A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE: WURM FLESH, EXORBITANT PRICES MUST DIMINISH, ORPHEUS OMEGA, SERPENTHEIR, COLACON

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 262024
 


Wurm Flesh

(As we’ve nearly broken into the final quarter of the year, DGR decided it was a good time to do some more catching up on reviews that have been percolating in his head, and so here are five of them that might collectively scramble your own head.)

While sifting through the pile of music that I’ve been gathering up over the years for these shorter, less officious and stuffy – my preferred writing style – review collectives I’ve found that I often have a small blockage of grind releases building up against the wall. There hasn’t necessarily been a particular overarching guide as to what gets written about and when with these, as it’s more of a panicked attempt to spread the word about a few of them before year-end season hits, and I lock myself in a closet with the laptop and a caffeine-fueled fit of pique and do so much writing that I end up having zero thoughts for a month afterward.

However, this bout is my attempt to help get a few of those out there, as well as to aim for something a little shorter and then round off with two releases from way opposite ends of the spectrum that I’ve been enjoying in between checking out the shiny latest and greatest that have come tumbling down the pipeline over the last few months.

Combining this with an absolutely fucked-up concert slate for my corner of Northern California and you can see exactly where the compulsion for coverage is starting to take over, with the sense that these things need to happen now. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: ORPHEUS OMEGA — “PORTRAITS”

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May 292023
 

(In the following review DGR catches up with the latest release by the Australian band Orpheus Omega, an EP that surfaced last month.)

Even though we’ve often dwelled within the realms of the dark and heavy – our site background having been a giant pile of skulls for over a decade now – we’re not above and beyond traipsing into the ligher side of metal from time to time. We’ve featured a-plenty of clean singing over the years, usually when used effectively and not just as ‘product’ to provide a radio-worth chorus, and yes, there are a few of us in this burnt-out shell of a building that like them some good ol’ fashioned melodeath keyboard cheese.

When a band buys wholly into that sort of bullshit, it’s difficult to not cheer along, and Australia’s Orpheus Omega have proudly flown that flag for some years now, fully ensconced in the ‘no, this is what we make’ mentality with full admiration for the era of early-aughts melodeath when the synth work became especially prominent and was a constant traveling companion of whomever decided to kick out the next guitar solo.

Orpheus Omega are just that sort of band, and while their 2019 album Wear Your Sins didn’t quite gel with us as well as we would’ve liked, 2015’s Partum Vita Mortem was a near-perfectly constructed one of those sorts of albums, with plenty of glory-flag waving and power-choruses to turn any listener into a massive dork. Obviously, time doesn’t stand still for anyone and the group have evolved since then but thas one of a handful of things that made the April release of their new EP Portraits interesting. Continue reading »

A DGR REVIEW ROUND-UP (PART 2): THE RITUAL AURA, HOPE DRONE, ORPHEUS OMEGA

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Sep 252019
 

 

(NCS scribe DGR is catching up on reviews after a long hiatus with a multi-part collection, of which this is the second of three parts.)

This was not intended to be the Australia segment of this roundup when I started. In fact, as I found myself bouncing around this whole archive of intended reviews, the ones I cut out to send off to the teeth machine that is this website kept lowering these down while I was adding to them, until I had the three resting on top of each other, much in the same way a puzzle game will collapse pieces on top of each other in unplanned fashion.

While I mentioned earlier that this archive has found itself both swelling and shrinking in size as the year has gone by, and even as some other writers were kind enough to pick up some of the releases I had been hoping the site would cover, these three managed to stay pretty firm in their places while we waited for their release dates to hit.

For the most part, they were always on the radar screen. It just so happened that two of them would release in close proximity to one another toward the later part of the year and the third is one of those that is strictly in this writer’s wheelhouse and basically found itself spoken for before anyone else could even get the chance to call it. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): ORPHEUS OMEGA — “PARTUM VITA MORTEM”

 Album Reviews, Premieres  6 Responses »
Jul 202015
 

ORPHEUS OMEGA-Partum Vita Mortem

 

(Today we bring you the premiere of a full stream of the new third album by Orpheus Omega, scheduled for release later this month by Kolony Records — preceded by this typically detailed review from our man DGR.)

Orpheus Omega are a young melodeath band from Melbourne, Australia. They’ve been around for seven years now and have managed to produce two albums, an EP — and one new disc coming out very soon. That album is the one you’re about to hear in its entirety, Partum Vita Mortem.

Until 2013, they operated under just the name Orpheus, but wound up adding the Omega to their name that year. They hail from the school of melodeath that places a heavy emphasis on keyboard work and guitar melody, the school that became incredibly popular with the explosion of bands like Soilwork, In Flames, and Dark Tranquillity. However, the band really came into their own with 2013’s Resillusion and showed that they could modernize that sound. They also proved that they would be one of those bands who seemed to improve astronomically with every album.

Over the past couple of years we, here at NCS seem to have had good fortune in finding groups like this, bands who are clearly students of a genre yet play like masters, who recognize the boundaries of what they are playing with yet still put out fantastic material with the tools they have. Aether Realm, Words Of Farewell, and Crepuscle spring to mind as more recent discoveries who, alongside Orpheus Omega, are proving to be the new blood of this keyboard-heavy branch of the melodeath genre. In the case of Orpheus Omega, Partum Vita Mortem is their most mature and well-developed album to date. Continue reading »