Straight outta British Columbia’s Okanagan Valley comes the death metal band Nomad and their debut album The Mountain, which is home to songs that are both heavy-grooved and technically adventurous, both fiendishly melodic and strikingly savage, and with a wide-ranging vocal interplay that features three different performers.
As a vivid sign of what Nomad have done with The Mountain, we’re going right to an electrifying and politically charged new song named “Revolution”. Continue reading »
Automb
(Andy Synn prepared this collection of reviews, all addressing fine albums that are being released today.)
It’s a very busy Friday for releases this week, both big and small. Some of them we’ve covered here already (Aodon, Perdition Temple, The Malice), some of them we’ll probably get to over the next couple of weeks… maybe… and some of them have already received significant coverage elsewhere.
The purpose of today’s column however is to highlight a handful of bands/albums which might not necessarily receive the same amount of attention and/or adoration as some of the bigger or more high-profile releases, beginning with… drum roll please… Continue reading »
At the risk of overloading our readers with new music in light of what we’ve already sent your way over the weekend and this morning (a risk that obviously means nothing to us), here’s a carefully curated collection of chaos to begin the new week. If death metal is your meat and potatoes, this will explode your gastrointestinal tract.
ULCERATE
It didn’t take long for a new Ulcerate song to cause a flurry of comments within our internal NCS group. Not long after the title track to the band’s new album surfaced this morning, my colleagues uttered such exclamations and opinions as “tasty”, “oh shit”, “this is probably the cleanest and least reliant they’ve been on recorded-in-a-cave-next-door style mixing they’ve had yet”, “it’s DEFINITELY more melodic, and the production is warmer, but those are GOOD things”, and “it’s a natural progression from what they were doing on Shrines of Paralysis“. Continue reading »
(Andy Synn brings us another of his periodic columns devoted to metal from his homeland.)
Today’s edition of “The Best of British” features a nice amount of musical variety, from a bunch of different bands at different levels of fame/exposure (although, coincidentally, two of them hail from the same place – my original home town of Manchester), all of whom released their debut full-length album at some time in the last six months.
As a result, even if you’ve heard of one of these three acts before (and with the recent press furore over one in particular there’s a very good chance that will be the case) you should still be able to find some fresh new metallic morsels here to sink your teeth into. Continue reading »
I have many albums I badly want to review, and I had a fair amount of time this weekend to devote to that. So what did I do? I listened to new songs and EPs instead. I just couldn’t stop myself. The more I bounced around the interhole, the more good new stuff I found. I collected some of it yesterday (here), and there’s a lot more in this post — and with any luck, I might manage to write about some of those EPs I found before the day is out. Presented in alphabetical order by band name:
GRAVE
Okay, okay, I realize this first song isn’t exactly hot off the presses, since it debuted on August 5. But gimme a break, it’s by Grave, and anyone who knows anything about my musical tastes knows there’s no way in hell I’m going to miss writing about new Grave music.
The name of the song is “Redeemed Through Hate” and it will appear on the band’s next album, Out of Respect For the Dead, to be released by Century Media in October. It follows the Morbid Ascent EP in 2013, about which Andy Synn wrote a review in haiku: Continue reading »
So, we begin. This is the first installment of this year’s list of the most infectious extreme metal songs, as determined by yours truly in his sole, defective discretion. To understand what this list is all about and how it was compiled, you may read the Introduction via this link.
Although my grand plans for how to begin this series were briefly derailed (as recounted here), I’ve bounced back. I still get to use my original pick for the second song in this Part 1 and I’ve found another song from the list of winners that will do nicely as a complement. I doubt it will shock anyone to learn that we’re starting with . . . death metal.
The first song featured today is by a Polish band called Nomad and it comes from their fourth full-length album, Transmigration of Consciousness, released in March of this year. I originally came across this band through a MISCELLANY post in February, in part because the band includes guitarist Seth from Behemoth, and then I later reviewed the album as a whole (here). To crib from that review, the album is “a kind of death-metal rave, a seamless flow of syncopated rhythms and synth-driven interludes that effectively combines elements of melodic black metal, industrial metal, and tyrannical death.”
The first song from the album that I heard remains my favorite. It’s called “Identity With Personification” and it makes for a nice ass-kicking launch to this series. Continue reading »
In sporadically sampled reviews of previous releases by Poland’s Nomad, the phrase “brutal death metal” appeared often (along with words like “evil”, “blackened”, and “satanic”). Four years have passed since the band’s last release (The Independence of Observation Choice). In that time, perhaps their musical interests have evolved, because that “brutal death” label doesn’t fit Nomad’s forthcoming album, Transmigration of Consciousness.
What label does fit? Must we afix a label? No, we don’t. Gazing at the stupendous album cover by Michael “Xaay” Loranc, we can instead think of the music that paces the stroke of oarsmen on a giant longship plowing the waves of interstellar gas, emerging from a galactic vortex to carry cities and citadels into an ominous void where no humans have gone before.
Or, to be more prosaic, we could tell you that Transmigration of Consciousness is a kind of death-metal rave, a seamless flow of syncopated rhythms and synth-driven interludes that effectively combines elements of melodic black metal, industrial metal, and tyrannical death.
Or we could just tell you that we’ve near-destroyed our neck muscles repeatedly snapping our rattled heads to this album. (more after the jump . . .) Continue reading »
We’re jumping the gun on this post, since the month doesn’t end until tomorrow. Why? Uh, because this post is ready to go and we don’t have anything else finished for today yet. Work and other shit interfered with our grand plans for a Sunday post. We might still get another one up later today, but for now, feast your eyes on the barrage of metal headed our direction.
What we do with these installments of METAL IN THE FORGE is collect news blurbs and press releases we’ve seen over the last 30 days (or in this case, the last 27 days) about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like (including updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know them yet. And in this post, we cut and paste the announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.
This isn’t a cumulative list, so be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming New Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported in previous installments. This month’s list begins right after the jump. Look for your favorite bands, or get intrigued about some new ones. There’s some awesome shit on the way. Continue reading »
It’s time for another MISCELLANY post. Actually, it’s way past time. If I had any hope of checking out all the bands I’d like to check out, I should be doing this every day.
Most of you know the rules: We keep a running list of bands to check out, and I impulsively pick names from the list and listen to a song or two, and dutifully report my impressions — while giving you the chance to hear exactly what I heard, because I’m not high enough on my own opinions to think you will — or should — just take my word for it.
In this edition of MISCELLANY, I’ve got three finds for you — and holy fuck, are there some prize-wnners in this group. Before I sampled the tunage of these three bands, I didn’t know what to expect. In the first two cases, it was a spine shuddering experience — the kind of music that makes me proud to be a metalhead. A true, motherfucking bonanza. In the third case, the music was just so demented that I found myself strongly attracted against my better instincts. Shit, to be brutally honest, it makes me proud to be a metalhead, too!
I can be faulted for an excess of exuberance, but to the extent I’m capable of being objective, I don’t think I’m off the mark on the first two bands. In the third case, I may have simply lost all my bearings. But you be the judge:
From Poland, a band called Nomad (which includes Behemoth guitarist Seth); from Massachusetts, a band called Sentinel; and from the Czech Republic, a band called . . . gulp . . . Mincing Fury and Guttural Clamour of Queer Decay. (my listening log, and the songs for you to hear yourselves, follow after the jump . . .) Continue reading »