Mar 182024
 

(As you can see, we have a song premiere, but first, an album review.)

After listening to parts of Venomous Echoes‘ 2023 debut album, Writhing Tomb Amongst the Stars, this writer immediately spewed forth words while my mind was still boggled, among them such adjectives as “maniacal”, “freakish”, “insane”, and “demented”, and referenced the conjunction of “full-tilt demolition in the low end and spell-like alien wailings that seem to reach our shores from deep space”.

I also quoted a friend’s impressions: “If Choir meets Portal and Impetuous Ritual in Strapping Young Lad’s City is in your wheelhouse you can’t go wrong with this onslaught brought to you by Benjamin Vanweelden.”

Upon learning that Mr. Vanweelden had had recorded a second Venomous Echoes album that I, Voidhanger Records would be releasing this spring, I already knew that I would have to hear it, and that I would have to make sure before listening that I wouldn’t need my brain to function in even its usually disjointed condition for several hours afterward. No great shock to see that the album’s name is Split Formations And Infinite Mania.

Well, now I’ve listened, and I find myself in shuddering but exhilarated agreement with the label’s summing up of the new album as “an intimate and personal experience into a universal cosmic horror apocalypse”. Continue reading »

Jun 242023
 


False Gods

Excess is best?” Well, sometimes it is. In fact, given how much music NCS throws at people every day, one might even say that should be this site’s sub-header (remember when we used to change the sub-headers every week?). But today the latest edition of Rennie Resmini‘s starkweather SubStack, which landed in our in-box overnight and which asked that question in its title, made me think, “No! Not this morning!

I already had some ideas for this round-up, and then saw Rennie‘s recommendations and bookmarked a dozen of them that I hadn’t been aware of — too many to explore in full, unless I was willing to delay this collection for many more hours, which I’d be anxious about doing. I did investigate a few of them, and you’ll see two of those below, followed by a few I’d previously found in other ways.

Hope you find something to brighten, or ruin, your weekend, even including the astonishing curveball I’ve thrown you at the end. More selections of a blackened variety coming tomorrow…. Continue reading »