SHADES OF BLACK: RAAT, PAYDRETZ, STARER, GEISTERFAUST, HAND OF OMEGA, SALQIU, MANṢŪR, MORK

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jul 302024
 

Hopefully you noticed that we began the last NCS Sunday with a premiere. That song and video by Weald & Woe were well worth the time required to prepare the write-up, and it would have fit well into the usual Sunday roundup of new black and black-ish metal, but it did leave me with less time than I needed to pull together the usual Shades of Black column.

So, I’ve taken an extra two days to finish gathering together what I wanted to recommend this week. I’m very happy with these eight selections and hope you’ll also find all of them well worth your time. (Yeah, there’s a lot here — bookmark it, try a little here and a little there, in between trying to make a living, drinking yourself silly, washing your cat and your clothes, bathroom breaks, sleeping, etc.)

RAAT (India)

As steadfast visitors to our site are well aware, I’ve been enthusiastically following the progression of Raat‘s music since early days, and thus was eager to delve into the band’s fourth album, Enchantment, which was released about 10 days ago. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: CAVE SERMON, SALQIU

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jan 272024
 

After three weeks away from home working my day job I’m finally back. It was a stressful and often bizarre experience, made worse by the absence of my spouse and cats, and worse still because I had no time to listen to music, much less write about it.

That may sound weird. There’s always time to listen to music, isn’t there? In my case, it just didn’t fit what I was doing, too much of a distraction instead of a companion. Especially when it comes to metal, my brain’s not wired to combine even less raucous variants of music with trying to concentrate hard on something else. So I was forced to take a very long hiatus, the longest one in the 14+ years I’ve spent in devotion to NCS.

Andy and DGR stepped up and kept the site from going dark, and a few other writers continued sending things in too. But we’ve still got a backlog of un-published material to bring to the surface, mainly a big slug of interviews from Comrade Aleks. Other backlogs will never be fixed. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SALQIU, PALE KING, BAD MANOR

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Nov 032022
 

 

I know I sound like a broken record, but this has been yet another week when the job that pays me (not NCS) has rudely interfered with my ability to recommend new music via round-ups such as this one. Even today it will interfere, and so even though I’ve decided to fill this round-up with full releases rather than advance tracks, I’m unable to say as much about them as I’d like. But fortunately, you can heed the wisdom of your own ears.

SALQIU (Brazil)

To begin, here’s a new album named خماسين الوباء from Nuno Lourenço in his guise as Salqiu. We’ve already learned that although Salqiu is prolific, we’re not going to get the same thing twice from album to album, a conviction reinforced by this new one, which has themes drawn from places far away from Nuno‘s homeland. He explains: Continue reading »