May 022016
 

Necrosavant-Aniara MMXIV

 

(We’re late reviewing the very impressive debut album of Necrosavant, but DGR does his best to make up for the delay with this extensive review.)

Sometimes reviews start out as entirely different beasts from the ones that are eventually published. You close your eyes and start typing — in my case usually to discover that your fingers were off to the left by just one letter after about a paragraph — and the next thing you know your opening segment has spent more time talking about other projects that a band might be involved in than the release you were initially focused on. This review has one such lineage, starting out as one for In Mourning, before shifting to October Tide, before finally becoming a review for Necrosavant.

Believe it or not, there actually is a throughline for those three releases. The initially wild and wooly paragraph that opened up this monster would’ve taken you on a journey ’round the world before landing on why those three are tied together somewhat.  Instead, it came down to the fact that although our site posted about the Necrosavant kickstarter way back when it launched, and I personally was on pins and needles hoping to see it succesful (based on a one-minute sample video of guest vocalist Tobias Netzell (In Mourning, Antarktis) delivering a monstrous vocal performance), we actually never got around to talking about the whole album after its end-of-February release through Kolony Records came and went. The time has come. Continue reading »

Sep 282015
 

Enshine-Singularity

 

(DGR steps up for round-up duty, and he prepared a really big round-up, so big that your humble editor decided to divide it into two parts.)

In case you missed it, Friday was a kind of slow date for the site. We’ve had times like this before, where various outside influences conspire to make sure that we post with the speed at which animals are able to escape the La Brea Tar Pits. That doesn’t mean we weren’t up here in space, lookin’ down on you and keeping track of various rumblings going throughout the web.

I’ve gathered together eight fairly recent developments in the heavy metal world for you all to enjoy. As usual, I’ve tried to catch stuff that has flown under the radar and mix it in with a few things that have likely made a big splash across the web already. This collection of stories covers a pretty good swath of the globe in terms of distance but has a foot heavily planted in the death metal and doom metal realms, making a few labored grasps to the outside genre world.

ENSHINE

In case you missed it, we here at NCS have a bit of a soft spot for the melo-doom band Enshine and all their related shenanigans. The group recently allowed us to premiere their song “Adrift”, and that song was an awesome teaser of things to come for the group’s upcoming album Singularity. Recently, Enshine uploaded another song to the web in the form of “Resurgence” and boy, in NCS parlance, is it a doozy. Continue reading »

Dec 212014
 

 

I suppose this post could be considered Part 2 of a collection I began yesterday (here). It’s a big selection of music I discovered over the last couple of days that in widely varying degrees incorporate elements of black and death metal into the sound. And I do mean “widely varying” — no two of these bands sound alike, but I hope you’ll agree they all sound good.

LVTHN

LVTHN is a Belgian black metal band with three short releases to its credit, all of them appearing in 2014. The first one, Adversarialism, I reviewed here. The next two of those releases came this month — a four-song EP entitled The Grand Uncreation (which includes a cover of a Katharsis song) and a split with Lluvia entitled Illuminantes Tenebrae. Both are worthy of separate reviews, but I’m so pressed for time that I’m afraid I’ll never write them. I decided this short comment is better than nothing.

In a nutshell, these five new LVTHN songs are potent examples of bestial black art — torrential hailstorms of knife-edged riffs undergirded by the distant rumble of percussion and pierced by flesh-rending vocals, with waves of dark, dramatic melody moving through the music like the migration of leviathans. It’s gripping, galvanizing, ravaging music, with just enough well-placed breaks in the onslaught to prevent total sensory overload.  And the Katharsis cover is obliterating. Continue reading »