A TRIP ON THE WAYBACK MACHINE: SIX MORE ALBUMS FROM EARLIER THIS YEAR YOU PROBABLY MISSED

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 062024
 

(After a bit of a break our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri returns to our miserable halls with reviews of six albums that struck some chords in his head, and may have damaged them.)

On the 9th of October ominous news surfaced that a group of hackers decided to lay siege to an internet institution that can generally be considered as a universal good. It was universally seen as a dick move. The Internet Archive is a library of audio, visual and textual resources as well as old website archiving with the mission of providing a library with omniversal access to all knowledge.

Flummoxed at the stupidity, because 99.9% of hackers love this site, and unable to use the Wayback Machine (it is back up now so this link is not compromised as of this writing), I simply had to take a hard stare at my ‘Catching Up’ list. October has been another stacked month for releases and November still has some serious offerings before the end-of-year bonanza. The list of what we weren’t able to get to is not always a question about quality or subjective – or even objective – partiality, it’s the sheer volume of content out there.

With the year almost over, I took it upon myself to go on the ‘way back machine of metal’ and jump back 282 days to January 26th. On its own an insane day for metal releases, two of the releases below fell on that same day. Continue reading »

FIENDS OF EASTERN THEATERS — PART 2 (SHORTER FORMS)

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 042024
 

(Following up on yesterday’s Part 1, today our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri brings us Part 2 of an article focused on Asian bands, narrating the effect of four EPs released this year.)

Having succeeded in subverting the norms with not-so-subtle subterfuge in an article containing very little metal in recent weeks – a tactic learned from Waylander of David Gemmell’s fantasy was that of hiding in plain sight — here we have four offerings that are connected to Part 1 geographically, but also aesthetically, albeit genre-wise we’re dealing with offerings of a more mongrelized persuasion. Anything suffixed with ‘core’ is a curse word in some circles, I prefer to spread the mycelium- and spongiform-afflicted ear holes of mine in myriad directions. Continue reading »

FIENDS OF EASTERN THEATERS – PART 1 (OBSCURIAL / FECUNDATION)

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Oct 032024
 

(Our Vietnam-resident writer Vizzah Harri has prepared a two-part sequence of reviews focused on albums released this year by Asian bands, and this is Part 1.)

A defenestration, crashing through a hearse straight into the coffin. Curtains augured in, joining the choir invisible. A sewer-slide into the glue factory. A first-class ticket out of corporeality to meet sleep’s cousin. Off the hooks and un-alived, a veritable shuffle off this mortal coil via toaster bath. And if that overbearing slew of gammon-appendaged analogies didn’t make it clear, we’re here for death served with a touch of supremacy. Continue reading »

NEBULOUS OBFUSCATION OF ESSENCE (RELEASES THAT STRAIN CATEGORIZING)

 Album Reviews, Off Topic  No Responses »
Sep 192024
 

(We will let our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri explain in his own words what he did in selecting the records reviewed in the following article, and why they are here now.)

What follows are other obscurities and arcane esoteric mysteries of the abstruse. If a more redundant sentence exists as title, I’m obviously ignorant of its existence. It’s almost October, I know, but my brain is still stuck in the heretofore, so the next few writeups will contain releases that happened at the end of the year of the rabbit (cat in Vietnam) and the beginning of the year of the dragon (earlier in 2024).

In signs of the times, it is easy to become but a whisper of grace wrapped in a facade of putrescence in the absolute cacophony and unceasing mass of new sounds. In this era of mass consumption, it is the underground at times where some of the truest art hides. Especially of the underground metal kind if you are so inclined. Only one of the releases to follow can be described as metal, though they all dabble in extremities in different senses. Continue reading »

WANDERING INTO BLACKENED REACHES — 4 CRITICAL BLACK METAL ALBUMS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 172024
 

(In this article our Vietnam-based contributor Vizzah Harri brings us four reviews of four unusual albums from blackened realms — albums created by Skeletal Augury, Cemetery Trip, Conifère, and Xw​î​n.)

The following 4 albums have been on my to-do list for months. You won’t find a slew of reviews on their Bandcamp pages sharing the praises from bigger media outlets. I couldn’t even find many reviews of the albums themselves out there. And partially this could be because of it being one hell of a year for black metal, but isn’t that just every year?

If you like black metal, you’re bound to love at least one of what I’m sharing with you today. The only order here is chronological because I don’t have a favorite amongst them and their styles diverge violently. There were more albums which I will hopefully be able to get to soon, but 4 is a nice number for its tetraphobic propensities in East Asia. The number 4, you see, signifies shaking hands with Elvis (I only learned that slang phrase for death today). Continue reading »

VULVODYNIA: “ENTABENI”

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Sep 042024
 

(Our distinctive contributor, the South Africa born and Vietnam resident Vizzah Harri, is back at NCS with his review of a new album by the South African death metal band Vulvodynia, which was released in July of this year by Unique Leader Records.)

Click play with caution, because there is a real danger that your attention might be shanghaied for a full forty-one minutes and 8 seconds, the runtime for Entabeni, Vulvodynia’s fifth, released by Unique Leader Records (that’s if you’re not counting 2015’s Finis Omnium Ignorantiam ‘EP’ which clocked in over 34 minutes). Continue reading »

ABSENCE OF THE SACRED: “IV: THE HAND THAT WOUNDS”

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Aug 262024
 

(About 10 days ago the multi-national extreme metal band Absence of the Sacred released their fourth album, IV: The Hand That Wounds, and below we present NCS writer Vizzah Harri‘s enthusiastic and evocative review of this new achievement.)

There is a saying that we die every second we breathe, for each breath that we release back into the air is a small death. In French that translates to petit mort, which in no uncertain terms is slang for sexual release. The immensity of molecules exuded from just the collective sigh necessary to deliver a qualifiable work of art into the world… uncountable. It’s important to put in perspective sometimes where we are at, and how good we have it right at this minute.

In death there is life, yet we consume the art that can un-alive a packed venue for the amount of carbon dioxide released from the breaths it took to create. We consume without sometimes even thinking about that part, and we can masticate on that hard-won elegance made manifest in waves of sound as if it were nothing, but a thing it is. Continue reading »

ZNOUS: “ZNOUSLAND 4”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 122024
 

(Our Vietnam-based writer Vizzah Harri prepared the following highly entertaining review of the latest album by the Tunisian band Znous, released in early June of this year.)

And now for something completely different. No, I’m not referring to the Flying Circus, the music and the band is anything but unserious. Znous hail from Al Rudayyif, Gafsa in Tunisia and were covered by Andy Synn back in 2021 as “socio-political Punk-Metal firebrands” not to miss.

Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: LILLE GRUBER

 Interviews  No Responses »
Aug 022024
 

Images courtesy of Laura McCullagh and Slam Dank Productions

(We’re very pleased to present our contributor Vizzah Harri‘s interview of Lille Gruber from Defeated Sanity, with apologies to both of them for our delay in publishing it.)

Defeated Sanity are a jazz ensemble hiding in plain sight as a brutal tech-death band. At this writing they’re currently on their Final Impetus tour to bring to audiences far and wide one more experience of their 2020 opus, The Sanguinary Impetus. Their recent show in Cape Town, South Africa was reviewed here.

It’s certainly not easy to make time on a tour for pesky questions from a sometimes-contributor to a music blog, but Lille Gruber, drummer, songwriter, and founder of Defeated Sanity, took precious time out of his busy schedule to entertain my queries.

For those who don’t know or grew up under a rock like me, Lille Gruber started playing and growling from a really young age. Starting the band with his brother Jonas Gruber and their dad, the late Wolfgang Teske (R.I.P. 2010), it was like growing up with a literal Amadeus as a father.

With family names basically soothsaying where they’d end up seeing as the etymologies date back to people who lived in a hollow… or pit (Gruber), and to console/comfort (Teske); well, they’ve been comforting pit-dwellers since 1993 and aren’t we all the richer for it? Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: UKEPARAAVE ENVIAVUASAN

 Interviews  No Responses »
Aug 012024
 

(Our contributor Vizzah Harri has provided us and you the following interview that he conducted.)

We contacted the founder of Nächtlich and owner of Vinland Corpse records, the artist known as Ukeparaave Enviavuasan, in order to shed more light on their latest album Exaltation of Evil, which was reviewed at NCS here. (They’re also involved with quite a few other projects, Thallid, Black Kruud, Bloody Winds, Dibikimitig, Dobhar Chú, Dolmen Shrine, Eerified Catacomb, Reliquary Ash, Malphas). Continue reading »

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