SHADES OF BLACK: HORNED ALMIGHTY, SEAR BLISS, KRALLICE, HOULE, KRÅBØL, HEILUNG

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Jun 022024
 

After a bit of a festival-induced hiatus in these Sunday columns, I’ve returned, and have had time to pull together a pretty good-sized selection of new blackened sounds today.

I’m leading off with three veteran bands who have managed to withstand the ravaging gales of time, and then I’ll move into newer collectives. I’m not sure there’s any organizing principle in what I chose, other than my own strong positive reactions to each choice. They include advance tracks from five forthcoming albums, some of them accompanied by videos, and one recently released full-length.

HORNED ALMIGHTY (Denmark)

The mighty Horned Almighty are returning to strike fear into the hearts of men, women, beasts, and probably plant life. Their new album, the seventh in a 20+ year career, is Contagion Zero. The first frights from it come in the form of a daunting and extremely dire song named “Ascension of Fever and Plague“. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BARBARIAN SWORDS, DARKTHRONE, LAIR OF THE MINOTAUR, SEAR BLISS, THOU

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Apr 122024
 

Another big week for new songs and videos from some very good bands. I wasn’t able to pull together a mid-week roundup, so we’ve got a lot to cover today and tomorrow. Without further ado, let’s begin.

BARBARIAN SWORDS (Spain)

We start today’s alphabetized collection with B, which stands of course for Barbarian, as in Barbarian Swords, and a song of “true nihiilistic black doom” off their new album Fetid. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2018’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 33): BEHEMOTH, VOLKOLUN, SEAR BLISS

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2018  6 Responses »
Feb 252019
 

 

With this post I’m beginning the final week of this list, bound and determined to end it by Friday, when the third month of the year begins. With that brutal deadline in mind, I spent hours this past weekend looking at what was left on my gigantic list of nominees for these awards and listening to many of them. The listening was enjoyable, but it was still a harrowing experience — because even though this 2018 list has turned out to be longer than in any previous year, there are still SO MANY SONGS I’d like to recognize, beginning with these three:

BEHEMOTH

Behemoth‘s latest album, I Loved You At Your Darkest, seemed to stir up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Sure, there were plenty of people who lavished it with praise, but a lot of the accolades came from sources that seem to reflexively give every release by every “big name” their highest ratings. The album didn’t evoke quite so much enthusiasm in other quarters, where fans were dismayed by some of the ideas the band tried on for size, and by the more “rock ‘n’ roll” feel of the album as a whole. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: SEAR BLISS, NINE INCH NAILS, NABERUS, LUNAE ORTUS, LESSER GLOW, FLOOD PEAK

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 182018
 

 

Yesterday I exercised rare restraint and didn’t attend the annual Syttende Mai parade in Ballard, Washington, reportedly the largest celebration of Norway’s Constitution Day in the U.S. So, instead of doing what I’ve done in past years, i.e., getting pleasantly wasted in the company of hordes of actual and pretend descendants of Norwegian immigrants to the Pacific Northwest, I did what I try to do most nights: I crawled through the slag heap of the NCS in-box and scrolled the endless stream of my FB news feed looking for new music that might be worth sharing.

I added links to more than 20 new songs and videos to my ever-expanding list, most of those from albums or EPs that haven’t yet been released. That’s a sign of how much new metal is revealed every day, and that’s not counting stuff I omitted because I suspected it wouldn’t do anything for me. Then I started listening. Some nights that goes faster than you might think; if something doesn’t grab me pretty fast, I skip past it and move on.

Last night the first six songs I listened to are the first six songs you’ll find in this round-up, heard (and seen) in exactly this order (most of them are presented through music videos). And the last item here is an EP I heard right after those six. I never made it to the rest of the list. Obviously, all of this new music grabbed me — though in very different ways. Because it’s such a broad scattering of genre styles, I’ll be surprised if anyone else likes all of it as much as I do. But you might find at least one thing you like.

SEAR BLISS

I really, really, really like how this Hungarian band have evolved over a career that’s now roughly 25 years old. On the occasion of their last album, 2012’s Eternal Recurrence, Natalie Zed’s review at Angry Metal Guy included some lines that I thought were astute in capturing the band’s accomplishments on that album: Continue reading »

SUNDAY SINGLES: THE 11TH HOUR, SEAR BLISS, AND MORDAX

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 082012
 

The last couple of days brought new singles from three bands that made an impression on my ear holes, so I’m collecting them here for your ear holes.

THE 11TH HOUR

I’m new to this band, but warming up to them quickly. The 11th Hour began as a Dutch/Swedish doom-metal collaboration between two dudes who were better known for their work in death metal: Ed Warby, the drummer for Gorefest, Hail of Bullets, and Ayreon/Star One, and Rogga Johansson, the man behind bands such as Paganizer, Ribspreader, The Grotesquery, and Demiurg (another Johansson/Warby collaboration). Their 2009 debut album, Burden of Grief, was a concept album about the last days of a man dying from a lung disease.

The 11th Hour now have a second album due for release by Napalm Records on January 27 (February 7 in the U.S.). It’s called Lacrima Mortis. As with Burden of Grief, Ed Warby played all the instruments on the recording and also provided the soaring clean vocals. Unfortunately, Rogga Johansson had to pull out of the recording work on this album due to a prolonged illness, but the band’s live vocalist Pim Blankenstein stepped in. Rogga is a tough act to replace, but based on what I’ve heard of the album so far, Blankenstein’s roars are fucking bottomless.

A day or two ago, Napalm released a single from Lacrima Mortis called “Bury Me”, and even better, they’ve made it available for free download at this location. It’s a fucken great song (and an Exception to the Rule around here, because it’s a mix of clean and un-clean vocals). Have a listen right after the jump (and thanks to KevinP for the tip on this one). Continue reading »

2012: METAL IN THE FORGE (Part 1)

 Forthcoming Albums  28 Responses »
Jan 062012
 

December and 2011 are both over, and with the end of the last month, it’s time to round up what we saw over the last 30 days about forthcoming albums.

We usually try to post these updates on the first of the month, but the first of this month was New year’s Day, and I was moving kinda slowly that day. Plus, I’ve been focusing on year-end lists from a variety of sources, and, well, I’m late with this. I have more excuses, if you’d like to hear them.  No?  Okay, I understand.  I’ll just shut up and get going with this list.

So, here’s the deal:  In these METAL IN THE FORGE posts, I collect news blurbs and press releases I’ve seen over the last month about forthcoming new albums from bands we know and like at NCS (including occasional updates about releases we’ve included in previous installments of this series), or from bands that look interesting, even though we don’t know their music yet. In this series, we cut and paste those announcements and compile them in alphabetical order.

Remember — THIS ISN’T A CUMULATIVE LIST. If we found out about a new forthcoming album before December, we wrote about it in previous installments of this series. So, be sure to check the Category link called “Forthcoming Albums” on the right side of this page to see forecasted releases we reported earlier.

This month’s list begins right after the jump. It includes some real eye-openers. In fact, it’s not too soon to say that 2012 is already looking like yet another royally skull-fucking year for metal. But as usual, this list is half-assed rather than comprehensive. I confess that in December I was even more half-assed than usual in keeping my eyes open for news about new albums. So, feel free to leave Comments and tell all of us what I missed when I put this list together. Let us know about albums on the way that  you’re stoked about, even if you don’t see them here! Continue reading »