OVERFLOWING STREAMS ON A SATURDAY

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 072024
 

From midnight on Thursday to midnight on Friday we received 221 e-mails about recent and forthcoming heavy metal releases. That’s not counting the e-mails that were just trying to sell us clothing or physical editions of records that have been out for a while, or to announce tours and shows, or to promote music that’s utterly foreign to anything we cover here (no idea how we get on some of these distribution lists).

That’s what Bandcamp Fridays do to our in-box, and the same thing happens on social media. It’s no longer surprising. Bands and labels know that lots of metalheads wait for these days when more of the money they spend will go to bands and labels. But it sure as hell makes me feel like I’m drowning when I look for things to include in Saturday roundups following Bandcamp Fridays.

And that’s not counting all the new songs and videos that were already on my plate before Friday arrived. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: SANCTUARIUM — “ABHORRENT EXCRUCIATION IN REPRISAL”

 Premieres  1 Response »
Aug 012024
 

Only in the most miserable domains of death metal could adjectives like “fetid”, “putrescent”, “repulsive”, and “utterly disgusting” count as high praise. Trying to explain that logic to someone who isn’t already an aficionado of extreme metal would be like trying to teach math to a golden retriever, though a retriever would just keep wagging its tongue instead of rolling its eyes.

But we should acknowledge that while great achievements in musical repulsiveness have drawn applause since the early days of death metal (and especially creeping and crawling death metal of doom), that’s really never been the full story. Acclaim (at least when justified) has always depended on much more than simply sounding foul and spawning visions of putrefying corpses.

The Catalonian death metal band Sanctuarium understand this, and they practice their understanding extremely well, having put their finger on what made the OGs timeless in their appeal and then expanding upon it in increasingly surreal and heart-palpitating ways.

One proof of that is in the Sanctuarium song we’re premiering today, an extract from a new album that’s set for release in September by Me Saco Un Ojo and BlackSeed. Continue reading »