THE RESISTANCE: “SCARS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 192013
 

(DGR reviews the debut album by The Resistance, out now on Armoury Records.)

Everyone around these here parts knows I enjoy a bit of the melo-death scene, so it shouldn’t come as a shock that we were eventually going to come around to talking about The Resistance. It’s been a pretty good year for that scene, with a couple of groups firing on all cylinders for the first time in a long time and just dishing out absolutely amazing discs. When word got out that Jesper Stromblad of In Flames was involved in a group called The Resistance way back in late 2011/early 2012, I immediately perked up. I felt that he was responsible for a lot of the speed that In Flames had, and when he left, there was a big gap in that band’s sound. It seemed that he took the speed-playing with him to bands like Dimension Zero and now The Resistance.

The Resistance are something of a melo-death supergroup, composed of former (or once former and now current) members of groups such as The Haunted, In Flames, Carnal Forge, and many others. They’re a group formed of long-time veterans, so it’s not surprising how quickly the “supergroup” tag became affixed to them during the media blitz that lead up to this album’s release. Scars, which hit in late May, is a very solid slab of melo-death, but it also includes some other interesting ingredients as well.

Scars kicks off with “Clearing The Slate”, a pretty loud statement about what The Resistance are up to. It’s a quick, roughly two-minute flame-blast of pretty straightforward death. It sounds as if it were designed to rid the listener of prior expectations based on the previous band memberships of this group’s roster. However, things change the moment the vocals kick in, as The Haunted’s Marco Aro roars throughout the whole song, and by extension, the whole CD. Continue reading »

REVOCATION: “REVOCATION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 182013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new self-titled album by Boston’s Revocation. For another opinion, check out BadWolf’s review here.)

I’m pretty sure I should be in the ER right now for all the bones I just broke moshing and headbanging to this album, but duty calls.  Revocation’s S/T is pretty much the shit.  Maybe more than the shit.  Certainly their best album to date, most brutal, most technical, and just downright fucking nasty, grimy, and vicious in every way possible. Last year’s Teratogenesis EP in no way will have prepped you for this bad boy.  It takes no prisoners, it shows no mercy, I’m still trying to figure out how they managed to make an album this malicious and rabid.

Revocation, along with bands like Vektor and Sylosis, have really proved that one of the few ways (maybe the best way) for thrash metal to achieve legitimacy in the current world is to completely assimilate itself into death metal frameworks with jazz influences and black metal touches. In fact, this may be the new standard. I mean yeah, I heap praise upon bands like Evile and Havok, but I have no problem also saying that, as good as they are, they still pale in comparison to bands like Revocation — because bands like Revocation are paving the way for the future of metal as we will know it.

I know some observers already consider Revocation to be a “death metal” band per se, but I entirely disagree.  The band’s character is definitely more in line with thrash; the music is an organized anarchy, a barrage of Molotov cocktails and riot shields crashing into each other, the sound of civilizations collapsing beneath the frantic violence of life itself.  Nowhere is this more evident than on their new self-titled opus.  This record is chaotic as fuck and holds nothing but warriors’ pride in that fact. Continue reading »

REVOCATION: “REVOCATION”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Jul 182013
 

(BadWolf reviews the new album by Revocation. For another opinion, check out TheMadIsraeli’s review here.)

You pick up a record, and find one phrase, even one word, on the cover—it sends a message. “This is a singular experience. This word is the definition of these sounds, and vice versa.” A self-titled album, then, should either be a band’s self-estimated masterpiece, or, at the very least, a record that best encompasses a band’s sound.

One should not self-title an album lightly—to do so is to make a major artistic statement frivolously. It’s like a superstition—a dicey proposition. I can think of four self-titled metal albums off the top of my head: Metallica’s 1991 blockbuster, Avenged Sevenfold’s best-forgotten stinker, and Killswitch Engage’s two(!) eponymous records. All four fail at defining those bands. Metallica will always first-and-foremost be the band that recorded Master of Puppets; Killswitch Engage will always be “That band with the black guy that did the heartbreak song.” (Sorry, Jesse Leach).

Enter Boston’s Revocation, releasing their self-titled record just in time for this year’s Summer Slaughter tour. While I don’t see Revocation reaching the mainstream-appeal of the aforementioned bands, it’s realistic at this point to see the band making records as a career for the foreseeable future. Unlike most other bands playing technical-melodic-death-thrash-insert-adjective metal, Revocation can craft a good tune, and have a certain general appeal as well.

That appeal is David Davidson, the band’s lead guitarist/vocalist/songwriter, whose distinctive harsh vocals and expressive guitar leads give Revocation something most modern metal bands absolutely lack—personality. Honestly, the band should just call the album “David Davidson” and be done with it. Continue reading »

BISPORA: “THE PINEAL CHRONICLES PHASE I: FURTHERANCE”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jul 162013
 

(DGR reviews the new release by Sacramento-based Bispora.)

Back in 2011, local Sacramento group Bispora released an EP called The Cycle. For a group that pretty much came out of nowhere, The Cycle was a fantastic twenty minutes of music. It combined a love of prog metal, some djent elements, and a serious bit of Between The Buried and Me influence into something that you couldn’t really find elsewhere. It was a very guitar-centric disc too, with a pretty amazing melody that was intertwined throughout the first and last songs.

With a first release like that, Bispora became a band to watch. While they occasionally played with the same genre tropes as a lot of other bands, they managed to morph them into something all their own, so that they didn’t sound like just generic musician exercises. That’s why they gained the following that they did and why so many folks have been watching and waiting to see how they would follow it with the now-titled The Pineal Chronicles Phase One: Furtherance. (For the sake of my own fingers I’ll probably alternate between Phase One and Furtherance.)

Phase One was released the evening of July 4th and was free for an hour, before the band decided to start selling it for the pittance of $5. So is the first half of a promised two-part release worth the time of day? Have the band managed to pull away from the tractor beam that is the ‘difficult second release’? Continue reading »

ANDY SYNN PRESENTS: REVIEWS IN HAIKUS

 Album Reviews, Reviews In Haikus  8 Responses »
Jul 162013
 

(Andy Synn delivers another installment of his irregular series of album reviews in haiku. Two more reviews come after the jump. With music.)

DEVILDRIVER – WINTER KILLS

More brawn than Beast. More

vigour than Villains. Hamstrung

By some weaker tracks.

https://www.facebook.com/DevilDriverOfficial1 Continue reading »

DARKANE: “THE SINISTER SUPREMACY”

 Album Reviews  8 Responses »
Jul 152013
 

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Sweden’s Darkane, their first in five years and out now on Prosthetic Records.)

There are certain bands who, I will admit, I am incapable of being objective about.  Bands whose music has an effect on me that, let’s be honest, is just plain fucking unfair.  Darkane is that band to me. Not only have Darkane been consistently excellent, they are to me THE flagship band for how modern metal should should be, creating a succinct core sound with so much hybridization at work that it’s full of nooks and crannies to get lost in.

With a compelling combination of Bay Area thrash, melodic death metal, death metal, progressive tendencies, jazz fusion detours, and classical foundations, they should be bigger than they are.  It’s a real shame.  The Sinister Supremacy marks album number six, and yet I fear that it may not expose their music to many more people than normal.  The Darkane fanbase, even the most rabid, seems to be rather insular in nature.

I think  the discography is flawless, the sound always far ahead of its time, and the musicianship unrivaled in many respects.  The core of guitarists Christofer Malmstrom and Klas Idleberg, bassist Jorgen Lofberg, and drummer Peter Wildoer is quite possibly one of the tightest, most in-tune-with-each-other musical units you will ever hear.  While keeping vocalists around has always been a problem, I was also immensely stoked to learn that Lawrence Mackory, the band’s original vocalist on their debut, Rusted Angel, had returned for The Sinister Supremacy. Continue reading »

CLOUDKICKER: “HELLO”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  3 Responses »
Jul 142013
 

(Better late than never, DGR reviews a single released by Ohio-based Cloudkicker earlier this year.)

Cloudkicker is one of those projects that people really should know more about. At this point, one-man band Ben Sharp has taken this project beyond being interesting for just guitarists and moved into a realm where people who love music generally should have a couple of his releases. Especially when he’s been kind enough to put out his material for free and then offer up some beautiful physical packages later on. He’s also got quite the varied discography at this point, writing music that was technically impressive and then moving into an area that is very ambient and ethereal.

I think he hit a major high point with 2010’s Beacons, which is one of the few instrumental discs I can do front to back without getting bored, and then reached it again with the recent Fade. Both discs represent two different eras in the Cloudkicker history, and way earlier this year he put out a single song called Hello that falls right in line with the mastery he displayed on Fade. Some folks may think it ridiculous that six months out we finally decide to discuss the song, but Hello is a powerful bit of music that travels further into the ambient realm than this project ever has before. On top of that, it contains slight elements of drone to create a warm and inviting song that, cliched as the description is, you can get absolutely lost in and just drift. Continue reading »

TORTURE DIVISION AND BENT SEA: “DOUBLE PENETRATION”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 132013
 

It was barely more than a month ago when Torture Division released their latest three-song assault on the senses (The Worship, reviewed here), and damned if they aren’t already back with another release. And damned if they don’t have company this time, because Double Penetration is a split release by Torture Division and Bent Sea, which is another super-group, and one we haven’t heard from in a while.

I had to crawl all the way back to November 2011 to find the post I wrote about Bent Sea’s debut album, Nostalgia. At that point the band consisted of guitarist/drummer Dirk Verbeuren (Soilwork, Scarve), vocalist Sven de Caluwe (Aborted), and bassist Devin Townsend (you read that right). Devin Townsend didn’t participate in Bent Sea’s contribution to Double Penetration, his shoes having been filled by none other than Napalm Death’s Shane Embury.

The Bent Sea track is a ditty called “Partners In Grind”. It’s a bone-shaker and a neck-snapper, a death-grind marauder with a beastly off-tempo mid-section. I’ve taken the liberty of uploading it to our Soundcloud account so you can hear it. And then of course you should go download it from Torture Division’s web site (more on that later). Continue reading »

THE SYNN REPORT, PART 38 — PERSEFONE

 Album Reviews, THE SYNN REPORT  8 Responses »
Jul 122013
 

(In this 38th edition of THE SYNN REPORT, Andy reviews the discography of Persefone from the small nation of Andorra, including the band’s new 2013 release, Spiritual Migration.)

Recommended for fans of: Wintersun, Into Eternity, Edge of Sanity

It’s funny how things work out. Persefone had been on my list as a potential Synn Report for some time, and what with them recently releasing their fourth album it was pretty clear that I could kill two birds with one stone and link a short appraisal of it in with the usual Synn Report format. I decided pretty much straight away after finishing Part 37 that the Andorran prog-metallers were going to have to feature in the next edition, and then by coincidence a good number of our readers started mentioning Spiritual Migration as one of their albums of the year so far. It’s crazy how these things line up.

Persefone are the first Andorran artist to feature in The Synn Report, but their sound has worldwide appeal – indeed, their progressive proclivities, ostentatious keyboards, and epic song structures have a fair bit in common with In Vain, who were the subject of the previous edition of this column.

To put you in the right state of mind, a flurry of other names which have been thrown out in response to the band’s music are Dream Theater, Edge of Sanity, Symphony X, Opeth, Into Eternity, Borknagar… all prog-metal behemoths, ranging from the Power Metally inclined to the Death Metally devoted. The fact that these acts are so frequently referenced when talking about the Andorran sextet should (hopefully) give you some indication of just how highly regarded their albums – and their musical abilities – are by those in the know.

After the jump – four albums’ worth of technical skill, creative flair, grandiose ambition, and magnificent storytelling (and keyboards)… Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: DEIPHAGO AND RITUAL COMBAT — “ACCEPT THE MARK”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Jul 122013
 

Last fall a U.S. label named Red Stream Inc. made a limited CD release of a split entitled Accept the Mark by two sonically destructive bands — Deiphago and Ritual Combat. Now, the German label Iron Bonehead Productions is on the verge of giving the split the vinyl treatment, and that gave me the opportunity to hear the split for the first time. Here are some thoughts about it, plus the chance for you to hear one track from each band’s two contributions (we thank Iron Bonehead for giving us permission to do this).

DEIPHAGO

Deiphago, who we’ve written about repeatedly in the past, were initially what caught my interest in this release. Originally from The Philippines and now based in Costa Rica, they’ve mastered the art of inflicting black/death musical assaults that are both incinerating and transfixing. Their 2012 full-length Satan Alpha Omega was one of the best in this genre that I heard last year, and their two songs on Accept the Mark are just as compelling.

“Beast of Annihilation” is an original song that will eat you alive from the head down. It’s a mass of uber-distorted, vicious riffing, snare-heavy beats, and reverberating bestial barks and howls. Massive bass vibrations segment the maelstrom in brief slowdowns, and a shrieking solo tunnels into your skull like an overheated drill. It’s an eviscerating, brain-slamming experience. Continue reading »

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