AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: PHOBOS MONOLITH — “OKTOBER (LUNAR ECLIPSE)”

 Premieres  No Responses »
Apr 142020
 

 

“When the Light Will Fade“, the title track and first single released from the debut EP of Phobos Monolith, quickly demonstrated the band’s precocious mastery of ingredients that are vital to the appeal of doom-influenced melodic death metal: craggy low-end weight, jolting rhythms, a vocalist who possesses a deep and ravaging growl that’s spine-tingling to hear, and most importantly a talent for crafting forlorn melodic hooks that make an immediate and lasting impression. In addition, consistent with the band’s thematic interests in the mysteries of space-time and the multiverse, they created a sound that hinted at the vastness of the cosmos, accented by ringing keyboards that sparkled like starshine.

That song made a very positive first impression, and now we’re able to bring you a lyric video for a second single, entitled “Oktober (Lunar Ellipse)“, in the lead-up to the June 29 release of When the Light Will Fade by Pest Records. Continue reading »

A VALENTINE’S DAY MASSACRE: PERCHTA, HELFRÓ, ULVER, PHOBOS MONOLITH, ISHVARA, VMTHANAACHTH

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Feb 142020
 

 

On Valentine’s Day 2011 (here) I provided a 600-word history of the holiday going back to the Roman celebration of Lupercalia, interspersed with efforts to explain why Valentine’s Day is metal. Re-reading it this morning, I nearly passed out from the tedium.

On Valentine’s Day 2012 (here) I posted an NCS “lonely hearts” column in which I answered a variety of e-mails from women offering to video-chat with me (soapy and fresh out of the shower), people trying to sell me products that would give me “robust bone-ons”, others who wanted to have my children (I proposed to send ampules of love juice and suggested names for the kiddos), and a few broken-hearted people looking for help (I told them to just go ahead and kill themselves). The Comments were funnier than what I wrote. I’m more grown-up than that now (yeah, right).

As far as I can tell, I haven’t made an effort since then to organize any kind of holiday-related theme for the music I’ve posted on Valentine’s Day, though I’ve usually make some kind of (usually snarky) comment about the day, typically related to how commercialized the holiday is. In case you were wondering, this year the National Retail Federation reports that those celebrating Valentine’s Day in the U.S. plan to spend a record average of $196.31, up 21 percent over last year’s previous record of $161.96, and that total spending is expected to total $27.4 billion, up 32 percent from last year’s record of $20.7 billion.

Isn’t that heart-warming? Continue reading »