ENSLAVED: “RIITIIR”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Sep 132012
 

(Our man Andy Synn wasted no time consuming the forthcoming album from Norway’s legendary Enslaved once we received it, and he turns in this typically detailed review.)

Hands up anyone who was at least a little concerned by the prospect of the new Enslaved album? I know I was. First, the band have their own stellar reputation to maintain, as well as a hefty task following up the near perfect Axioma Ethica Odini. Then there were the rumblings that this would be a more “experimental” and “progressive” effort – not bad words in themselves, but the last time a band went to such lengths to over-emphasise these words we were left with Heritage – a rather lifeless tribute to progressive rock, rather than a progressive (or particularly interesting) album in itself.

On top of this, the last time Enslaved put so much emphasis (at least in the press) on their “progressive” inclinations, they came out with Vertebrae, perhaps my least favourite album in their entire discography. So maybe you can see why I was worried?

Thankfully RIITIIR gets pretty much everything right from the start. This is the record Vertebrae should have been – epic and expansive, drawing colour from a wide sonic palette, but with an energy and vibrancy that was often missing before. It is in many ways a companion piece to Axioma Ethica Odini, albeit with a very different focus, serving as the other side of the same coin. Continue reading »

COBOLT 60: “THE GRIM DEFIANCE”

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Sep 122012
 

(Andy Synn reviews the new album about to arrive after a 10-year hiatus from Norway’s Cobolt 60, the two-headed beast that includes members/ex-members of Blood Red Throne and Satyricon.)

To paraphrase a well-known ape, “the only good thrash, is black-thrash!” And death-thrash. Look, the point I’m trying to make here is that over the years my love for the thrashiest of sub-genres has waned pretty dramatically, coinciding with a steady increase in my love for the more “extreme” sub-variants of this music we call metal.

For example, here’s a list of the “-thrash” bands I’m digging these days, all of which are more at home in the black and brutal camp than the high-tops and heshers one: Hellish Outcast, The Wretched End, Skeletonwitch, Vreid, Aura Noir, Ancient Ascendant, Goatwhore, The Crown, The Konsortium… it’s a big list.

Anyway, my point is that to really get my blood pumping these days an album has to offer more than just a thrashy sound and a pissed off vocalist. It’s got to have more grit, more heaviness. Just more. And The Grim Defiance is certainly more than just another blackened thrash album. Continue reading »

BECOMING THE ARCHETYPE: “I AM”

 Album Reviews  6 Responses »
Sep 112012
 

(Andy Synn is the author of this review of the new album by Becoming the Archetype, with music from the album at the end.)

Five albums. That’s a pretty good legacy for any band, particularly when they’ve managed to progress with each release, from the unconventional prog-core of Terminate Damnation, through the more esoteric and Extol-infused The Physics Of Fire, the more conceptual and song-oriented approach of Dichotomy, and rounded off with the more stylistically varied Celestial Completion. Through it all though, regardless of several line-up shifts, they’ve retained a core identity that gives the name Becoming The Archetype both its power and its continued relevance.

That being said, let me give you a quick heads up – while I Am continues the tradition of progressing the band’s sound with each release, particularly in this case as a darker, heavier album much of the time, this is not the Becoming The Archetype you’re used to, and almost certainly not the Becoming The Archetype you may be expecting.

 

“The Ocean Walker” (not an Arrested Development reference, as far as I can tell) immediately sets the stage with its unexpected Periphery style leads and semi-Meshuggah-ised riffs. Thankfully it’s more than an uninspired imitation (it remains distinctively BTA throughout), but the shift in sonic priorities is initially startling. That being said, Chris McCain’s vocals manage to reference enough hints of Jason Wisdom early on to establish continuity, before dropping into a more guttural roar, upping the brutality and paired with a thunderous, chugging riff.

This is followed by two particularly aggressive tracks that recall the more “-core” oriented material of Terminate Damnation. The “Timebender” has a great off-kilter central riff, a warped and dissonant lead refrain, and an almost mechanised sense of rhythm that isn’t far from that perfected by Living Sacrifice. “The Eyes Of The Storm” employs a similarly neck-snapping, rhythmic approach, though the two songs are clearly distinctive entities. The chiming keyboard presence and lightning-fast lead motif draw a line back to the precision compositions of Dichotomy, but with an uncompromising heaviness and visceral vocal intensity that harkens back to the band’s earliest days. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: HYPERIAL – “INDUSTRY”

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Sep 102012
 

There is a certain style of death metal that I think of as “imperial”, and sometimes as “infernally imperial” to account for the demonic shadows that often fall across the music. Those words come to mind, for example, when I think of Poland’s now best-known metal export, Behemoth. Obviously, I’m not using the term to convey a sense of glittering ostentatiousness, but instead as a means of capturing an atmosphere of dark might and majesty.

Hyperial is a four-man, one-woman band who have just released a six-song EP entitled Industry that incorporates that kind of blackened majesty into their music, but also use keyboards and ethereal guitar solos in a way that adds a sense of futuristic atmosphere to the brutish pummeling of the riffs and drums.

With the exception of a brief synthesizer instrumental that creates a moody ambience (“MMXII-MMXXX”), the songs are fast, with jabbing, choppy riffs and slightly off-kilter rhythms, anchored by a huge, groaning bass presence and percussion that frequently erupts in explosions of blasting. The songs are packed with massive (and even bombastic) grooves and the near-constant presence of moaning (and sometimes squealing) guitar chords that conjure up not only images of Behemoth but also Gojira (especially on the title track).

The vocals add to that ominous sense of rampant bestiality, with low-end roaring that sounds like a cross between a barking wolf and an enraged bear, though the vocals also include a trade-off with high-end shrieking that avoids any risk of monotony. Continue reading »

PSYCHIATRIC REGURGITATION: “STABBED IN THE EYES WITH A CRACK PIPE”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Sep 042012
 

PSYCHIATRIC REGURGITATION are an unsigned band from Dallas, Texas, who sent me the songs from their new debut album not long ago, describing the music as sort of like a cross between Death/Decrepit Birth and Exhumed/Carcass/Impaled.

The music happened to arrive in one of those rare moments when I wasn’t right in the middle of something else, and the description sounded like my kinda thing. So, I listened to a few tracks and got a big smile from what I heard — and not just from the sample that starts off the opening title track, “Stabbed In the Eyes With A Crack Pipe”.

Despite the humorous samples and song titles — including the unforgettable “Smoke Crack, Worship Satan, Kill People” — the music is seriously good death metal. It’s a rapid-fire blast of skull-hammering brutality delivered with blazing technicality, but it also includes catchy melodic riffing, head-spinning solos and progressive instrumental breaks that may take you by surprise, and even a few clobbering slam breakdowns. The barking-dog vocals are cool, too (big, rabid dogs, to be clear).

When you see names like Death, Decrepit Birth, and Exhumed tossed around in an e-mail out of the blue, you tend to take it with a grain of salt. But Psychiatric Regurgitation have the songwriting and performance chops to back it up.  Continue reading »

MIDNIGHT: “COMPLETE AND TOTAL HELL”

 Album Reviews  5 Responses »
Sep 032012
 

(In this post, BadWolf reviews the forthcoming Hells Headbangers compilation of Midnight’s entire pre-Satanic Royalty back catalogue.)

Midnight came seemingly out of nowhere last year with their debut Satanic Royalty. Clocking in at just over thirty minutes, the album roared out of the gates, dazzled with its compelling mix of old-school black metal, D-beat, and classic cock rock, then ended too quickly. I loved it—as did many others, judging by Midnight’s announced slot at Maryland Deathfest—and if I’d heard it before the holiday season, it would most certainly have wormed into my end-of-year lists. I await tis sequel with bated breath.

But Satanic Royalty was hardly Midnight’s first release. The Cleveland three-peice has been releasing music in splits, demos, singles, and EP’s since 2003, and now all of that early material (minus a Quiet Riot cover) is available in one convenient package: Complete and Total Hell. And while it hardly feels like the rock-solid sequel to Satanic Royalty, it serves as a convenient appetizer—the prequel to the sequel, if you’ll pardon my reference.

Complete and Total Hell flows well as an album, even though it is a compilation. “Funeral Bell” opens with some Bathory-style atmosphere, and then the record pumps out track after track of chunky and distorted riffs. The early tracks sound like they were recorded straight to cassette in a basement over a boombox—which they may have been. The raw recording works in their favor since the songs emerge from simple building blocks. As the record progresses you can actually hear more and more money flow into Midnight’s recording—the guitar solos clear up, the bass rumbles deeper, until the music breaks into jangly boogie rock on “Berlin is Burning,” over an hour later. Yes, an hour; where Satanic Royalty was brief, Complete and Total Hell is overlong. Continue reading »

NEUTRON HAMMER: “IRON STORM EVOCATION”

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Sep 022012
 

The album cover provides a good clue: Iron Storm Evocation is raw, primitive, and thoroughly necrotic. It’s also one hell of a hell-ripping ride.

The album is the full-length debut by Finland’s Neutron Hammer, the culmination of nine years of effort that included a demo and two EPs. It doesn’t boast zooming technicality, ground-breaking creativity, or melodic hooks that you’ll be humming days later, but for this kind of music who wants or needs that? What Iron Storm Evocation brings is 40 minutes of blasphemous black thrashing death mixed with venomous black ‘n’ roll that’s a shitload of evil fun. It exerts a kind of animal magnetism that has brought me back to it repeatedly over the last month.

With few exceptions, the music barrels ahead at high speed with high distortion, and although the production quality isn’t really lo-fi, it’s close enough to coat everything in grime. The dominant musical style is blasting blackened thrash with rapid-fire chords and hammering percussion, sometimes blazing away with enough speed to fuse everything into the proverbial wall of noise. But no song on the album is really all one thing.

Even on the tracks where rolling hellfire is king, you get changes in rhythm and riffing that bring the beats of old-school punk, crust and d-beat, Motörhead on an open throttle, and pretty close to straight-up rock, without ever losing the authentic air of thoroughly blackened filthiness. There’s a dose of Venom and Hellhammer, an injection of of Impaled Nazarene and Nunslaughter, and even a bit of Discharge,  to go along with the hailstorm of infernal thrashing. Continue reading »

KHONSU: “ANOMALIA”

 Album Reviews  12 Responses »
Aug 312012
 


(In this post Andy Synn reviews the just-released debut album on Season of Mist by Norway’s Khonsu.)

There’s something incredibly exotic, even erotic, about the darker side of music.

Whether you believe that music (and art) creates some sort of spiritual or emotional connection, or whether you see it merely as a stimulus for strange, internal chemical reactions, the fact remains that ever since Sabbath struck their first doom-laden chord there has been an inherent darkness to our music that touches something within us far different from what the rest of the world experiences.

The hybrid black metal sound of Khonsu absolutely revels in this darkness, wrapping its post-industrial, post-apocalyptic (but never post-metal) sound in a shroud of shade and shadow, while taking the audacious (and risky) step of using the keyboards as a leading instrument, utilising this expanded sonic palette to great effect to realise both extroverted concepts and introverted neuroses in equal measure.

Always a dangerous choice, in the wrong hands this often results in nothing but pompous farce or overblown, soulless theatrics. But Anomalia bucks this trend – instead of simply filling out the sound in a passive fashion, the ever-present synth lines and haunting keyboard refrains actively control and direct the direction of the music and have been given the necessary time and care that they need to realise their potential. Rather than being treated as an afterthought, a mere parlor trick or cynical attempt to expand the sound, the synth work here is an integral part of each song’s foundation, granting each one a thematic breadth and depth outside and beyond the confines of black metal’s traditionally guitar-based aesthetic.

Progressive in intent and ambition, the structures of all the songs, which you may have gathered are all of a somewhat significant length, are complex without being convoluted, intelligent without being impenetrable, and though each track is a singular contained chapter, they all contribute, individually and as a collective, to the overall direction of the album.

This is pure Blade Runner black metal, born and raised in Perdition City under the hazy glare of neon lights, where the blood of the dragon meets the sprawling sound of tomorrow. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: SATYROS – “THE DIRT OF AGES”

 Album Reviews, Free Shit, SHORT BUT SWEET  4 Responses »
Aug 302012
 

Riven, the 2011 album by Germany’s Satyros, was one of my favorites from last year. The band self-released it last March, and I posted this review in April. I also included one of its tracks on our list of 2011′s Most Infectious Extreme Metal Songs (here). It was an ambitious undertaking, a true musical journey consisting of 12 songs and approximately an hour’s worth of diverse music that took years to create, and yet the band released it for free download on Bandcamp — as they have with everything they’ve released to date.

Satyros are now working on their third album, but in the meantime they’ve started a new project, the concept of which is just as interesting as the music. They call it the Open-Anthology-Project, and its first product is an EP named The Dirt of Ages, which Satyros put up on Bandcamp yesterday to celebrate their 7th anniversary as a band. For the EP, the band assembled three songs not included in their previous works — but this is only the beginning.

Satyros intend to use the project as a vehicle for releasing future songs that would not be part of albums. As the band explain, “This allows us even more artistic freedom to experiment with new sounds, styles, and blends of genres than before, apart from our songwriting for upcoming full-length outputs.”

This is a cool idea, and one that I hope catches on with more bands. My sense is that most bands create music that for one reason or another never make it onto an album or EP, maybe because it diverges from the musical style that identifies the band or perhaps because it doesn’t fit within the concept or arrangement of music on a larger release. But if the band is nevertheless satisfied with the music, giving it away on Bandcamp (or some other platform) could benefit fans as well as giving the band an added vehicle for ongoing creative expression.  Continue reading »

DEVOLVED: “REPRISAL”

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Aug 302012
 

This is a review of Reprisal, the fourth album by Devolved. In writing it, I feel conflicted. On the one hand, I’m delighted that the band have given me the chance to hear the album in advance of its release. On the other hand, I feel a sense of guilt because it is so far in advance that our beloved readers won’t be able to share in the full awesomeness of the music until November 20, 2012, which is something like 80 dog years from now. It’s so far in advance that I can’t even feed you a link for pre-orders.

Obviously, my sense of guilt hasn’t stopped me from forging ahead. I just want to be clear that it’s not because I enjoy torturing you. Except, of course, those of you who enjoy being tortured, and you know who you are, and to you I say, “Happy to be of service!”

And yes, Reprisal is awesome, Devolved’s best album yet, and one of the year’s gems. It benefits significantly from the changes that founder/lyricist/drummer John Sankey has made since the band’s last album, taking greater control over the songwriting process and bringing on board two new performers — Mark Hawkins (guitars and bass) and Mark Haggblad (vocals) — both of whom are simply superb. Between the three of them, they have constructed an unstoppable killing machine.

The music delivers cold, mechanized power with almost inhumanly fast, ridiculously precise drumming and riffing. The rhythms have an industrialized quality — jabbing, hammering, jolting, in a start-stop flurry of pneumatic, piston-driven blows, with the drums, guitars, and bass often tightly in sync. The sound conjures mental images of some giant robotic factory in overdrive, fabricating ominous ranks of weaponized cyborgs ready to begin crushing and blasting our frail humanity. Continue reading »

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