CANCER CULTURE OVER NORTH AMERICA TOUR

 Concert Reviews  No Responses »
Apr 242024
 

(Our friend Ben Manzella made sure not to miss one of the California dates of the ongoing Cancer Culture Over North America Tour, featuring Decapitated, Septicflesh, Kataklysm, and Allegaeon, and he brought us the following report on the show and lots of his photos.)

After going to shows consistently for close to twenty years, I find some venues hold a nostalgic place in my memory. The Observatory in Santa Ana, formerly known as the Galaxy Theater, is one such place. I rarely attend shows there due to the distance from where I live in southern California; but when I heard Decapitated’s tour would be starting there and I knew I’d be out of town for their other date in the area, I knew I had to figure out a way to be there.

As other US/North American fans of Decapitated will be well aware, the band has not been back to this region of the world since an incident that happened 7 years ago. It was pretty well documented and I don’t think it needs to be further mentioned out of respect for the band in moving forward. If anything, it felt sort of celebratory that their tour started at The Observatory because it was also the last venue they played 7 years ago.

So, with a new album released in 2022 and a strong/eclectic lineup featuring Septicflesh, Kataklysm, and Allegaeon, the Cancer Culture Over North America tour started on a high note. Continue reading »

SEPTICFLESH: “MODERN PRIMITIVE”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
May 312022
 

 

(We present DGR‘s review of the latest album by SepticFlesh, which was released by Nuclear Blast earlier this month.)

Modern Primitive, the eleventh release from Greek symphonic death metal group SepticFlesh, was quietly waiting to strike just out of our visual periphery. It’s a big, lumbering beast of an album that was patiently waiting for its moment of impact, and like many SepticFlesh releases there’s a lot to unpack here.

Now firmly ensconced in their specific style of symphonic death metal, SepticFlesh have become a band that moves in iterations. They have a solid and recognizable through-line in their music and one that has largely remained unchanged since the early-aughts – the general big, booming void of a SepticFlesh song is hard to mistake for anyone else.

What has become the story of each SepticFlesh album is just how far the band will drift from that line on each album, just how much they will go symphonic or just how death metal the band will be, with each release becoming a differing ratio of each. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS (15 NEW SONGS AND VIDEOS!)

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Apr 232022
 

I’m pretty sure this is the single biggest roundup I’ve ever created. The streams of music were indeed overflowing over the past week, and I felt compelled to get out to you as many of the good ones as I could — though I still have more, drawn from blackened veins, to push your way in tomorrow’s column.

I will say that there’s more rocking out to be found in this collection than usual, and a couple of exceptions to our no-singing rule. But don’t worry your pointed little heads, there’s plenty of savagery in the mix too. I’ll also say that I played DJ, trying to arrange these in a way that would pair up like-minded songs here and there. But some of the segues are still probably jarring, which is how I like it.

BLACK VOID (Norway)

I decided to begin with music from forthcoming releases by a big label before clawing deeper under ground. The first pick is a video for “Dadaist Disgust“, a new single from this Norwegian band’s upcoming debut album Antithesis, out May 27th on Nuclear Blast. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: SEPTICFLESH, VITAL SPIRIT, ANATOMIA, UNDERGANG, COME MIERDA, OTTONE PESANTE

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Mar 052022
 


Septicflesh – photo by Stella Mouzi

I wasn’t able to pull together any roundups of new songs and videos this past week, which means that today I’m only scratching the surface of what surfaced. It’s more like scratching just the top molecular layer of a solid block of steel. I’ll be back tomorrow to do some more scratching. Maybe some of your musical itches will be scratched too.

SEPTICFLESH (Greece)

Yesterday Nuclear Blast released news about a forthcoming album by SepticFlesh and a video for its first singe, “Hierophant“. It’s a conceptual song that begins a story which continues in the track “Self-Eater”.

This first part of the story (to quote band member Sotiris Anunnaki V) “depicts the experience of a high priest, acting as a human conduit between Heaven and Earth. Having never heard a single word from the mouth of God, he grows tired of preaching the preordained words of the clergy. He turns to performing primitive and powerful rituals that have been long forbidden, as he seeks the guidance of a chaotic elemental consciousness”. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2017’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 2): SEPTICFLESH, TEMPLE OF VOID, ACEPHALIX

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2017  4 Responses »
Jan 132018
 

 

No sooner than I started this series and quasi-promised that there would be a new installment every day than I missed the second fucking day. Let it serve as a reminder that this NCS gig isn’t a job for any of us here, just a passion that occasionally gets de-railed by other obligations and distractions.

Anyway, welcome to the second installment of our list of Most Infectious Songs from 2017, the length of which is now unknown, but which I hope will be fun for you to experience, even if neither I nor you quite knows where it’s going.

SEPTICFLESH

“Portrait of A Headless Man” was the first song I heard from the 2017 album from SepticFlesh. Since I’ve made a point of not showing my own head in social media photos, the title had a certain immediate appeal. But the appeal of the song went well beyond its title. Continue reading »

SEPTICFLESH: “CODEX OMEGA”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 082017
 

 

(DGR wrote this extended review of the new album by the Greek band SepticFlesh, which was released on September 1 in North America by Prosthetic Records.)

It’s hard to believe that three years have already passed since yours truly was given the opportunity to review Greece’s symphonic death metal arbiters SepticFlesh and their album Titan. Since then, I’ve dedicated a fair share of words to the band, as their brand of orchestra mixed in with crushingly heavy death metal scratches just the right itch, but I always wind up musing about the same subject, which is how the band’s chosen genres combine in order to form the band as it is today.

It’s interesting to me because, pulled apart, the orchestral music genre and metal genre are two gigantic beasts in their own right, so the thought of combining them makes sense. It’s been done for years, of course, but the gentlemen in SepticFlesh have developed a unique mastery of it. Even in the hands of masters it can occasionally get a little unwieldy — because although the two combine well, in the world of SepticFlesh they are also treading a very thin line, and depending on what side of that line they land on is the version of SepticFlesh you’ll be getting at that point in time. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): DYSCARNATE, BROKEN HOPE, HIDEOUS DIVINITY, ARCHSPIRE, VOLTURYON, FLESHKILLER, THE RITUAL AURA, SEPTICFLESH, THE HAUNTED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Sep 052017
 


Dyscarnate

 

(DGR has again stepped forward for round-up duty and has pulled together 9 new songs and videos that caught his eye between last week and yesterday.)

Last week saw a tremendous on-rush of heavy metal news, and of course, since many people knew that we here in the States (or at least many of us) would get a long three-day weekend, a lot of it hit in the back half of the week. As the site’s resident hoover vacuum, I’ve compiled an itemized list of nine… items… that caught my interest over the course of the week that we didn’t get a chance to cover that I will now lovingly shove right into your faces.

If you’re a big fan of death metal and its chugging ilk, this roundup is mostly for you, as it seemed like a large chunk of what I found came from that sphere of influence. There’s definitely the requisite world-traveling element as well, as we go from England to Canada to Italy to the States to Greece to Sweden (twice), and you can see where this is going from here. So let’s quit goofing off and get to the fun stuff. Continue reading »

SYMPHONIES OF SICKNESS

 Mosh Pit, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  10 Responses »
Sep 022017
 

 

(Andy Synn is now lobbying the Oxford English Dictionary for recognition of a new word.)

In case you didn’t know, yesterday saw release of the brand new album by Symphonic Death Metal titans Septic Flesh (yes, I’m still spelling it as two words).

Now while I’m not planning on reviewing it here (that honour will, in all likelihood, fall to DGR), I will say that Codex Omega feels like a big step up from The Great Mass and Titan, the latter of which in particular suffered (in this author’s opinion at least) from a noticeable lack of balance between the “Symphonic” and the “Death Metal” aspects of the band’s sound, with the lion’s share of the effort put into the orchestration, while the drums and riffs (or lack thereof) were treated very much as an afterthought.

And as Codex Omega is such a big improvement on its predecessors in this regard, I felt it might be high time we all got together to discuss the costs/benefits inherent in “symphonisizing” (a word I’ve just invented) your sound. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): BELPHEGOR, SEPTICFLESH, INANIMATE EXISTENCE, AMON AMARTH, INCANTATION, THE LURKING FEAR, ABHORRENT DECIMATION, THENIGHTTIMEPROJECT

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  11 Responses »
Jul 172017
 

 

(DGR takes over round-up duties again, with this collection of new songs and videos from eight bands.)

The end-of-the-week news flood was insane, as we have settled well into summer now and a lot of bands are either gearing up to hit the road or are already out making numerous loops on the festival circuit. Of course, this also means that there are a lot of albums in the hopper, getting ready to come out within weeks, or you’ll start seeing a lot of press for albums set to hit when the first leaves of fall drop.

That’s how you wind up with posts like this SEEN AND HEARD that helped kick off the weekend — not even counting our own fuel that we added to the fire, and the one that you’re reading now, which is basically just a gigantic dragnet for bands that had premieres elsewhere throughout the tail end of last week, or just blasted that thing right out to the world to see.

This episode of SEEN AND HEARD is eight (!) bands deep and skews death-metal heavy, so prepare yourselves for a lot of gigantic grooves, growled vocals, enough blasts to reach gunfire status, and enough chainsaw guitar destruction to fuel the planet. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD (BY DGR): SEPTICFLESH, DYING FETUS, BYZANTINE, ABORTED, JACK KETCH, THE FACELESS, KREATOR, ASYLUM

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jun 152017
 

 

(DGR takes over our round-up rodeo for this Thursday, with a mix of news and new music from 8 bands.)

By the time you are reading this, I will likely be hiding like a coward underneath a fan set on incredibly high as this region of California experiences its first legit summer heatwave of one hundred plus temperatures. Considering that I am a soft wuss who has somehow survived many of these prior, you’d think that attempting to lose weight so that I may one day fit in my freezer with the door closed wouldn’t be the go-to gameplan, but alas, here we are.

You may have noticed by our recent slowdown post that a good chunk of the NCS crew plans to spend the weekend cooped up in a handful of venues in Seattle for the Northwest Terror Fest, enjoying a smattering of different groups. So in order to offset that I’ve made a hefty collection of new music and some album artwork that has slowly been cropping up on the web in recent weeks that have floated by us recently, to be caught in the patented super-porous DGR news net. At the very end I’ll even toss in an album that I came across recently for all of you to enjoy.

So let us sunder forth so that I can quickly go back to attempting to stuff myself onto the second shelf of the freezer next to the frozen lasagna boxes. Continue reading »

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