AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: SHORES OF NULL — “DARKNESS WON’T TAKE ME”

 Premieres  2 Responses »
Sep 042023
 

In March of this year, with the assistance of Spikerot Records, the Roman band Shores of Null released their newest album The Loss of Beauty, and it has quickly drawn widespread admiration (including at our site) for its compelling renderings of melancholy and tormented moods, and earned its recommendations for fans of Amorphis, Enslaved, and Paradise Lost.

We are fortunate, however, that Shores of Null seem just as devoted to the creation of captivating videos as they are captivating music, and they are fortunate to have done this through a very successful collaboration with director Martina L. McLean and the filmmakers at Sanda Movies.

Shores of Null have already released four accomplished videos for songs from The Loss of Beauty, and we’ve assembled all of them at the end of this article. But the principal focus today is a fifth video, this one for the song “Darkness Won’t Take Me“. Continue reading »

GONZO’S HEAVY ROUNDUP, MARCH 2023

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 032023
 

(We’ve just barely breached the walls of April, and so our friend Gonzo makes a timely reappearance with a selection of five albums released in March that made a big impact in his listening.)

Before I get to writing this month’s helping of my choice cuts from last month, I gotta get something out of the way first:

I am still absolutely buzzing from last night’s Death to All show here in Denver.

To see the likes of Steve DiGiorgio and Gene Hoglan play music of any kind on stage, in person, is a treat enough by itself, but having them rip through selections from the inimitable Death for almost two hours was an experience that I plan to re-live in perpetuity. Possibly forever. Who knows?

It was an insane spectacle for the eyes as well as the ears, and I’ll get to writing up the entire thing soon enough. If you missed this tour, you have my condolences.

Let’s get to the good stuff from March.

Continue reading »

UNSUNG HEROES OF 2020:  ECCLESIA / LETHIAN DREAMS / SHORES OF NULL

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  1 Response »
Dec 182020
 


Ecclesia

 

(Andy Synn follows yesterday’s installment of “Unsung Heroes” with another one, this time presenting reviews and streams of new albums by two French bands and one Italian group, all of which provide well-deserved exceptions to our “Rule” about singing.)

As I’ve tried to stress several times – not just this year, but every year – it is literally impossible for any “Best of…” list to be totally comprehensive and/or definitive.

There’s only so much listening time available, and so many, many albums released each year, that the most you can ever really hope for is a representative sample of the year’s “best” releases.

It’s in acknowledgement of this unfortunate, but incontrovertible, fact of life that I first started writing these “Unsung Heroes” articles in the hope of providing some well-deserved, albeit retroactive, coverage for a bunch of artists and albums which I/we didn’t get chance to cover in proper detail before now, and which you, our readers, may well have missed out on too.

Today’s article has a particularly doomy focus although, as you’re about to find out, each of the three bands featured here has a distinctly different take on the genre.

Of the three artists I’m about to (possibly) introduce you too, one of them is a very recent discovery that I didn’t stumble across until my week-long list-a-thon was almost finished, while the other two I was hoping to be able to write a paragraph or two (or five) about prior to “List Season” commencing, but just never found the time. Continue reading »

STUFF LEPERKAHN DONE FOUND AND DONE LIKED, PART 5: SHORES OF NULL, OLD MAN GLOOM, INTER ARMA, WORMWOOD, WHORLS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Oct 082014
 

 

(Leperkahn soldiers on with the round-ups while I’m AWOL from round-up duty. Here’s his latest collection of new things.)

Hello all. This version’s gonna be a bit short on the descriptions, since I have a boatload of Adam Smith to read, and a paper on the The Iliad that won’t write itself. That said, I figured I needed a break from that, and you all needed some wonderful metal in your lives.

SHORES OF NULL

I know I remember seeing some good press behind Shores Of Null’s recent Candlelight-released album Quiescence, and probably even watched one of the earlier music videos they made for one of the tracks. Yet, dunce that I am, I never actually checked out the album, and the just-released video for “Ruins Alive” is proving that was a mistake.

It mixes some doom-y/death-y instrumental work not unlike Insomnium, or something doomier than Insomnium, with Davide Straccione’s absolutely stunning vocals, both his cleans, used heavily and tonally in the vein of Enslaved’s Herbrand Larsen, Extol’s Ole Børud, and Black Crown Initiate’s Andy Thomas (therefore at once stunningly melodic and entrancingly proggy), and his cavernous, funeral doom-y growls. Listening to some of their other music videos, the quality put forth on “Ruins Alive” seems to carry throughout Quiescence. Add that to the long and growing list of albums I need to check out

https://www.facebook.com/shoresofnull Continue reading »

AVOIDING SHAME: FUNEREAL PRESENCE (“THE TOWER FALLS”) AND SHORES OF NULL (“KINGS OF NULL”)

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Jul 032014
 

I’m mainly putting these two songs here so that, six months from now, when I include them in our list of 2014’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs, I won’t have to cringe in shame and admit that I never wrote about them.

FUNEREAL PRESENCE

This New York band’s debut album The Archer Takes Aim was released in March by The Ajna Offensive. It’s “only” four tracks long, but those songs add up to nearly 50 minutes of music. The opening song is “The Tower Falls”. It’s 12 1/2 minutes long and still ends too soon, as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t need to tell you that some of the best metal songs in creation are long-form creations. But our Most Infectious list isn’t necessarily about the best songs. The songs have to be good, mind you, but the main criteria is that they have to be catchy, hard to forget, addictive — and those aren’t the first qualities that principally come to mind (or at least my addled mind) when you think about epic-length music.

No doubt, long jams can have more powerful and lasting effects on your mental and emotional states than short blasts of hook-filled, neck-throttling energy. But you often live in them “in the moment”. They don’t necessarily drift back into your mind and start replaying themselves without any conscious volition of your own. But “The Tower Falls” does that. Continue reading »