Septicflesh Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

SEPTICFLESH: “AMPHIBIANS”

Mar 062025

(In advance of their recent North American tour with Vltimas and Ex Deo, the Greek band SepticFlesh released an EP named Amphibians, and our DGR gives it a review here.)

If you’ve been following the news around tours for the past five or so years you’ve likely noticed an increasing trend of groups surprise-releasing singles – sometimes collaborative ones, which are immense fun – or EPs just prior to the tour happening. Aborted did it for their most recent tour; Machine Head did a combo song with the vocalists of Unearth, In Flames, and Lacuna Coil making appearances; and Lamb of God combined forces with Mastodon for their full album playthrough tour not too long ago.

The genesis of these songs can often lay in the cutting room floor from previous album sessions since creativity doesn’t exist in a vacuum and are highly unpredictable, but whereas it felt like groups constantly needed to have something to get them out on the road, now it has morphed into something more akin to revitalizing the current album cycle for a few more rotations around the sun.

Just as equally though, you do get lucky and a band will find time to sneak into the studio for a few and crank out ideas that’ve been haunting them like shadows ever-present in the corner of their vision. Bearing in mind that SepticFlesh‘s newest release crashes ashore a bit over two and a half years after their album, it would be hard to guess what led to which. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: CHAOS!

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 2 Responses »

Jan 112025

(written by Islander)

Normally I use the “Seen and Heard” title for Saturday roundups of recommended new songs and videos. When the number of picks swells to gargantuan proportions I use “Overflowing Streams,” because the number of streams in the column is overflowing. Get it?

I’ve got a baker’s dozen of bands in today’s collection, too many names to try to cram into the post title. I used the exclamatory word “Chaos!” in place of all the names because I got on a roll with the kind of high-energy, high-intensity, sometimes batshit-crazy, music I was hearing. With just a couple of exceptions, I filtered out everything that wasn’t Chaos!, leaving them for another day.

Stylistically, the Chaos! comes in different packages. Though the opening segment is pretty heavy on tech-death, I arranged the choices so they begin to change. You’ll see. You’ll also see that there’s no black metal in this collection (or at least nothing I’d call black metal or its variants), but I’ve got tomorrow to focus on that. Continue reading »

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 »

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