Nightfell Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

SHADES OF BLACK: NIGHTFELL, UNMENSCH, ORM

Jul 162019

This is a rare mid-week edition of a column that usually appears on Sunday. This didn’t happen by design. I was trying to select some new songs for a SEEN AND HEARD post, and by chance it happened that three of them — these three — were shades of black metal. So I decided to collect them today, and try again tomorrow for a cross-genre round-up under the SEEN AND HEARD banner.

NIGHTFELL

A Sanity Deranged is the third album by Portland’s Nightfell, a duo (Tim Call and Todd Burdette) whose music I’ve enjoyed from the beginning. It will be released on Friday the Thirteenth of September by 20 Buck Spin (who are having another great year of releases), and the first song in today’s selection is from that new album. Continue reading »

MIGRATION FEST: DAY TWO

Concert Reviews 5 Responses »

Aug 142016

This is the second part of a three-part recap of the first Migration Fest in Olympia, Washington. For the first installment, covering the pre-fest show on August 11 and Day One on August 12, go here.

The first day of Migration Fest proved to be a very strong start to what I selfishly hope will become an annual tradition. If anything, Day Two topped it, in large part on the strength of a history-making performance by Saturday’s headliner — Panopticon — that was simply stunning.

At the end of this post I’ve embedded five videos from Panopticon’s 90-minute set, and I’ve got one video of Vastum in here, too. By tomorrow, I also plan to update this post (and yesterday’s recap of Day One) with videos of additional bands. For now, I’m including the best of my crappy cellphone photos, and some words of course. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (PART 2): MEPHORASH, NAPALM DEATH, NIGHTFELL, RUBY THE HATCHET, SATAN

Exceptions to the Rule, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 7 Responses »

Sep 112015

(Leperkahn compiled this second of at least four round-ups of new music we’ll be presenting today. Part 1 is here.)

MEPHORASH

In my infinite wisdom, I totally forgot that the Swedish black metal band Mephorash’s new album 1557 – Rites of Nullification had already been released (despite Andy Synn’s glowing review) until I saw that Mephorash posted a stream to a track other than the advance track they had previously presented on their FB page. This “new” track, entitled “Phezur – Dissolving the Sea of Yetzirah” has me strongly regretting that lapse in memory.

The song masterfully conjures a deeply evil, occult, Luciferian atmosphere with its stirring riffs and caustic snarls, and the riff that comes in about a quarter of the way through the song is certainly quite the earworm. It moves through periods of chaos, groove, eerie calm, and infernal majesty, all while maintaining a truly nefarious aura. Make this the soundtrack to your next black mass if you know what’s good for you. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (PART 1): ÆVANGELIST, ABIGAIL WILLIAMS, VHÖL, CRUCIAMENTUM, HORRENDOUS, NIGHTFELL

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 8 Responses »

Aug 262015

I haven’t been able to pull together a round-up of news and new music in five days, and you know what that means: I’ve got a backlog that’s so big I’ll never catch up. But instead of just uttering a big sigh and looking ahead instead of behind, I decided I should at least pick some of what interested me out of the last five days’ discoveries (in the hope that they will interest you, too).

The entries in this first part of a two-part post are almost all news items — and they include a ton of great cover art — but since this feature is called Seen and HEARD, I’ve tacked on one new song at the end that you can stream right here. Part 2 will be all music.

ÆVANGELIST

This interests me greatly: Through 20 Buck Spin, Ævangelist will release their fourth album on October 9 in the U.S. and October 23 in Europe. A vinyl edition is projected for December. The name of the album is Enthrall To the Void of Bliss. I have to find out who created the cover art, because it’s very good. (UPDATE: I’ve learned that the wonderful art was created by Stephen Wilson [FB page here], and more of his work will appear in the digipak of this album.) Continue reading »

2014: FIRST QUARTER RECOMMENDATIONS

LISTMANIA 2014 39 Responses »

Mar 242014

(NCS supporter KevinP came up with an idea. Unlike his idea that the NY GIants will return to the Super Bowl in this decade, it’s a good one, so we’re going with it. Read on…)

If you are like me (shudder at that thought for a moment) then you get overwhelmed with all the new music that comes out over the course of the year. Call it professional curiousity (I guess I feel special today calling myself a “pro”), but I’m always on the hunt for new bands and music (even from older bands). I feel some type of moral obligation to myself to hear as much as I possibly can. But there’s simply not enough hours in the day and we all miss a plethora of releases. Then at the end of the year I comb through endless “Best Of” lists trying to see what I missed and what I should check out.

So instead of waiting until the end of the year and trying to pack it all in at once (which inevitably causes even the best of us to overlook something by not giving it enough time), I propose after each quarter of the year (that’s every 3 months for those of you who failed math), we all list 5 releases that each of us recommends everyone check out (in the Comments section below if that wasn’t painfully obvious). Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ENTARTUNG, NIGHTFELL, TORTORUM

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK 3 Responses »

Feb 092014

I’ve collected in this post two new songs and one new album, all of which I discovered yesterday. As the post title suggests, two of the bands are solidly in the black metal camp and the third, sandwiched between them in this feature, is “blackened” — although their music is a striking amalgam of styles. All three are doing some very exciting things with their music.

ENTARTUNG

As is true of all three bands in this post, Germany’s Entartung ambushed me yesterday. Before then, I hadn’t heard of them. Their debut album Krypteia appeared in 2012 and their second, entitled Peccata Mortalia, is due for release by the World Terror Committee (W.T.C. Productions) on March 8. Two days ago DECIBEL premiered the album’s first advance track, “Blasphemaverit in Spiritum Sanctum”.

The strength of the song lies principally in the powerful tremolo-picked melodies that heave in the music like ocean swells, and in the shifts between the bleak, frigid atmospheres they create and the black, rocking rhythms and other transitions that segment this long song. It’s easy to become immersed in the wintry tale Entartung are spinning. Continue reading »