SHADES OF BLACK: THE AMENTA, STILLNESS OF A DYING WORLD, EXCOMMUNICATIO, DELETRIX

 Album Reviews, SHADES OF BLACK  No Responses »
Nov 052023
 

Welcome back, or welcome for the first time. For those who were with me for yesterday’s round-up, I’ll spare you a detailed update on my vaccine-induced congestion and say only that my body’s mucus factory is still vigorously pumping out the product, my wishes be damned.

Like yesterday, I wish I could have made this collection longer. Under the circumstances (which include a rare outing from my hermitage with my spouse this morning), it’s the best I could do. I did attempt to make it a varied experience, with a curveball at the end.

THE AMENTA (Australia)

Well of course we’re leading this column with a new video from The Amenta, because we’re nothing if not slavish in our attention to what they do.

It makes a special kind of sense today because the song that’s the subject of the video is The Amenta‘s cover of Diamanda Galás‘ hymn to Satan, “Sono L’Antichristo“, which originally appeared on her Plague Mass album. Continue reading »

THE AMENTA: “PLAGUE OF LOCUS”

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Oct 132023
 

(On October 19th Debemur Morti Productions will release a new EP by The Amenta (albeit a 40-minute “EP”). We’ve already showered its advance tracks with attention, but today we have a review of the entire release by DGR.)

The fun part about any release from Australia’s avante-garde black metal clusterfuck The Amenta has always been the opening paragraph wherein the author spends a good five or six sentences tripping over their own feet while attempting to describe what The Amenta is. To say that the band have existed off the beaten path would be putting it politely; instead it’s more like The Amenta saw the ‘path’ and proceeded to beat it to death.

Early on, the group saw various permutations into and out of the symphonic black metal scene and their first few albums are jammed full of big sweeping synths, various noises, and plenty of riffs for their chosen vocalist at the time to soar over, but there’s always been a stubborn part of the band that has refused to be put down, and beginning with their V01D EP, the band have long settled into ‘fuck it’ mode and let their artistic tendencies run mad. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: THE AMENTA, HARM’S WAY, VIOLENT LIFE VIOLENT DEATH, NO DIVINITY, GRUZJA, INTO THE DEEP, INCANTATION

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 172023
 

Oh look! Another mid-week roundup of new music, and it’s even more voluminous than the one I managed yesterday.

To give you a bit of a roadmap to what’s ahead, I’m starting with a perennial NCS favorite from Australia, then moving into an absolutely devastating block of U.S. metallic hardcore, then veering off in all sorts of other different directions.

THE AMENTA (Australia)

The Amenta decided to record a bunch of cover songs by a very eclectic group of bands, ranging from the black metal of Nazxul and Lord Kaos to Alice In Chains, Diamanda Galas, Killing Joke, Wolf Eyes, Halo, and… wait for it… My Dying Bride.

As if the prospect of these covers wouldn’t be titillating enough on their own to pique our interest (because we know a band like The Amenta aren’t going to play it straight with any of those songs), the 40-minute “EP” that includes the covers also presents a new original song, which is the subject of a video that debuted yesterday. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2021’s MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 23): THE AMENTA, UNFLESH, IN MOURNING, GATEWAY, ZORNHEYM

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2021  2 Responses »
Feb 022022
 


The Amenta

 

When I announced that I was blowing past Monday’s deadline for completing this list I wrote that I might possibly continue it through Friday. Now I would say that’s a certainty. Which means I have three days, including this one, to finish the list.

Today’s choices are a musical smorgasbord, wide-ranging in their styles and moods, and “infectious” in different ways. To check out the songs that preceded these four on the list, GO HERE.

THE AMENTA (Australia)

Release-wise, The Amenta had a busy 2021 after allowing 8 years to go by since their preceding album, Flesh Is Heir. They brought forth the new album Revelator, a split with Aborym, and an EP named Solipschism.

We’re big fans of The Amenta around these parts and accordingly devoted quite a lot of attention to them last year, but our man DGR is probably the most devoted fan. He reviewed both the full album and the EP, and so even though I’m solely responsible for this list, I deferred to him in the choice of song (among several that were strong candidates). Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE: THE AMENTA — “TWINED TOWERS”

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Nov 032021
 

Surely you’ve listened to Revelator by now. If you haven’t, there better be a damned good excuse, like a protracted coma or meningitis-induced deafness or living-under-a-rock ignorance. Possibly you just don’t like absolute musical crushers you can headbang to and/or maelstroms of noise capable of causing your brain to lock up and/or hallucinatory experiences that will disturb your sleep. But we’ll discount those latter explanations, because you’re here at this site, aren’t you? Of course you’re attracted to such things.

We of course are big fans of the genre-colliding Australian band who made Revelator, none more so than our slave DGR who devoted many (MANY) words to it in his review. But we’re not only inveterate fans of the music. We also always relish the videos that The Amenta and friends craft for their songs, because they’re just as wild and unsettling as the music.

And thus we’re thrilled to present one of their jaw-dropping, skull-exploding videos today, for a song that arguably could be considered the centerpiece of Revelator. And in addition to that we also have an extended interview of The Amenta‘s vocalist Cain Cressall, who answers some of the questions that will inevitably occur to you after watching — such as “How the fuck did they do that?”, “Are those maggots and spiders real?”, and “What the hell does this all mean?” Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: THE AMENTA, GADGET, RETALIATION, KONSENSUS

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Sep 012021
 

 

(DGR prepared the following trio of reviews for 2021 releases that don’t require a lot of your time but make a big impact nonetheless.)

It still feels strange when we get to use the “Short But Sweet” review tag for the purpose it was designed for instead of the usual ‘these reviews will be shorter than usual’ style that I favor, but when you combine the total time of the three releases we’re discussing here you wind up with a little under twenty-five minutes worth of music. Two are short because they’re the usual suspects – grindcore groups smashing out music with reckless abandon – and the other is brief because the whole release consists of only two songs, but serves as a fantastic addendum to an excellent album released earlier this year.

The Amenta – Solipschism EP

Solipschism is the newest release from Australia’s The Amenta, a two-song EP consisting of tracks that were initially part of the run for their earlier-in-the-year return album Revelator – in case the continued portmanteau in the song naming wasn’t enough to tip you off. It serves partially as an addendum to that previous release, unleashing one crushingly heavy almost song recorded during the Revelator sessions that seems to exist solely to ratchet up in intensity while at the same time burying vocalist Cain within an abrasive wall of sound, and one quieter experiment, both of which fall perfectly in line within that album’s current run.

As to specifically where? It’s hard to tell, but they currently do a great job stitching themselves right onto the end of an album that is already difficult to describe at times, given its tendency to murder its own momentum for the sheer fun of it and try to create haunting soundscapes out of the rubble left behind. Continue reading »

DGR REVIEW ARCHIVES (PART 4): THE AMENTA — “REVELATOR”

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Feb 192021
 

 

(We present the fourth and final installment from an avalanche of reviews that DGR delivered unto us earlier this week, and today’s edition focuses on the newest album by Australia’s The Amenta, which is being released today by Debemur Morti Productions.)

It’s been a good bit of time since we last heard from the Australian amorphous extreme metal genre-hoppers The Amenta. Their sound has expanded widely over the years, with releases that range from a blackened death metal vein, to industrialized monstrosities, and even some straightforward noise and black metal collisions for fun. I’ve even seen them granted the genre-descriptor of ‘terminator metal’ a few times, given their favoring of distorted electronic backings that can often sound like failing machinery.

By the time of 2013’s Flesh Is Heir the group’s sound was firmly planted in a vast maelstrom of industrial noise and blackened death metal, and it is a release that we have yelled about for a long time – largely my fault – at this here site. The eight years since then, though, have been relatively quiet and have seen The Amenta‘s various musicians spread far and wide. It seemed for a little while that the group would be slowly shadowed out – that is, until the announcement of the group’s newest album Revelator. Continue reading »

AN NCS VIDEO PREMIERE (AND AN INTERVIEW): THE AMENTA — “AN EPOCH ELLIPSIS”

 Interviews, Premieres  No Responses »
Jan 212021
 

 

In early December we got a big but very welcome surprise when Debemur Morti Productions announced that they would be releasing a new album by the avant-garde Australian death metal band The Amenta (the band’s first full-length in almost eight years), and sprung upon us a video for the album’s first advance track, “Sere Money“. And now we’re springing upon you a video for the album’s second single, “An Epoch Ellipsis“, along with an interview of the The Amenta’s Timothy Pope which focuses on what you’re about to see and hear.

The name of the new album is Revelator, and Debemur Morti has set February 19th as the release date. As DMP rightly reports, it is “the culmination of nearly 20 years’ collective experimentation in nonconformist, dissonant, dynamic and electronically-lacerated Death Metal”. And although we typically resist just copy/pasting promotional texts written by others, the following passage does a very good job as an introduction to the manifold experiences the album presents: Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK: ISSOLEI, CAEDES CRUENTA, EGO, THE AMENTA, CULTED, VØIDWOMB, SUNNATA

 SHADES OF BLACK  4 Responses »
Dec 062020
 

 

Sometimes fortune smiles and these Sunday playlists just fall into place as if directed by some devilish higher lower power. In those times I move through songs I might be interested in, and by serendipity the music just flows in a way that makes sense. That didn’t happen today.

I had sorted out what I wanted to recommend, but had no good idea how to order them. I made an effort, but it’s still a pretty twisty and turny trip, made even more twisted by a last-minute addition prompted by a recommendation from my comrade DGR.

This episode is also different from most, in that it includes no complete releases, only advance tracks from forthcoming records. To spice things up, a few come with videos that will likely make you sit up and pay even closer attention.

ISSOLEI (Norway)

I decided to begin with a song called “King Apophis“, though I have very little information about the band or the release. Issolei apparently come from Trondheim, but beyond that they are a mystery. Terratur Possessions will release a debut Issolei record that includes this song, but hasn’t yet announced the title or a release date. Continue reading »

THE REARVIEW MIRROR (THE AMENTA)

 Album Reviews, THE REARVIEW MIRROR  6 Responses »
Oct 252015
 

Rearview Mirror

 

(This Sunday, DGR steps forward with our weekly look back at metal from yesteryear.)

I’ve been waffling a bit with the idea of contributing more often to the series of Rearview Mirror posts that we’ve been doing here at NCS. I genuinely love the idea of being able to deep-dive on a song at random, but I’ve also wanted to let other folks share their hidden gems out there without me vomiting my taste all over the site, especially as my own archive of ideas consists pretty much of bands I’ve already taken a healthy opportunity to write about on this lovely page.

However, there is one group that has been haunting me, that I’ve been thinking about a lot as of late, and that is Australia’s The Amenta. If you’ve been following NCS for a while, you’ll know that I’m a pretty unabashed fan of the band. Tim Pope gave me one of my favorite interviews ever, and the group’s 2013 release Flesh Is Heir ranks among my favorite discs — it is a noisy, harsh, and abrasive listen that seemed just slightly ahead of its time, especially as now it seems like more groups from Australia are breaking out into the limelight. Continue reading »

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