to next week. Continue reading »
(Below you’ll find DGR‘s review of the new album by Sweden’s Necrophobic, released on March 15th by Century Media Records.)
Mark this as one of the most profound statements you’ll ever read on this site: As NCS has grown older and followed the careers of many a heavy metal band, we seem to be reviewing more and more albums that have hit double-digits in a band’s discography. Who would’ve thought the passage of time would be such a crazy thing?
It’s taken Sweden’s Necrophobic a while to get there – their first having been released in 1993 – but they’ve actually kept to a surprisingly consistent amount of time between albums over the years. They’ve never fully fallen into the ‘every two-to-three-years’ album schedule that many career bands do, and beginning with 2002’s Bloodhymns, the gaps between albums have remained steady, hovering at around three-and-a-half to four years. Continue reading »
A hell of a party awaits below….
All the “big” names in this Saturday roundup of new songs and videos were suggested by my old friend and fellow NCS slave DGR — “big” in quotation marks because no surface-dwelling listener would remotely consider the music “radio friendly”.
But I still decided to throw in a few more subterranean offerings of my own choosing, all of it presented in alphabetical order by band name. That arrangement turned out to create some big twists and turns in the music.
First up, feast your eyes and ears on the music video for “Condemned To Rot” from Aborted‘s guest-studded new album Vault of Horrors. The guest stud on this one is Francesco Paoli from the NCS house band Fleshgod Apocalypse (does anyone remember when I used to call them that every time I mentioned them?). I’ll crib from my friend Andy‘s review of this album: Continue reading »
Happy Saturday, or whatever other day you’re in when you come across this collection of new music.
I’m taking a lazy way out here — mainly just spewing a bunch of new metal songs and videos at you without much, or any, of the usual commentary. It’s actually not because I’m feeling lazy, it’s because I’m getting crushed by my fucking day job. Sadly (very sadly for me), it’s going to get worse as we approach the end of the year, and even worser in January.
I’ve never given any details about my job, but it’s not 9-5. Some days it might be Noon-3, but other days it might be 5 (a.m.) to midnight, and I have no control over the schedule. Mostly it leaves me plenty of time for NCS. Now, and increasingly until mid-January, it’s going to choke me.
At some point soon I’ll explain what that’s likely to do to some portions of our annual LISTMANIA extravaganza and the usual schedule of daily premieres, but not now. Now I only have time enough to start the spewing of this new stuff I’ve enjoyed, presented in alphabetical order by band name. Continue reading »
Like all the best-laid plans of mice and men, my goals for the rollout of this list have obviously gone seriously awry. With Part 10 having gone up on January 18th, I’ve missed six weekdays. That’s six missing installments of the list that will be very difficult to make up if I stick to my plan of finishing the rollout by the end of January. Which means I will probably have to change that drop-dead date, because I’d really like to load the list with more tracks than the remaining days of this month will allow, and I’m still busy enough with other things that it’s unlikely I’ll be able to double-up the installments every day.
Anyway, on we go…
NECROPHOBIC
Necrophobic’s 2020 album Dawn of the Damned was one of those records that was home to multiple candidates for this list, and as I considered them, no one track clearly stood out above the others. In an effort to settle on just one song, I sought the input of Andy Synn. As usual, he was very little help. He suggested it would be a choice between “Mirror Black”, “Dawn of the Damned”, and “As the Fire Burns”, which simply confirmed my own selection of candidates — though I also had “The Infernal Depths of Eternity” in that group. Continue reading »
This is pretty much a DGR round-up, since it was he who urged the first three new songs and videos in this collection. They’re all from bands who’ve been around for a long time, from 14 years to more than 30 years (but are still kicking ass). To justify my own existence, I picked two more, one from a more obscure band than those first three but whose name is rising fast, and a second from an even more obscure name that I suspect will soon become better-known.
I have approximately 53 other new songs I’d also like to share with you. Maybe later. There’s a fly that’s making the rounds on the morning news interviews, so I need to check that out.
NECROPHOBIC
“Devil’s Spawn Attack” is the closing track on Necrophobic’s new album, Dawn of the Damned. I smell a review simmering in the NCS mess hall that questions the wisdom of that choice — not a question about the quality of the song (which is damned good), but about its position in the running order. But I’ll let that writer speak for himself in due course; maybe he’ll change his mind. Meanwhile, I’ll speak my own mind. Continue reading »
Necrophobic
I used to joke around here that I made my living as a drug mule, or as a secret adviser to world leaders who were flummoxed about how to solve shattering problems, or as a caretaker for a loris horde that would threaten human survival if I didn’t keep a close watch on their compound near the NCS headquarters. The truth is much more mundane (though I still suspect that covid was hatched in the loris lab). Not that I’m going to advertise the truth, because I still don’t think what I do here would be healthy for me in the world where I collect my paychecks.
Even a few months ago I thought my day job had settled into a long-lasting somnolence, leaving me an abundance of time to spend at NCS. But it has come roaring back. Not a completely shocking development, because the job has always varied among shifting states of intensity, but still a surprise. Last week was particularly demanding, and I fell way behind in paying attention to new metal. Thankfully, I was able to ignore it all day yesterday and spent the hours immersed in music.
Having surfed the tides of metal from near sun-up to sundown, I created the beginnings of half a dozen NCS posts, with four of them devoted to black and “blackened” metal. Most of those will probably remain little more than mind games once the new work week begins, but at least I’ve completed this two-part SHADES OF BLACK, which I hope you’ll enjoy. Continue reading »
Well, my fine feathered fiends, here we go again: For the 10th straight year we present our list of the preceding year’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs.
I’m going to dispense with repeating the operative definition of what I think makes a song “infectious”; if you’re encountering this series for the first time, go here to see that. But I will remind you what I do to compile the list, and why I currently have no idea how long it will be or precisely when the rollout will end.
The universe of songs I’ve considered includes a list of candidates that I began at the start of 2018 and continued expanding as the year progressed. It also includes recommendations from my colleague DGR (he’s the only staff writer who makes suggestions each year, bless his pointy long-haired head). And it includes every suggestion made by our readers in response to my invitation, in the comments to this post. When you add it all up, that universe of candidates that’s now sitting in front of me includes nearly 600 songs. Continue reading »
(Here’s the fourth installment of DGR’s 5-part year-end effort to sink our site beneath an avalanche of words and a deluge of music. The concluding Top 10 will appear tomorrow.)
A confession: For a long time the only words in this whole writeup prior to me breaking the whole thing into five parts and actually listing the bands was just a whole bunch of swear words. Even though I’ve been doing this for nine years now I still will occasionally try things I learned in writing classes over the years or even some things I’ve read about since then. Stream-of-consciousness writing is one of those, but the only thing I’ve learned from doing that in the context of talking about albums of the year is that I’ve assembled a pretty neat collection of permutations of the word ‘fuck’ that I’ve gathered from popular culture over the years.
It was at this point that I began going back through our review archives so that I could even remember what came out this year. Metal-Archives is also a tremendous help in that regard, since I often can’t remember what I talked about in January unless I’ve listened to it since then. It’s also one of my favorite things to do because I get to have a laugh at how far back I have to go in the segment tagged ‘Reviews’ on the site. I know that we’ve missed more than a few albums, but as it stands now, our first review of something from 2018 is about forty pages back. And there can be anywhere between five to fifteen albums per page of results — depending on how we grouped them for each article.
I know that’s just reflective of the ‘relentless march of hashtag content’ that the internet has become, but it still makes me smile. If I ever need a reminder that heavy metal is — somehow, despite all the odds and all the editorials about rock music dying — a lively as all hell genre, that’s enough for me. I guess there will always be room for cathartic release via loud instruments, or the various experimentations outside of the tradional music sphere to which this genre loans itself. Continue reading »