SEEN AND HEARD: SPIRIT ADRIFT, WORMWITCH, THRASHFIRE

 Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Mar 242023
 


Spirit Adrift, photo by Wombat Fire

No NCS premieres today. I had blocked out this day to fly to Texas for the day job, but that got canceled at the 11th hour, so here I am with unexpected time to entertain myself, and hopefully you too.

But wow, what a flood of new songs and videos there have been this week! And I’ve barely scratched the surface in checking them out. Under the circumstances, I’m going to try something new, since I have nothing else in the queue ready to publish today: roll out short round-ups one after the other until I run out of time. This is the first one, which focuses on things that just surfaced today. I’ll also have another roundup to share with you on Saturday, as usual.

SPIRIT ADRIFT (U.S.)

I know, I know, what the hell am I am I doing leading off with a new Spirit Adrift song? We typically pay as much attention to trad heavy metal at this site as we do to quantum physics. But I’m not immune to the appeal of a band like this one, witness the fact that I even named a song from Curse of Conception to our list of 2017’s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs, and gave a shout-out to their Forge Your Future EP in 2021 too. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2022’S MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 10): WORM, WORMROT, WORMWITCH

 MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2022  4 Responses »
Jan 132023
 

For the third time in this series I tried to make my decision process easier by just focusing on songs on the candidate list by bands whose names begin with the same letter. And I couldn’t resist the temptation to make the selection worm-ridden.

WORM (U.S.)

What an enormous near-Halloween surprise this band’s Bluenothing EP was. With expectations extremely high based on the burgeoning appeal of Worm‘s Foreverglade album, they satisfied fan hunger by deciding to throw a curveball at their faces.

The A-side consisted of two previously un-used tracks from the Foreverglade recording sessions, embellished by the added performance of new Worm guitarist Phil Tougas (of First Fragment, VoidCeremony, Chthe-ilist, and Hulder [live]) in his new guise as Wroth Septentrion. That alone made those songs sound different, but even more different were the B-side tracks, with the first of those (“Invoking The Dragonmoon”) functioning as a lead-in to the sheer necromantic spectacle of the second one (“Shadowside Kingdom”), which one would guess was the true inspiration for Brad Moore‘s amazing cover art. Continue reading »

SHADES OF BLACK (WEEKDAY EDITION): MITHRIDATUM, IMPERIUM DEKADENZ, KOMMANDANT, WORMWITCH, FORELUNAR

 SHADES OF BLACK  3 Responses »
Nov 082022
 

 

I decided I would have enough time to prepare a round-up of new songs and videos today. As I checked out candidates, it hit me that a lot of them were in the vein of black and “blackened” metal (with a healthy heaping of death metal in the mix). And so, with apologies to bands in other genre terrains that have also released worthy new music in recent days, I decided to focus this one on the kind of music I usually explore through this column on Sundays.

MITHRIDATUM (U.S.)

I was compelled to lead off with “Sojourn” because of the stunning cover art by The Blazing Seer for this band’s debut album Harrowing. But to be clear, the music isn’t an afterthought. Like the album title, the song is harrowing — a blistering, battering, bleak, and bizarre formulation of dissonant blackened death metal. Through the freakish whining and wailing of the guitars, it applies knives to the listener’s nerves, even when it slows, and the drumwork is as discombobulating as it is electrifying. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: WORMWITCH, VORARE, TORTURER, SERPENT ASCENDING

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  2 Responses »
May 142022
 

If you happened to wade through my windy intro to yesterday’s small-ish roundup, then you know I had a ton of new songs and videos to check out, and hoped to pull together a lot more picks today than I managed to do yesterday.

Unfortunately, for reasons I won’t get windy about today, I haven’t been able to dig as deeply into that big pile of new things as I’d hoped, so this followup roundup will also be smallish, but hopefully still worth your time. (More to come tomorrow.)

WORMWITCH (Canada)

Kyle Tavares has been a very busy man this year. Aided by some talented bandmates, his group Vital Spirits released a new album, and his band Seer released a new EP (both of which we premiered, here and here), and now Wormwitch (the third active band in which he is a key participant) just released a new digital single yesterday, along with a video that had its premiere at Decibel. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Sep 042021
 

 

Can’t you read plain English? It says “Labor Day”. It doesn’t say “Holi-Day”. So I’m just following the prescribed agenda, and laboring.

Because I unexpectedly agreed to write a whopping four premieres yesterday, I had no time to begin rounding up a selection of songs and videos that surfaced this past week. Leaving that until today has resulted in another massive collection, again featuring too many bands to name in the post title.

As it happens, the majority of the new music you’ll find below is accompanied by videos. It also happens that almost all of the new songs are high-speed devastators. This isn’t entirely by accident, because many of them were recommended in our NCS group by DGR, who tends to prefer musical riots over other forms of audio entertainment. And once I’d gotten into that kind of groove, I tended to stick with it in choosing from among other possibilities I checked out.

ARCHSPIRE (Canada)

We’ll start with a new lyric video for a frantic new song by Archspire, in which vocalist Oliver Rae Aleron goes faster than a cattle auctioneer and the rest of the band spits a variety of bullets even faster — but then abruptly the song gets dreamy. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A BANDCAMP FRIDAY (TOO MANY NAMES TO PUT IN A POST TITLE)

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Aug 062021
 

 

Over the last few days my NCS comrades (well, mainly DGR) have been shoveling links at me for new songs and videos, in anticipation that I would put together a round-up by today — which is a Bandcamp Friday. Most of those links were for music by bigger-name bands. The thought was that I could also add more obscure names, and that the allure of the bigger names might help introduce the lesser-knowns to more fans.

The problem is that the pile of links has grown to gargantuan proportions, which has made it tougher for me to insert as many other discoveries as I might want and still write up some thoughts about everything. Ah well, there’s always tomorrow. Here’s the A-to-Z deluge I have for today, in alphabetical order.

ARCHSPIRE (Canada)

Prepare for relentless high-speed bludgeoning and crazed fretwork mania as a big rabid mastiff barks in your face at equally high speed. Exhilarating! Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM, WORMWITCH, MOROS

 Album Reviews, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Jun 102021
 

 

In between bouts of activity driven by my fucking day job today, I had just enough time to pull together this relatively short round-up of new sounds — two tracks (both with videos) from forthcoming albums, and one recently released EP.

WOLVES IN THE THRONE ROOM (U.S.)

WITTR’s new album has been officially announced. Entitled Primordial Arcana, it’s set for release on August 20th by Relapse Records. Coincident with that they released a video for the song “Mountain Magick“. The band made the video themselves, and filmed it “in the northern reaches of the Olympic Mountains and the ancient forests that shroud the foothills”. They also recorded, produced, and mixed the album themselves. Continue reading »

AN NCS EP PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): VITAL SPIRIT — “IN THE FAITH THAT LOOKS THROUGH DEATH”

 Premieres  5 Responses »
Aug 242020
 

 

Before delving deeper into the sounds of Vital Spirit‘s debut EP, In the Faith That Looks Through Death, let’s begin with the band’s own stated list of musical influences: Ennio Morricone, Taake, Earth, Ulver, Marty Robbins, Dissection, Drudkh, Inquisition, and Wovenhand.

And then let’s add to that this list of their lyrical inspirations: Wovoka, Patti Smith, Chilam Balam, Townes Van Zandt, and the corridos of the Mexican Revolution (with subjects that range from Mayan cosmology and history, to Pancho Villa’s role in the Mexican Revolution, and Wovoka’s Ghost Dance movement).

Got that? Well, you probably don’t, because even though you can read all those names, comprehending how such disparate sources of inspiration could all work together in harness under the coaxing (and the whiphand) of this Vancouver duo is probably a challenge. But when you listen to the music, you’ll discover that it all integrates wonderfully well. And the fact that In the Faith That Looks Through Death doesn’t sound quite like anything else becomes a big part of its attraction. Continue reading »

A TALE OF TWO ALBUMS: FROSTHELM AND WORMWITCH

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Apr 052019
 


Wormwitch

 

(Here we have a pair of reviews written by Andy Synn, juxtaposing the new albums by Vancouver’s Wormwitch and North Dakota’s Frosthelm.)

Every time that I’ve done this previously – bundling together paired reviews for Marduk/Funeral Mist, Arsis/Revocation, and Gorod/Beyond Creation – the response to the format and structure of the article has been surprisingly positive, hence why I decided to resurrect it for this piece.

The idea, after all, has always been about using comparison and contrast as a way of both critiquing and celebrating the artists involved, not in a way that necessarily invites or invokes competition, but in a way that uses each band as a mirror or a prism through which to view and reflect upon the other.

It’s also a great way of encouraging fans of one band to check out the works of another, similar, artist, if they haven’t already (and does wonders for our google rankings too).

So, without further ado, let’s take a look at the latest offerings from Frosthelm and Wormwitch, shall we? Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: BLACK ANVIL, SLAVES BC, WORMWITCH, SACRILEGIA

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  1 Response »
Feb 212019
 

 

After finishing this morning’s previous posts, I just barely had enough time to grab a few new songs for this round-up before having to surrender to my fucking day job. Based on what’s on the slate tomorrow, I think I’ll have time for a few more then.

BLACK ANVIL

Following up on their latest album, 2017’s very good As Was, New York’s Black Anvil have a new EP named Miles headed our way, a release that was written, performed, and recorded as a tribute to late The Devil’s Blood guitarist/vocalist Selim Lemouchi. DECIBEL mag, which premiered the EP’s opening track earlier this week, describes Miles as retaining “the barely-restrained insanity of Black Anvil’s previous releases while also embracing more melody and vulnerable emotion”, and that description is borne out my the song they premiered, “Iron Sharpens Iron“. Continue reading »

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