SHEVILS: “LOST IN TARTARUS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Nov 302013
 

Shevils‘ latest album Lost In Tartarus deftly straddles the line between hardcore abrasiveness and pop-punk hookiness. It delivers 10 mostly short songs that are all irresistibly catchy but backed by enough split-lipped, heavy-booted aggression to feed an appetite for destruction.

It’s almost all one high-energy, blood-pumping, head-nodding romp after another. Most of the tracks are built around punchy, start-stop riffs and compulsive rhythms that are driven home by conjoined bass-and-drum beats that will get your head bobbing. Some (like “Black Eyes” made me want to pogo — if I were young enough to do that without spraining an ankle) and others (like “Timelines”) made me want to bust up some furniture.

There’s a dark, menacing air to “These Walls Are Coming Down”. Corrosive and battering, it benefits from magnetic bass guitar work, which really shines throughout the album but plays a near-starring role on this track. “We Walk on Shattered Glass” ingeniously combines a big, strutting, hooky riff with a piercing, almost spacey guitar lead that comes and goes. Continue reading »

EXHALE: “WHEN WORLDS COLLIDE”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 292013
 

(Here’s DGR’s review of the new album by Sweden’s Exhale.)

When Exhale released the music video for “Wrath Unleashed” the band managed to worm their way inside my skull like no other managed to this year. Based on one furious, grinding, explosive blast of metal I found myself looking forward to Exhale’s release of When Worlds Collide… and then waiting… and waiting.

For being a minute and twenty seconds long, “Wrath Unleashed” has a way of grabbing you with its bony fingers and gripping your arm like a claw, then never letting go. Keep in mind, the video for “Wrath Unleashed” was uploaded to YouTube in late December of last year, so Worlds Collide has had a long time to simmer and get us hyped up about its forthcoming release. It’s rare that a band is able to hook someone like that on the strength of one song, so when Exhale managed to pull that off, I knew we would be in for something special.

Later releases of “Avsky” and “Machinery” would add fuel to that fire. Although initially difficult to find because it was on a sampler, “Avsky” promised more of that initial rush that was delivered via “Wrath Unleashed”, and it felt good. If the song could’ve been inserted into my veins then I’d probably still be riding that high. “Machinery” was the sort of song that hit like molten steel, sparks and everything ejected from it in every which direction. It was the sort of song (as I described it in my initial discussion following its release) that you put on in your car at full blast and then drive full speed into a wall. Continue reading »

SHIT YOU MAY HAVE MISSED IN YOUR METAL TRAVELS

 Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  7 Responses »
Nov 282013
 

(In this post guest writer DiabolusInMuzaka provides reviews of three recommended albums, with full music streams for each one.)

With the internet providing a platform for even the most obscure Indonesian-black-death-drone-ambient-progressive-neo-folk project (recorded entirely in analog in a cave in mono of course), a lot of music understandably slips by under our metal radars. That, and we’re oversaturated; too many bands to check out, too little time. My aim in this post is to provide a good description of the music offered by the bands here, so that you, as the reader, can judge whether or not this band would be suited to your tastes. Full streams of each album are present in the article, so if anything piques your interest, click play and give it some of your time. You just might find a particularly refreshing drop in the vast, ever-expanding metal ocean. So, without further ado, here is some shit you may have missed in your metal travels.

Gorelust – Reign of Lunacy (PRC Music – reissue; New World Symphony – original pressing)

As the name would imply, Gorelust is death metal. Reign of Lunacy, released originally in 1995, was the Quebec band’s debut and only full-length album. The album is short (clocking in at just under 30 minutes) but absolutely refuses to relent for its entire running time. Being released in 1995, this album presents an interesting form of death metal: it sounds like the missing link between Cryptopsy’s 1996 masterpiece None So Vile and their much more tech-death oriented 1998 beast Whisper Supremacy (it’s worth noting again that this was released in 1995). The production sound is close to Whisper Supremacy as well, which makes sense, as Cryptopsy’s frequent partner-in-crime Pierre Remillard engineered this album. Continue reading »

BLACK CAP MINER: “THE FORMATIVE YEARS”

 Album Reviews  3 Responses »
Nov 272013
 

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the debut album of Black Cap Miner, the solo project of Byzantine’s Chris Ojeda — and some notable friends.)

Respecting your elders IS important, even in metal.  A lot of venerable bands had a creative spark that a lot of modern bands seem to lack.  Whether this was due to them leading the first wave of something important or simply being in the right place at the right time, the sounds of legacy musicians warrant frequent revisits.  It’s for the better of the music that we do this, otherwise we lose sight of who we are.

No one knows this better than Byzantine’s Chris Ojeda.  Numerous conversations with the man about music, bands we love, and whether they made favorable or distasteful evolutions, have given me pretty good insight into how he thinks.  Ojeda’s a man of the old school for sure. While he definitely investigates what’s on the scene in the here and now (it seems he pays far more attention than most metal musicians his age), he still has a grasp on his musical roots that verges on zealotry.  As a consequence, it really makes sense that Ojeda decided to pay rich tribute to the music that made him who he is as a musician.  Black Cap Miner is Ojeda’s battle cry to revisit the days of old, and The Formative Years is his testimony as to why. Continue reading »

SPAWN FROM DECEIT: “WOVEN PROMISES – UNRAVELED VICTIMS”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Nov 262013
 

(DGR, feeling grindy, reviews the latest album by a group of Finns who’ve taken the name Spawn From Deceit.)

Even though it has felt like a system oft overlooked in favor of newer, shinier services like Spotify and Pandora, I have to give a huge shoutout to the last.fm recommendations system because it seems I find more new music through that site than I do the other ones, especially considering the rarity of commercials on the last.fm site player vs the other services.

Lately it seems to have noticed that I’ve been in a deathgrind mood and it has recommended bands accordingly. It did me a huge solid this time in the form of Spawn From Deceit, a Finnish grind band that is just starting to get its feet off of the ground – their first demo was released in 2010, just a year after the project was formed by a couple of guys in the group Ithaquan, and their first actual disc hit in 2011 with the title At Least We Did Care.

However, I found myself at their doorstep via the song “Volition” from the group’s 2013 release Woven Promises – Unraveled Victims, and, as we are wont to do on this site when it comes to music we enjoy, we had to share it, if only for its stark differences from the other, grindier bands that I’ve been reviewing as of late. Continue reading »

NETRA FEATURING WE’REWOLVES: “DREADING CONSCIOUSNESS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  7 Responses »
Nov 242013
 

I’m probably one of the least qualified people imaginable to review this new EP. However, every day I read about, and occasionally meet, all manner of motherfuckers who are unqualified to do what they are doing, so I don’t know why that should stop me. Besides, unlike all the motherfuckers to whom I refer, at least I’m being honest about my lack of qualifications. Putting to one side the question why you should continue reading this review in light of my disclosure, I shall forge ahead.

The title of this EP is Dreading Consciouness and it was released on November 18 by Canada-based Hypnotic Dirge Records. That label releases an eclectic range of music, but Dreading Consciousness is an odd one even for them. It’s a collaboration between netra (the one-man project of Steven LeMoan, a Frenchman who now lives in Norway) and an underground rap duo (Hockeymask and Konsept) who call themselves We’rewolves. Netra provides the music, We’rewolves the rhymes.

And here’s where my lack of qualifications come in — because I am not well-versed in either the kind of trip-hop backing music that dominates most of the three songs on the EP or hip-hop, yet I do like this. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: TORTURE DIVISION — “THE SACRIFICE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Nov 242013
 

Two days ago Torture Division released their latest offering of “the world’s best death metal”, The Sacrifice. I’ve written about Torture Division so often at this site that explaining who they are and their approach to releasing music runs a high risk of redundancy, yet there’s always the slim chance that a few lost souls are discovering them for the first time. For them, here’s the back story:

The three members of this Swedish band – Lord K Philipson (guitar), Tobben Gustafsson (drums), and Jörgen Sandström (bass/vocals) — collectively have over 60 years of combined death metal experience, including membership in bands such as Grave, Entombed, Vicious Art, The Project Hate MCMXCIX, Vomitory, and God Among Insects. Their modus operandi is to release short demos and give them away for free. Every time they finish releasing a group of three demo’s, they or a record label package them up and sell them as a compilation CD. So far, this has happened three times; the latest compilation, The Army of Three, was released as a digipack earlier this month and has already sold out.

In June of this year, Torture Division gave away the first three-song demo in a new trilogy. That one was named The Worship, and I reviewed it here. The new one, which was again mixed and mastered by Dan Swanö at Unisound, delivers three new songs — “Queen Sacrifice”, “Fähund”, and “Flesh Before My Eyes”. Continue reading »

AYREON: “THE THEORY OF EVERYTHING”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  8 Responses »
Nov 192013
 

(DGR reviews the new album by Arjen Lucassen’s Ayreon project. This is obviously an Exception to Our Rule.)

I have a deep and abiding love for the Ayreon project. Describing it to people on the occasions when I can do so has proven to be an endless source of entertainment because it always ends with someone just going, “That sounds ridiculous”. They’re right too. Ayreon is a ridiculous project, one in the business of making space metal operas filled with multiple characters represented by multiple singers and then having insane guestlists of musicians written up for each one as well.

It’s not so much that I love Ayreon for how well Arjen Lucassen does with the music, but more so because of the absolutely insane amount of ambition that the project has required. He has told stories that span galaxies and cover millenia in the blink of an eye, and he has wrangled some of the best vocal performances out of an amazing array of musicians that I’ve ever heard. It just seems so grand, and when it comes to that, The Theory Of Everything is at face value a concept disc about a father/son team of geniuses working to unite physics of the macro and quantum levels; yes, the whole thing just seems… ridiculous.

No matter how hard outlets like Popular Science, Bad Astronomer, and Io9 try, physics at a granular level isn’t a sexy subject (although googling ‘sexy physics’ has provided hours of entertainment), but the results are. When broken down into layman’s terms and punctuated with pretty pictures, physics can seem incredible, but physics is much like meeting your heroes/watching your favorite food being made. It loses a lot of that appeal when you realize how much bookwork/math/study goes into it. The idea of Ayreon tackling this subject, whilst also dealing with the ideals of a father who feels inadequate because his son ranks somewhere high on the savant/autism range, is remarkable. Continue reading »

INTERVIEW AND OVERVIEW: CODE — “AUGUR NOX”

 Album Reviews, Interviews  6 Responses »
Nov 192013
 

(We hit the trifecta in this post — BadWolf provides an overview of the new album by <code>, an interview of the band’s guitarist/songwriter Aort, and a full stream of the album.)

Augur Nox, the new album by international outfit <code>, is a gift—as in, I was not expecting it, and 2013’s crop of albums is richer for it.

The last time <code> released an album, 2009’s excellent Resplendent Grotesque, it was up for a Spellemann award (Norway’s equivalent to a Grammy), and rightfully so: That record is a roller coaster of dark moods and powerful guitar work, one that pushed the boundaries of what I considered “normal” for a progressive black metal album at that time.

And then, nothing. <code> parted ways with vocalist Khovst, who has a particular talent for high-pitched screeches as well as super-creepy clean singing. Khvost has gone on to work with many other not-particularly-metal-but-still-super-creepy projects, such as folk outfit Hexvessel, and goth rock band Beastmilk (the new Beastmilk LP is pretty fun, as well).

As for Aort… not a peep. Apparently he spent that time searching for a vocalist who could actually compete with Khvost, as well as writing the material that would become Augur Nox. The wait seems to have paid off—the new <code> frontman, Wacian, suits the band perfectly. Continue reading »

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