SEEN AND HEARD: CORPSESSED, SKELETHAL, NARTHRAAL, SKALLBANK, THE HU, TENGGER CAVALRY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Nov 062018
 

 

I know there was a ton of new music released yesterday. I can tell just from rapidly scrolling through the 130 e-mails that hit our in-box between 12:55 a.m. and 10:35 p.m. yesterday (yes, I counted them). But (with two exceptions) I had already decided what I wanted to put in this round-up before any of those e-mails arrived, and I decided to just go with these and defer figuring out what Monday might have brought until another day.

The first of the two exceptions is one of the five recommendations I received yesterday from my Norwegian friend eiterorm. I suspect at least a few of the other four will also find their way into another round-up later this week. And that one exception led to a second. Most of the the rest of what I’ve collected below came out late last week or I discovered them last week.

CORPSESSED

More than four years ago, our former contributor Leperkahn introduced his brief comments about Corpsessed’s Abysmal Thresholds with these words: “I’ve been seriously hungering for some absolutely cavernous death metal, the kind of stuff that sounds like it was recorded in a Lovecraftian studio at The Mountains Of Madness”. And he found what he was looking for in this Finnish band’s debut album: “To put it succinctly, these guys play death metal that sounds straight out of the abyss. Since putting it on I’ve had to check a few times to make sure Cthulhu isn’t looming behind my back”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SUNDAY: LOSS, KAMPFAR, KING APATHY, WEEPING SORES, SKELETHAL, MICO, UMBRAL, GRIND OF THE DEAD, HARVESTMAN

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 262017
 

 

The weekends at NCS are usually all mine. No one else’s compositions to ready for posting, no premieres to write, no day job to fuck around with my own desires (usually), and this weekend my spouse has also been away having fun without me (or at least I hope she is). With all the cats away, this mouse has plenty of time to play (metal).

And so, in addition to all of the reviews and streams I tossed your way yesterday, I have a torrent of more metal to share on this Sunday, beginning with this collection of singles, advance tracks, and one full release selected from a massive list of things I heard over the past week. I’m not including streams and new videos from better-known bands, such as the ones that appeared from Solstafir and Heaven Shall Burn, but you can view them through those links.

LOSS

As previously reported, Nashville’s Loss have a new album named Horizonless, which is due for release by Profound Lore on May 19. We finally got a taste of the new music last week through the premiere of a track named “All Grows on Tears“. Continue reading »

DEATH RITUALS (Part 1): SKELETHAL, MASACRE, NIHIL KAOS, ASSUMPTION

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Oct 202014
 

 

I plowed through a lot of new songs yesterday and found a lot to like. Most of it happened to be death metal, though not quite all. So I decided to skip the “Seen and Heard” title for this round-up in favor of a more descriptive lead-in. Also, I found so much to recommend that I’ve divided the round-up into two parts. The second one will come a bit later today.

SKELETHAL

I loved this French band’s previous 2014 EP Deathmanicvs Revelation with an unholy love. I have little reason to doubt that I will experience similarly unnatural attractions to their new one, Interstellar Knowledge of the Purple Entity. Apart from my intense desire to obtain more knowledge about The Purple Entity (!), the advance song that became available for listening this weekend is like an aphrodisiac for the ears. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: A STREAM DUMP (PART 2)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  12 Responses »
Apr 132014
 

John Martin: “The Deluge” (1834)

As I mentioned yesterday, the past week brought good song and video premieres in a flood, which was unfortunate only in the sense that I didn’t have time to write about all those discoveries day-by-day as they happened. So this weekend I decided to just flood you with them, leaving behind all but some short snippets of my own sparkling prose and mainly delivering the streams, along with release info.

Yesterday I collected 11 (!) new songs and videos, plus a couple of tantalizing news items, and today I’ve got 12 more, plus a few more news items. Once again, I present them in alphabetical order:

AMBIENT DEATH

The Song: “Apotheosis of the Hangman”
From: Dismembering the Image of God
Release info: self-released by the band on April 7; below is a new video for the opening track

Vicious melodic death metal with flying fretwork that gets more interesting and seductive as the song progresses. Punches pretty damned hard, too. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: LORD MANTIS, SKELETHAL, INFESTUS, SARGEIST

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHADES OF BLACK  6 Responses »
Mar 032014
 

This round-up of news and new music is skewed toward the especially dark, depraved, nihilistc end of the extreme metal spectrum, hence the name “Shades of Black”, even though only two of the bands march under the black metal banner.

LORD MANTIS

Once you’ve seen Jef Whitehead’s cover for the new album by Chicago’s Lord Mantis, you really don’t forget it. I splashed it across the top of our site when it became public about two weeks ago, though back then I hadn’t yet heard any of the music from Death Mask. Now I have, and man, it makes a scarring impression, too.

The song that premiered last Friday is the album’s searing opening track, “Body Choke”. Three things about it stand out. First, there’s the visceral pounding of the rhythm section, with Charlie Fell’s bass and Bill Bumgardner’s drumming interacting like men at work on a demolition project. Second, there are Fell’s vocals, which sound like a man drowning in sulfuric acid. And third, there are the doomed, devastating, degraded riffs; they create a choking, noxious atmosphere.

You will want to headbang. You may also want to open a vein. Continue reading »