Album Reviews Archives - Page 499 of 576

ENTITIES: “AETHER”

Jan 292013

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the new EP by Entities from Sacramento, CA.)

While I think we can all agree that although djent, as an overarching fad and movement, is dying out and is in its death throes as we speak, that doesn’t say that the style in and of itself is bland or that there aren’t bands who remind us why this style got off the ground in the first place.

I am SURE, and am even willing to bet money, that djent as a whole will be a dead horse within two years and that NO ONE will give a single fuck about any of this shit nearly to the extent of the popularity it has enjoyed in years past. However, I do think some bands are going to continue to push on and show that they are undeniable musical forces: Vildhjarta, Uneven Structure, Means End, Born of Osiris, the list goes on.

I’m writing this piece, however, to talk about the new EP by Entities. I think there are two types of bands within the djent community: those who want to milk the cash cow while they can, and those who sincerely have a passion for the style and all its elements. Entities are definitely in the latter camp, bringing forth material that, while not necessarily original, is nonetheless a conviction-filled testimony to djent’s strengths and none of its weaknesses. Continue reading »

AMIENSUS: “RESTORATION”

Album Reviews 7 Responses »

Jan 292013

(In this post, NCS writer Andy Synn reviews the recent debut album by a Minnesota band named Amiensus.)

An unusual and unexpected delight, Restoration is a fine addition to the growing pantheon of American black metal – a style that I think has truly found its own identity, wearing its heart on its sleeve without regard for the judgemental restrictions of the established orthodoxy – and will no doubt appeal to fans of Agalloch, Oak Pantheon, and Woods of Ypres. Yet its gloomy light and shrouded divinity should also find a home in the hearts of those with a love of the more emotive side of In Mourning and Swallow The Sun, to whose sound much of Restoration is a distant cousin.

Ostensibly a melodic, subtly progressive black metal act, with more than a touch of the earthen, resilient power of Drudkh, there’s definitely a dark beauty and pronounced gothic streak to be found on the record – particularly with the abundance of soaring, bleakly emotive clean vocals – which showcase a massive amount of potential and a laudable level of ambition and creativity from the Minnesotan five-piece. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: TRENCHROT — “DRAGGED DOWN TO HELL”

Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET 2 Responses »

Jan 282013

I know almost nothing about TrenchRot. They are from Philadelphia, and through a little web sleuthing I’ve figured out that their members include vocalist/guitarist Steve Jansson, who has split time between a speed metal band named Infiltrator and a sludge band named Grass. And beyond that, they’re a mystery. Except for their music; I do know about that.

Earlier this month TrenchRot posted a three-track demo named Dragged Down To Hell on Bandcamp. You can pay what you want to get it. The music is neither speed metal nor sludge, but death metal. TrenchRot’s beefy death metal stew has a strong old-school flavor but it doesn’t sound like re-packaged, cookie-cutter hero worship. The songs are distinctive, and galvanizing.

For the most part the three demo tracks blaze away at a thrashing pace, propelled by slaughtering riffs, squalling guitar leads, and a mix of percussive rhythms, all hell-bent on sonic demolition. Where the pacing changes, it’s a drop down on all fours for a moaning, groaning death-doom crawl. Continue reading »

SATURDAY

Album Reviews, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC, SHORT BUT SWEET 12 Responses »

Jan 262013

I’m going to a massive bash tonight in celebration (a day late) of the 254th birthday of Robert Burns. Whisky will be drunk, songs will be sung, whisky will be drunk, poems will be recited, whisky will be drunk, haggis will be eaten, whisky will be drunk. Also, whisky will be drunk, and we will all be drunk.

Therefore, I will be writing something for tomorrow today, because I have a feeling tomorrow will be lost to incapacitation. I will also be preparing myself today for some sort of performance tonight, and also updating my last will and testament, just in case. Between the writing for tomorrow and the preparation for tonight, I will be scarce around the site on this Saturday. But before disappearing, I thought I’d share a few recent discoveries and a few old favorites that are on my mind today, all of which are metal, even if they’re not all music.

PRAISE

Today the following comment appeared on a post about the band General Surgery that I wrote a year ago: “Thank you a lot for giving everyone an extraordinarily brilliant chance to read critical reviews from this site. It is often very kind and full of a lot of fun for me and my office friends to search your web site at the very least three times in 7 days to read the new guidance you have. And of course, I’m just usually satisfied concerning the stunning techniques you give. Selected two ideas in this article are indeed the most efficient I have had.” Continue reading »

LIGHTNING SWORDS OF DEATH: “BAPHOMETIC CHAOSIUM”

Album Reviews 7 Responses »

Jan 222013

(In this post Andy Synn reviews the new album by L.A.’s Lightning Swords of Death. At the end of the post you’ll also see the band’s official music video for the album’s title track, which premiered today.)

Where exactly to start with this one? While LSOD have been pillaging the American underground for years now, their exposure to a wider audience has been relatively/extremely limited (depending on your perspective). They’ve been on major metal tours with the likes of Behemoth and Danzig, they’ve supplied songs for computer games and movies, yet all in all they’re more likely to be the sort of band you’ve probably heard before, but never realised it.

Part of that is the name – unwieldy, and more than a little hokey to some – and part of that is the band’s steadfast commitment to the underground aesthetic. They’ll do these things, they’ll play ball with the mainstream, but they’ll do so on their own terms.

They’re a band who put the emphasis on the METAL part of Black Metal, heavy, aggressive, and uncompromising, drawing elements liberally from across the Thrash, Death, and Traditional spectrum, without upsetting that careful balance between occult glamour and oily grime that Black Metal thrives on. More than anything they’re an unrepentantly dark and blasphemous band, a band whose sound touches on something nameless and forgotten, an atmosphere, an aura, of something not quite human, not quite alive, permeating every note and every aspect of their music. Continue reading »

HOLY GRAIL: “RIDE THE VOID”

Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule 2 Responses »

Jan 212013

(DGR reviews the new album by California’s Holy Grail, which will be released in North America on January 22.)

A solid chunk of time has passed since Holy Grail’s last release Crisis In Utopia. That was a pretty good piece of old-school-flavored metal that tried to bring in some heavier elements but never enough to really stray from sounding like a modern-day throwback. It was thrash by people who loved it and were able to craft a very good product that could stand right alongside their favorites.

Ride The Void – which had its European release on January 18th this year – is the group’s second full-length in a discography that also includes a smattering of EPs and single releases along the way. There have been some minor line-up changes, but overall the core of the band has remained the same.

This time the group have taken advantage of the close to three-year gap between releases to write a ton of music. Ride The Void comes in at thirteen tracks (fourteen if you get the bonus) of solid, retro-flavored without falling too far into idol worship, thrash music.

Thirteen songs is a lot, so it’s fair to ask whether it’s worth your time to check these guys out? Is it thirteen songs of wind rushing through your ears or is this a good opportunity to look into Holy Grail? Continue reading »

SOLSTORM: “SOLSTORM”

Album Reviews 1 Response »

Jan 182013

(In April 2011, I wrote briefly about Solstorm, a Norwegian band I’d just discovered. Today, Andy Synn gives us a review of the same band’s self-titled debut album.)

Let me start this off with a little story…

As some of you know I’m in a couple of bands (Bloodguard, and Twilight’s Embrace). Now both bands have fans who interact with us on a pretty regular basis, liking statuses, commenting, etc. Just generally getting involved. One gentleman who pops up on the Bloodguard page on and off is a fellow named Mads Lilletvedt.

Recognise that name? I didn’t at first, but something about it bugged me enough to check who it was, and lo and behold, Mads Lilletvedt is only the drummer from bleeding Hellish Outcast! But that’s not all. I also found out he’s in a couple of other bands, one of which in particular caught my attention. That band is Solstorm.

Solstorm are the sort of band who put the “post-apocalyptic” into “post-metal”. Clearly coming from the Neurosis school of claustrophobic atmospherics, along with a heavy dose of Cult of Luna-esque bleakness and clarity, this is not the music of Armageddon – the four horsemen have long since passed by now – rather, this is the music of the aftermath. The war drums have fallen silent, the skies are scorched and dead, nothing stirs, nothing lives. Continue reading »

MUTINY WITHIN: “MUTINY WITHIN 2: SYNCHRONICITY”

Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule 4 Responses »

Jan 172013

(DGR reviews the somewhat unexpected new album by Mutiny Within, which was just released a few days ago.)

I should probably just hang up my hat now, considering that even though I write for NoCleanSinging the next couple of reviews that I have in the hopper for this site consist of 80-90% clean singing. Consider yourselves warned, heavier music fans.

Mutiny Within drew something of a raw deal when it came to their debut disc. It didn’t sell all that well (and to hear the band tell it, it was pirated to hell and back), and unfortunately their label wound up letting them go after that one release. I was honestly surprised at the reception they got (some people really hated them) because I thought their debut was something very different: A good combination of the melody and singing from something like power metal and the crushing heaviness of melodic death and groove.

Afterward, it seemed like the group were basically hanging it up, so when word came out that the band had reformed and were releasing a second disc – the lengthily titled Mutiny Within 2: Synchronicity – it came as a bit of a shock. The group were now self-releasing an album after going radio silent and becoming something of a “Wow, they had a lot of potential – too bad that never worked out” story among those of us who enjoyed the first one. Continue reading »

ANNIVERSARY REVIEWS BY WILLIAM SMITH: THE CLASS OF 2003

Album Reviews, Listmania 2 Responses »

Jan 162013

(William Smith is the vocalist for Buckshot Facelift and a Long Island band named Artificial Brain that I’ve written about twice — here and here. He also writes a very entertaining blog called Vitos Squid Stop and Death Metal Museum. I asked him around this time last year if he would write something for NCS . . . and he gave us a 2-part list of “anniversary” albums — five albums recorded 10 years and 20 years earlier, respeectively. And this year he’s done it again. The first part appeared yesterday, and this post discusses metal gems from 10 years ago.)

…but then it came – the era of Chris Barnes as the Death Metal Elvis was dead – bloated on a toilet after a worldwide glut of gore. George Fisher took the flag and waved it through the fog of corpse paint and KORN, but the late nineties and early 2000s was an awkward, diehard period when keeping it real was all about guttural slam metal, old guys ran out of ideas and started Impetigo worship bands, and all of a sudden cassettes just disappeared .

10 years after the Death Metal renaissance of ’93, the internet had established a stronghold on the underground scene. File sharing sterilized the fun out of tape trading and straight edge hardcore bands began using blast beats and guttural vocals for their own benign purposes. “Fruity Loops- Relapse message board computer grind” all but drowned out “sociopathic loner tape trader grind”, one of North Americas most unsung “KVLT” phenomena of the late nineties (re: Extreme Scene, Anal Birth, Slough, Dismembered Fetus, Vomit Spawn) and old school tech-Death pioneers began sounding more and more like Hatebreed.

To view in the context of history where some of the last holdouts from the 90s stood in this unsure era, I’ve raided my collection for 5 underground releases that have stood the test of time to still be personal Kult favorites a decade later. Continue reading »

ANDY SYNN PRESENTS: REVIEWS IN HAIKUS

Album Reviews, Reviews In Haikus 14 Responses »

Jan 162013

(Andy Synn’s first installment of album reviews in haiku drew a lot of interest, and a bunch of hilarious haikus in the comments, too. So Andy decided to do it again . . . .)

Well the first edition of this was such a success that I’ve been working on several more in the time since publishing that first, relatively off-the-cuff, entry in the series.

I hadn’t originally intended to return to the well so soon, but with Islander’s work commitment cutting down on his ability to write and post to the site, “Reviews In Haikus” has become a good fallback option!

So here’s another 3 albums, irreverently reviewed in English Haiku style. There’s no real hidden puns or subtexts this time round, as no-one got my “clever” little joke/reference in the last one, so all the humour and references are nice and obviously telegraphed. Suck it, nerds.

WINTERFYLLETH – THE THRENODY OF TRIUMPH

Instinctive decay

Old souls, young blood, tales of woe

Black metal refined

Older Entries Newer Entries