AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): MOONDARK — “THE ABYSMAL WOMB”

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Dec 182024
 

(NCS contributor Zoltar wrote the following introduction to our full streaming premiere of the long-awaited debut album by Sweden’s Moondark, which will be released on Friday by Pulverised Records.)

Her name might not matter that much anymore but boy oh boy did she have the look. Yeah, you know what I’m talking about don’t you? That one gorgeous looking girl, for whom you had a not-so-secret crush all high-school years long. She filled your dreams and even to this day, although three decades have passed and you’ve moved to greener pastures with a ring on your finger, three kids, a mortgage, and a beer belly, you can’t seem to be able to get rid of, you can’t help but think of her from time of time, like a lost relic of bygone times when things seemed simpler and funnier.

And then, totally by random, you bump into her on your way to the supermarket. And boom, without warning, all your teenagers’ fantasies are ruined in a nano-second as this once seemingly goddess-like figure turns out to now be ugly, fat, ridden with bad skin problems, and utterly obnoxious.

So yeah, I so wanted Moondark not to be that girl geddit? Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: BECERUS

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Dec 092024
 

(On December 20th Everlasting Spew will release the second album by the Italian death metal band Becerus, and in anticipation of that event our contributor Zoltar conducted the following highly entertaining interview with Becerus guitarist Giorgio Trombino.)

Granted, death metal can be smart. But you can add as many lengthy lyrics and concepts about quantum physics or ancient philosophy as you want, and at the end of the day, nothing beats good ol’ in-your-face and fuck-good-taste death freakin’ metal, innit?

To those willing to go back to the stone age, Becerus would be more than happy to provide the soundtrack to your journey while banging two stones together. Three years ago, their debut Homo Homini Brutus proved to be one of those guilty pleasures for anybody looking for that kind of US thrash-infused early ’90s inspired death metal à la Broken Hope, full of palm-muting riffs and sudden blasts which don’t even pretend to be looking for an excuse to practice what they preach.

Although ‘preach’ might not be the most fitting word here as their first album bore a massive ‘no fucking lyrics’ stamped all over its inside booklet, with Balatonizer vocalist Mario Musumeci using his larynx as an actual instrument to convey strange, menacing sounds instead of delivering a so-called message.

Unsurprisingly, due on December 20th in the ever-reliable Everlasting Spew imprint, their new album Troglodyte – whose title song premiered on NCS last October – is as ruthless and savage, yet not short of rhythmic left turns and groove either. Proof that those Sicilians may not be as caveman-like as they want you to believe, even if guitarist Giorgio Trombino, former Haemophagus and Morbo and now steering both Assumption and Bottomless, enjoys covering his tracks and fucking around… Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: TOXAEMIA

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Nov 142024
 

(Yesterday we premiered a full stream of the new album by the Swedish death metal band Toxaemia — which will be out tomorrow via Emanzipation Productions — and today we follow that with our French contributor Zoltar‘s excellent interview of Toxaemia co-founder and bassist Pontus Cervin.)

Before the internet and Ebay (later on, Discogs) ruined it all, collecting obscure early extreme metal items was a fun if sometimes quite frustrating adventure. These days, even the least memorable and 134th Entombed copycat gets the momentary chance to shine thanks to all those reissues flooding the market and surfing on the general impression that artistically speaking the early ’90s were the golden years of Swedish death metal (spoiler: they were). But three decades ago, the genre was deemed ‘passé’ and most of the bigger bands were left to choose between jumping on the bandwagon or splitting up, whereas the low-profiled or unlucky ones were simply buried six feet under, seemingly forever.

For a long time, Toxaemia was first and foremost remembered as topping the ‘impossible to find’ list of early SweDeath items next to Expulsion, Goddefied or Mastication. Released in January 1991 on the mighty Seraphic Decay imprint, their sole ‘real’ release, the Beyond The Realm EP, with its thrashier take on classic death metal would quite often fetch insanely large sums of money whenever one copy would happen to pop up on Ebay. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: MICHAEL H. ANDERSEN (THORIUM)

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Oct 112024
 

(Following up on his review and premiere of a well-received new album by the Danish death metal band Thorium last month, our contributor Zoltar has conducted an in-depth interview with the band’s mainman Michael H. Andersen, which we present below.)

There are several kind of super-groups. These days, anything is possible, thanks to technology. You can be a nobody yet still grab a bunch of veterans who don’t even need to live in the same country, let alone the same continent, and convince them to record their parts on their own before assembling everything on your own, putting a nice attention-catching tag on your album ‘featuring members of blab la bla’ et voilà!

Thorium have never played that game though. Yes, when they first seemingly came out of nowhere, storming the gates in the spring of 2000 with their debut Ocean Of Blasphemy, the line-up felt pretty impressive, with Iniquity’s Jesper Frost Jensen, Withering Surface’s Allan Tvedebrink and Michael H. Andersen, and Taetre’s Jonas Lindblood. Yet while most were expecting this one quite good love-letter to classic death metal to be a one-off, Thorium have proven to be a far more long-term affair with five more albums, including the-just released The Bastard.

And while through the years the line-up has seen various people come and go, ultimately it is Andersen, who initiated the whole project in the first place, who still takes the final decision. Eager to keep the wheel turning, he vowed to try out an unusual method to give birth to The Bastard, first premiered on this very website on September 18th, and agreed to give us the details about the present and the future of Thorium. Continue reading »

AN NCS INTERVIEW: FATHER BEFOULED

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Sep 252024
 

(French NCS contributor Zoltar returns today with an interview he recently conducted with Justin Stubbs, the focus being on Father Befouled and their newest release via Everlasting Spew, but also touching on the status of Stubbs‘ other projects.)

While their early years were plagued by various, and a tad reductive, accusations of simply trying to be more Incantation than Incantation themselves, from their 2012 album Morbid Destitution Of Covenant onwards, Father Befouled have been carefully crafting their own brand of dark death metal, one release at a time, with 2022’s Crowned In Veneficium proving to be another highlight.

By the time you’ll be reading this, the band will be in the middle of a two-week European tour with label mates Fossilization. As they have a new EP out named Immaculate Pain, whose video for the title-track was premiered on NCS on July 30th, we took that opportunity to talk with their main man Justin Stubbs about this new slab of brutality, their latest line-up shift. and why he will always have something blasphemous to say. Continue reading »

AN NCS ALBUM PREMIERE (AND A REVIEW): THORIUM — “THE BASTARD”

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Sep 182024
 

(We welcome French metal writer Zoltar to NCS, and he makes his debut here with the following introductory review of a new album by Thorium which we’re premiering in full today in advance of its September 20 release by Emanzipation Productions.)

Thorium is an interesting beast. Not exactly just another side-project nor a full band per se, they do rear their ugly head whenever their leader and main man Michael Andersen of Withering Surface fame feels like it. And as it turns out, looks like lately, the man does really feel like playing good old and no frills death metal. And it shows.

In a way, The Bastard isn’t just some kind of reaction against the few years and painful gestation of the last Withering Surface – although that did play a small role, but I digress. It’s first and foremost the 49-year-old Andersen‘s love letter to the classic sound he was raised upon back in the late ’80s and early ’90s when a less confident and juvenile, yet already passionate, version of himself started dabbling in the underground through tape-trading and his own Emanzipation ‘zine.

Early reports of an album meant to originally be titled Sverige (that’s ‘Swedish’ for you in, erm, Swedish actually) proved at first to be a tad misleading as suggesting a sound firmly stuck in the early ’90s Stockholm style of Entombed, Grave, and so on. Then again, whereas there’s barely any fuzzy outpouring of the famed HM-2 pedal to be found here nor any D-beat parts and though it was ultimately retitled, it still somehow makes sense. Continue reading »

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