Jan 132014
 

Since the weekend began I caught up with a flood of hair-raising new songs and found so many worth recommending that I’ve collected them in two posts, this one being the first. I probably should have divided them into 4 or 5 posts, but since the unofficial motto of this site seems to be “long-winded”, why bother? New music from seven bands is gathered here. Shades and phases of black metal diversity… dig in!

KAMPFAR

This Norwegian band has been an NCS favorite for years. As previously reported, their new album Djevelmakt is due for release on January 21 via Indie Recordings. We previously featured (here) the first advance track from the album — “Mylder” — and now we have a second one, by the name of “Swarm Norvegicus”.

It begins with strings and piano and moves into a slow, massive, glorious, stomping behemoth of a song that builds in intensity. Both malignant and memorably melodic, it’s another very promising signpost on the road to one of our most highly anticipated 2014 albums. Listen next… Continue reading »

Jul 202013
 

Your humble editor’s ass is dragging this morning, because this is a Saturday morning and Saturday mornings always seem to bring ass impairment here on my metallic island. Saturday mornings, they follow Friday nights, and on Friday nights I seem drawn to the demon alcohol like a fly to shit. It’s all fun until the new day dawns. The sun rises above the clouds, and the sun in my head goes supernova and then collapses into a black hole from which no light or sentient thought can escape.

Ah, what to do on mornings such as this? Lying curled in the fetal position and moaning can only be indulged for so long. Crawling into a chair, slumped over a computer screen, looking for something new to hear — that seemed like a viable alternative to suicide, so that’s what I did. On some Saturday mornings I just want to be surrounded by the silence of the void, but today it seemed like a better idea to find something that would overwhelm the destruction in my head with superior destructive force. I succeeded.

You might think that given my current state of mental impairment I made a redundancy-related typo in the title of this post, but you would be wrong. I will explain.

NECROSADIST

One of the things I found this morning was a debut album released on 11-11-11 under the name Abstract Satan. I can tell you from immediate personal experience that there is nothing abstract about Satan, and that I must have done something terrible to offend Him last night, given the magnitude of the punishment I am currently suffering. But listening to Abstract Satan does not produce suffering, although it is indeed punishing. Abstract Satan makes me glad to be alive, despite all the self-inflicted pain. Continue reading »