BLASPHEMY, PRAYERS, AND THE CALLOUSNESS THAT FOLLOWS: TRIBE OF PAZUZU, SARCOPTES, AND TONGUE SCUM

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Mar 202023
 

(Sacramento-based writer DGR pulled together the following reviews of albums that surfaced over the last 30 days.)

The tour through the world of heavy metal continues, this time covering a good portion of the planet as we carve our way from Canada through the States and land in Australia for three suitably intense and mind-scarringly mean experiences that saw recent release. We begin with names familiar to longtime NCS readers and end on someone new but a group that’ll instantly appeal to the wall-punchers as decorative artists among our readers.

Tribe Of Pazuzu – Blasphemous Prophecies

It hadn’t occurred to us around here that it had been close to three years for the Canadian crew Tribe Of Pazuzu when it came to the gap between releases, nor the fact that Blasphemous Prophecies represents the group’s official first full-length album.

For those who haven’t been wandering around these fetid halls for a while, Tribe Of Pazuzu unleashed two EPs in late 2019 and early 2020 entitled Heretical Uprising and King Of All Demons. With the year-over-year churn on those particular EPs and each of them clocking in at a stocky five songs and near-twenty minutes each, it felt like the combination of the two together – which the band would eventually release in 2021 – was their debut full-length. Continue reading »

EP REVIEW PARTY: BOMBS OF HADES, TRIBE OF PAZUZU, TOMBS, KATHOLIK, SUTRAH, OVARYROT

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
May 192020
 


Bombs of Hades – photo by Susan Wicher

 

(DGR prepared this collection of reviews, focusing on six 2020 EPs across a range of metal genres.)

If you’ve been reading the site recently you might’ve caught fellow writer Andy Synn doing a deep dive on six EPs that had seen recent release (here). Well, that wasn’t the only one of those on the docket, and what you’re looking at is a second collection of EPs: Stuff that I’ve noticed we haven’t dived into in print, stuff that might’ve glanced by us, and one or two that are basically on the DGR radar by proximity alone.

Musically, we’re all over the map – hell, Ovaryrot’s presence alone was likely to have that effect – as we travel through crusty death metal realms, thrashier-death and black hybrids, to black metal itself and all of its post-genre cousins, even making a trip to the tech-death world to say hi to those over-complicated goofballs and their tendency to try to write everything and the kitchen sink into five-minute chunks, before finally winding up on the doorstep of some nightmare music, because who the hell needs to sleep?

So if you saw the previous six EPs and thought, “Wow, what a fantastic idea”, then settle in my oddly specific friend because do we have a treat for you, another six EPs of music that have hit over the past few months for you to check out and bang your head to. Continue reading »

OVERFLOWING STREAMS: WOLFHEART, WARDRUNA, DEVANGELIC, ON THORNS I LAY, TETHRA, BLAZE OF SORROW, DÄMMERFARBEN, EXHORDER, TRIBE OF PAZUZU, TURMION KÄTILÖT

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Feb 222020
 

 

I’m about to drive to Portland with friends to take in a mainly acoustic show by Austin Lunn (Panopticon), Aerial Ruin, and Mike Scheidt of Yob. That means I probably won’t have a SHADES OF BLACK column on Sunday, though I’ve already written a premiere for that day, so we won’t leave you completely lonesome tomorrow. As for today, I’ve resorted to the “Overflowing Streams” format because there are SO MANY new songs and videos I’ve been enjoying that I didn’t want to cut the list back, and don’t have time to write about them.

Almost everything here surfaced over the last 48 hours. Perhaps needless to say, there’s a lot of variety on offer. I don’t expect anyone (but me) to get a kick out of all this, but hopefully you’ll find at least one or two things to like. Continue reading »

TRIBE OF PAZUZU: “HERETICAL UPRISING”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Mar 192019
 

 

(DGR catches up to the debut EP by Tribe of Pazuzu, which was released in February this year.)

It’s not hard to imagine why the announcement of Tribe Of Pazuzu and their debut EP release Heretical Uprising turned some heads on first notice: It’s not often you get a group that unites musicians with credits to their name like Cryptopsy, Incantation, Soulstorm, and Pestilence. Yet that’s what this hybrid Canadian/American death metal band does, combining the forces of bassist/vocalist Nick Sagias, guitarists Randy Harris and John McEntee, and drummer Flo Mounier. Together they’ve recorded five songs and just over fourteen minutes of high speed death metal that is surprisingly straightforward, bludgeoning, and clear-sounding from a collective of musicians whose previous groups have alternated between sounding like cavernous whirlwind maws of death metal and sheer technical chaos.

Tribe Of Pazuzu‘s somewhat thrashier offering moves quickly, with a take-no-prisoners approach, and is so surgical about it that after its fourteen minutes wrap up, you’ll likely be a couple of spins into Heretical Uprising before you can even sort your thoughts from the first run-through. Continue reading »