(Continuing his string of reviews this week, TheMadIsraeli provides this explosively enthusiastic assessment of the [stupendous] new album by Cattle Decapitation.)

May 8 was an extremely good day.  Why?

Because this album and the new Allegaeon come out on May 8.

Cattle Decapitation and I have had a very torrid love affair, full of many ups and downs.  While the music has been consistently stellar deathgrind (with the exception of their horrific debut Human Jerky), I’ve found that this band usually killed what were great albums in the making with mixes so horrific it made my ears bleed.  If you are a long-time Cattle Decap fan, you might guess that I like To Serve Man and The Harvest Floor best since you can ACTUALLY MAKE OUT WHAT THE FUCK IS GOING ON.

I’m not being a new-age-all-production-must-be-slick-and-pristine nazi at all, but when you have a band like Cattle Decapitation who play music this fast, this furious, and this fuck-nuts-sanity-shattering, anything less than a stellar, tight mix will lose the music in translation.

Luckily, not only is Monolith of Inhumanity their best-sounding record to date, it’s also their musical pinnacle thus far. By making a little trip back to the drawing board after The Harvest Floor (an album I mostly enjoyed, but felt was a little weak at points), Cattle Decap have done themselves quite a bit of good, as Monolith Of Inhumanity may be one of the top five albums in the death metal/grindcore realm all year.

(Our UK-based writer Andy Synn reviews the highly anticipated new album by Australia’s Be’lakor.)

Be’lakor have become, it seems to me, immune to criticism in the underground press. I say this to let you know that this isn’t going to be a fawning, sycophantic review of the band’s latest album; I have tried my very best to stay impartial, even though the temptation was to simply love this album merely for its existence. That being said, while I have no major criticisms of the record (and have fallen head over heels in love with some of the tracks), I have come out of the experience with a few concerns preying on my mind.

Let’s get one thing straight first though, you’ve probably already formed your opinions that this is going to be good – hell, I’d wager that most people formed their opinion about the album without even hearing a single note – but the question is, how good?

To get the obvious comparisons out of the way, neither as heart-wrenchingly melancholic as recent Insomnium, nor as shamelessly audacious as latter-day Omnium Gatherum, the main criticism I can level at Of Breath and Bone is that while it is characteristically and distinctively a Be’lakor album (falling ultimately somewhere between The Frail Tide and Stone’s Reach), there is a certain spark missing from a few of the tracks, which impacts the experience of the record as a whole.

More restrained and perhaps a more consciously considered record than its predecessor, this factor is both a blessing and a curse for the band. It allows their multi-layered melodies room to breathe and expand, but softens the impact of some of their more fiery moments. At their most epic and nuanced, this restraint works wonders, allowing the band to express their melodic palette fully, yet at their most aggressive this often serves, paradoxically, to limit their full expression. Fundamentally the album is very much a companion piece to Stone’s Reach, introverted where that album was extroverted, restrained where it was unfettered.

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by The Safety Fire.)

So it’s time for my first true Exception to the Rule in quite a while. I decided at some point I would try to avoid breaking our site’s moniker as much as I could, but I feel this album deserves the occasion.

The Safety Fire have been picking up quite a bit of steam lately, introducing an interesting sound that has me slightly baffled, yet plenty fascinated. They mix in the low-tuned brutality and odd time signatures of bands we’ve come to know and love such as Textures, CiLiCe, and yes, Meshuggah, with technical, highly interwoven counterpoint dual-guitar mind-fuckery and add a heavy-handed dose of post-rock to taste.

To say that their sound is jarring would be a bit of an understatement, but also considering that I saw them live at The Masquerade in Atlanta last month and experienced this material full force (which convinced me to buy the album on the spot), I’d say this is a band to watch in the future. However, the future is currently irrelevant. What’s relevant is now, and Grind the Ocean is an impressive, technically adept, and progressive morsel of delightfully unorthodox taste.

The album’s opener “Huge Hammers” is immediately indicative of this. A subdued riff plays in the background, only to crash forth into the song’s gravitas-inducing, disorienting verse riff. It’s full of low-tuned rumble, high-end micro-shredding, and lots AND LOTS of pinch harmonic squeals and badass moments of harmony and interplay on the guitar front.

(Here, Andy Synn reviews the new album from those French nihilists in Reverence.)

As you may know, I like my metal like I like my women – black, blasphemous, and cold to the touch. Reverence’s newest album brings all these cards to the table, but ups the ante with a distinctively industrial edge.

Staking their claim to the barren lands somewhere between the crippling insanity of The Axis Of Perdition and the warped humanism of Glorior Belli, the band have been successfully fusing the angular chaos of the former with the sinuous darkness of the latter for years now, with this, their most recent release, taking pride of place alongside the arcane experimentation of Blut Aus Nord and the ritualistic self-loathing of Deathspell Omega.

Opening track (and de facto album intro) “Earth” has a slow, menacing build up, its haunting ambience coalescing into a rippling stormfront of cryptic strings, marching, martial drums, and morbid vocals. The more overt, metallic elements creep, rather than leap, into the fray, predatory, chugging guitars and restrained blast-beats chomping at the bit to be unleashed.

(TheMadIsraeli recently went on a reviewing rampage. We may have one from him every day this week. Today’s review focuses on “The Giant”, the new album by Germany’s Ahab, which will be released by Napalm Records on May 25.)

Doom metal is a genre that is often hard for many to accept or buy into.  I get why.  I didn’t even start to appreciate it until only last year when I forced myself to sit down and really listen.  In the end, I found it to be ideal contemplation music, music to which I could meditate about my life.  It’s not so much depressing as I find it to be the soundtrack to introspection, often the introspection of one’s mortality and shortcomings.

Funeral doom, however, is where my love for this style really shines.  If you aren’t going to be chaotic and frantic, you best be as morose and macabre as possible.  Four bands have accomplished this for me with the most powerful of results: Mournful Congregation, Colosseum (R.I.P), Pantheist, and Ahab.

Ahab’s new album The Giant continues their tradition of seafaring melodic death doom.  Their music has always penetrated my soul to its very depths, but The Giant is a whole other beast entirely.  An added strong presence of stoner vibes is evident throughout, creating something of an otherworldly experience akin to drowning yet not feeling or experiencing any of the fear, pain, or frantic desperation.  You are simply accepting.

The Giant is only six songs long.  That may not sound like much, until I tell you the shortest song is about eight minutes and the longest is about thirteen.  Ahab have taken a much more introspective and dynamic heavy approach this time around, crafting a journey that leaves the listener feeling like that lone shipwreck survivor holding onto a single plank of wood, floating in the middle of the ocean, hoping he’ll find land soon.

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by the reconstructed Six Feet Under. The album is set for North American release on May 22, 2012 through Metal Blade Records.)

I can just envision all of you fuckers rolling your elitist holier than thou eyes at me. I see every single one of you from here on out disregarding my opinions as a music critic with the explanation that “he likes Six Feet Under”. Check your opinion at the door, let me do my thing, and hear me out.

Six Feet Under have sucked. Oh fuck, have they sucked. I don’t think anyone can watch the video for “Amerika The Brutal” and take it or the song itself seriously. After putting out six terrible albums of the most painfully bland and sloppy death’n roll ever to exist, Chris Barnes apparently finally had the revelation that maybe people didn’t want Graveyard Classics Vol. 218843284832483-fucking-2. Something changed once the band’s seventh album Commandment came out. The music was meatier, dark as fuck, and even had a bit of a doom characteristic in some of the song’s pieces, such as the chorus in “Doomsday”.

After being persuaded to give them a shot after hearing good things about their latter output, I subsequently actually enjoyed Commandment as well as Death Rituals — good hefty slabs of some beastly, groovy death metal. Undead is a startlingly strong new album that seems even more of a progression in SFU’s journey to death metal legitimacy, no doubt helped by the band’s recent new addition of Chimaira’s Rob Arnold, who left his longtime outfit to become the band’s new ax man. Not only have SFU completely ditched the bullshit death’n roll elements for good, but they’ve become even groovier, while Rob Arnold has made the riffage quite a bit more sinister sounding.

Long-time readers may remember my repeated praise for a Vancouver, BC, grind band called Burning Ghats (the latest of multiple posts about the band can be found here). It turns out that two of the guys in Burning Ghats (Cam and Kevin) are in another Vancouver band called WTCHDR (along with members of other area bands, Spirals and Memorial). Last month, they released a self-titled debut EP, which you can stream and download for free on Bandcamp (HERE).

I had high hopes for this EP because I lost so many brain cells listening to the Burning Ghats releases and I’ve found that life is more enjoyable now that I’m able to comprehend less of it due to brain cell loss. But, to be brutally honest, I was also kind of afraid. I could stand to lose some more brain bits flying out my ears and nose, but if one or both of my eyeballs exploded out of their sockets, that would complicate important daily activities such as being able to locate the toilet paper and getting a beer out of the fridge for a big swig instead of the hot sauce.

So I tied a blindfold really tight, to provide some extra reinforcement, and started listening to this EP. Seven songs raced by in less than 11 minutes and left smoking tread marks across my face. The ingredients: Distorted guitar and bass chords tuned to subterranean levels of low, alternately slamming hard and dragging the listener through pools of filthy sludge; bursts of squalling lead guitar and ear-splitting feedback; a vocalist being strangled by barbed wire; percussion that sometimes pounds like a massive sledge and sometimes attacks with d-beat fury.

(groverXIII reviews the recently released second album by Soul Cycle, a two-man project consisting of Chris Catharsis and Mark Hawkins.)

Dawn Of The Shred. Evil Shred. The Quick And The Shred. Shred Poets Society. Better Off Shred. Shred Rising. Shred Man Walking. Shred Alive. The Shred Pool. Things To Do In Denver When You’re Shred. Shred Reckoning.

OK, I think I’m about out of “movie titles using the word ‘shred’ in place of the word ‘dead’”. I couldn’t think of a better way to start my review of the new Soul Cycle album, Soul Cycle II, which is an instrumental album full of, you guessed it, shred. Soul Cycle is the brainchild of guitar wunderkinds Chris Catharsis and Mark Hawkins, the band’s sole members; Catharsis handles writing, production, bass, and drum programming in addition to guitars, while Hawkins provides mostly guitar leads. The first Soul Cycle album (the cleverly-titled Soul Cycle) was a great collection of instrumental guitar pyrotechnics with bits of groove and, yes, a little bit of djent mixed in, and they have not deviated from that particular mix on their sophomore release.

However, in order to up the ante a bit, they went out and assembled the largest group of guest soloists I have ever seen. Seriously, this is like a combination of the Avengers and the Justice League, except instead of super heroes, this group is comprised of some of the most talented guitarists (and a couple of keyboardists) you’ve never heard of (and a few you have). To put things in perspective, I’ve compiled a list of each guitarist, along with a link to some of their work, in order of appearance:

(In this post, Andy Synn reviews a new album that’s been highly anticipated by your friends here at NCS — Rise of the Phoenix by Finland’s Before the Dawn.)

So, to atone for my most recent sinning, I’ve decided to bring you an album that thoroughly adheres to the site’s name. Truthfully, there is no clean singing on this album.

That in itself might be a bugbear for some, though, as Before The Dawn have become somewhat synonymous with their clean vocal sections in recent years. Indeed, mainman Tuomas Saukkonen’s declaration that he has decided to make a conscious shift away from this sound puts the listener in something of a quandary – as good as this new album is (and it is very good), how will previous records be represented in the band’s setlist in the future?

This, and other important questions remain to be answered, but Rise Of The Phoenix sets the stage for another new era for Before The Dawn. Remember that the band’s sound has shifted and grown since its very inception, shedding its more gothic skin along the way to become the Number 1 capturing entity they were up until this, their most recent transformation. Quite where they will go from here only they can say, but credit to Saukkonen for pursuing a purely artistic change in direction, having achieved chart-topping dominance with their previous style.

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the awesome new album by 7 Horns 7 Eyes.)

Here it is folks.  The moment of truth.

For me, the best metal albums always have these qualities: a dignified, almost regal vibe; exceptionally well-composed guitar work; and the ability to convey the gamut of human emotion in its most agonized states.  If an album can bewilder me, evoke emotion in me, and make me feel crushed under its presence while displaying musical virtuosity in all of its glory, it will win me over for life.  It’s these kinds of albums that embody the idea that music can be a journey.

We at NCS have been anticipating this debut album by 7 Horns 7 Eyes like none of you would believe since each respective member here was made aware of its existence.  At the time of writing this, I just finished listening to Throes of Absolution for the fifth time — the fifth time TODAY.  To say I can’t get enough of the punishment is a severe understatement. I’m also enthusiastic about reviewing this audio tome of morose brutality because 7 Horns 7 Eyes are known for being a rather openly Christian band;  A Christian band with the professionalism, compositional breadth, depth, and technical ability that match any of their hottest contemporaries.  Listening to this album has been an invigorating experience, and it’s a pleasure and an honor to review it.  Beyond a shadow of a doubt, it’s a landmark for the legitimacy of mixing Christianity and metal.

I also got my pre-order package at the time of writing this, which further pumped me up for this review and led me to review the album as a whole (and you’ll see what I mean by that).

7 Horns 7 Eyes have been the subject of much classification debate, but I’m personally going to lob 7H7E in with the melodic death doom metal crowd.  There are shades of In Mourning and Daylight Dies that PERMIATE EVERY FIBER of the band’s music.  Don’t be misled by my that statement, though . . . in their approach to the style, 7H7E are undoubtedly unique and recognizable virtually from first note.  Their Christian background also has a tangible influence in the music, as certain musical hallmarks the Christian music of old, as well as heavy classical influences, are evident.  The result is a sound that is quite dark and bleak, but one that communicates light at the end of the tunnel. A lot of elements contribute to this result.