CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE TWO

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  2 Responses »
Aug 052026
 

(Our writer DGR has been playing catch-up on records released earlier this year when other distractions interfered with writing about them. In mid-July he delivered Issue One (which you can find here), and now we have Issue Two, encompassing reviews of four records released in March, May, June, and July.)

It is politics season here in California, which means that by living in proximity to the state’s capital (Sacramento) you get battered relentlessly with ads from all neck of the woods. Over thirty-five million people live within the boundaries of California, which means that this metro area consisting of a mere two-to-three million means fuck-all to anyone internationally and is barely important enough to list on a map. You have to zoom in two or three times on Google, for instance, before Sacramento is revealed unto the wider world and long after Los Angeles and San Francisco.

By virtue of growing up in the Bay Area I’ve found my wider allegiances between the two regions fairly split, such that I kind of equally care for both even though my current residence will forever suffer from a generationally-instilled case of short-man’s syndrome. It’s why politics season tends to be annoying, because you get to hear your city’s name with the same sort of thin-mouthed sneer that is usually reserved for the scum of the Earth, such that even when filling up your gas tank you get greeted with banners pointing to the price of fuel and a notice that “Sacramento policies did this”.

Which I guess is nice, because at least the rest of the country is finally acknowledging that California is the real capital of this country, and clearly, we’re the ones who decided to start bombing the Middle East again and start a new forever war. It’s a fucked up way of finding that sort of thing out, but I guess anything to mask your consistent rape of the consumer wherein your prices don’t line up at all with what you claim, and by virtue of this state having more drivers than most anywhere else, is most often used to goose your profit margins so that we end up paying way more than “Sacramento policies” might’ve caused. Continue reading »

CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE ONE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 162026
 

(DGR is playing the game of review catch-up. Is today’s four-album installment the first inning of nine, or the first half of two? We shall see.)

I say this every time I’ve done it in its twice-yearly fashion, but smaller review collections like this are not ones that I feel good about doing. It doesn’t feel fair to the bands not paying the imagined debt I have with them, that I’ve done something so criminal as enjoy their music and yet not find the time within myself to dedicate toward the usual essay-long dissection and exploration of their newest release.

Yet, it is festival season now in Europe which means that metal’s biological clock is seeing fit to give birth to a ton of new releases. You may have noticed during the last month or so there has been a steady drip of reviews coming from my corner of the world, but truth be told, all of those were done just prior to our unwitting heavy metal May that we’ve created. The assumption being that they would run once a day so the site would always have something to post while we were out and about witnessing music or drinking ourselves into apocalyptic stupor.

You’ll note, that’s not how it happened, and instead the collective of releases that I had fished up from the world’s murky musical depths ran well into June. That doesn’t mean the exploration and listening stopped, either. Just as many were caught up in the nets or came out while we were on that aforementioned vacation, and we now find ourselves at the doorstep of a collection of music spanning months that needs to be caught up on.

You, dedicated reader of the site that you are, know next what is coming. It has traveled by many names: review roundup, things you may have missed, clearing the slate, material befitting the ethereal, music by swedes for long-haired plebes, a million other names that all translate to one basic idea – we need to catch up on stuff so we can maintain some semblance of being current yet refuse to leave these albums sitting in the dust. Continue reading »

ASYLUM TX: “CULTUS INOXIA”

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Jun 112026
 

(This is DGR’s review of the latest album from a Fort Worth band who now call themselves Asylum TX.)

Texas-based tech-death group Asylum – now operating under the name Asylum TX – are a band we’ve been following for some time now, iInitially as a group that showed a surprising amount of promise from seemingly out of nowhere in the death metal world, but then afterward because the group’s music kept making strange twists and turns.

Where Asylum TX were looking to take their music was not something we would have expected or guessed. 2021’s Sharpen, for instance, is a lengthy album that treads the line between tech-death and something more amateurishly explorative of various forms of hallucinogens. It was an hour-plus worth of music that felt like a group of stellar musicians who had fallen into a weird Alex Grey by way of Tool rabbit hole and then taking the wildest swing at making a death metal album about it. Prior EPs and their 2017 album Psalms Of Paralysis had been more straightforward in that regard, as Asylum bore the marks of more than one Cattle Decapitation-influenced twist on their sound.

Five years removed from Sharpen, however, and Asylum – again, wearing a new visage as Asylum TX – once again sound as if they’re a completely different band who’ve come up with something far more angular in its approach than a traditional tech-death release for their newest album Cultus Inoxia. Continue reading »

ARÜSPEX: “THE DEATH INSTINCT”

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Jun 092026
 

(Here’s a review by DGR of an album by the northern California crust band Arüspex, which was released in January by the band and later in the year on tape by Fiadh Productions.)

Crust-punk group Arüspex have had one of the longer tenures on the “to review” list that we are slowly working our way through now. While I can’t claim that I was there on the ground floor with the Sierra Nevada punks, for what little it is worth at the very least I’ve been digging into their newest release The Death Instinct since the end of March. Small potatoes when you consider that The Death Instinct came out in the middle of January, but what would we be if we didn’t have releases in our queue that we’ve missed the bus on so bad that the local municipalities have had time to defund the public transit system and replace the bus stops with lame “scenic” pottery and more lanes for cars?

Arüspex, like many groups, lie in an in-between realm within a couple of different genres lines, making them semi-difficult to define and an exciting listen because they’re equally somewhat hard to predict. Genre definitions themselves being for fools like us who build mood-playlists. Why do that when the whole album is a proverbial mood? The group’s core is very much that of a crust punk band, and the low-end-driven riff work and equally voracious thud on the drumkit no doubt fortifies that, but again, like many bands, a handful of other influences are also comfortably seated on the fringe of The Death Instinct that politely move it beyond mere sub-genrefication and into something vicious on its own terms. Continue reading »

SUNK: “FROM THE ABYSS”

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Jun 052026
 

(For the second day in a row we have a review from DGR that delves into sludge/doom, and the subject today is a February 2026 EP released by the UK band Sunk.)

The good ship NoCleanSinging, when taken out by your present captain here, will lower its trawl into the oceans of heavy metal and dredge up a variety of releases over the course of the year. So many are absorbed into its maw that there is always going to be something waiting in the wings to be covered whenever we can find time to eke one out. Combined with our desperately flailing attempts to stay current with what is coming out, we inevitably end up swamped, and so many of the reviews from yours truly will be focused on stuff that came out months ago that seem to be going unsung, yet still managed to capture the eye and ear.

Britain’s Sunk and their EP From The Abyss is one such release that managed to capture attention earlier in the year, and now we are grateful for the time to circle back and actually discuss this release as it proves that sludge isn’t just something we dredge up and clean out of our ship’s trawl, but is also something that has seen quite a bit of explosive growth in the last few years. Continue reading »

WEAVING SHADOWS: “EXISTENTIAL DECAY”

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Jun 042026
 

(Our DGR makes a rare (for him) foray into sludge/doom territory with the following review of a new album by the Nebraska crew Weaving Shadows, which they released in April of this year.)

Two things that have always been difficult to write about in this corner of the internet sewer: one, doom metal as a whole. Doom is a self-admitted perpetual blind spot for yours truly, having spent years ensconced in a comfortable bubble of moody and melancholic, pretty and polished, Euro doom usually on offer from the snow covered lands of the North. The often weed-obsessed, reverb-bathed, ’70s-influenced sects and the funeral-dirge cult, on the other hand, were often left on the wayside. A personal failing in the lack of patience for such a thing, and it is a failing that has led to vague overtures at attempts to fix – if nothing else than just to help serve as a custodial archivist of the cultural side of things.

The second: Nebraska, which is a place I have driven through a few times before, but my only lasting memories of the place are crossing the same river sixteen times, and the only man I’ve met whose name was “Guido” worked at a gas station there. So as you can see, we are starting from a tremendously strong context-heavy cultural touchpoint when it comes to the newest release from the Omaha-based doom metal band Weaving Shadows and their newest album Existential Decay.

Yet caustic sludge and doom knows no state boundaries nor humorous flippancy of an author on the internet. The language of plodding misery remains universal, bent and contorted through a variety of crawling tempos, distorted reverb, and feedback to drown in. If an album sounds closer to inching its way to the grave, all the better. Continue reading »

ABSURDEITY: “WE CAME, WE SAWED, WE CONQUERED”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jun 022026
 

(Once more we dig into DGR’s pre-festival archive of writings and today bring forth his review of a new album by the Sweden death metal band Absurdeity, which was released in February.)

This part of the year is one of our great opportunities to play catch-up with all the releases that we had absorbed into our collections over the years. The rivers are always overflowing on that front so it can seem a bit random, but the grab bag and shotgun approach has led to some wild weeks in terms of what we post around here. This one in particular is likely no different, and thus we take advantage of the time afforded to us to catch up with Sweden’s Absurdeity and their new album We Came, We Sawed, We Conquered.

Absurdeity is the project of Project Hate mainman Lord K. Philipson and long-running conspirator Jörgen Sandström, an exercise in creating straightforward and brutally focused death metal – in stark comparison to the expansive and humongous works that’ve taken place within the bounds of The Project Hate.

It is a wonder that K. Philipson has anything left in the tank after the multitude of year-over-year releases and ten-plus-minute songs that’ve been the hallmarks of his other project. But, there is something to be said to setting boundaries for yourself, and in the case of Absurdeity the goal was to create something raw and violent, and that is how we approach the aforementioned new album — as a collection of nine raw and violent songs that thankfully keep things concise and impactful, never straying anywhere over the four-minute mark. Continue reading »

DAWN OF ASHES: “ANATOMY OF SUFFERING”

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May 292026
 

(Before DGR and others around here embarked on two weeks of recent festival activity, he pollinated our archive of drafts with a great many reviews, and today we’ve plucked another one. This time his focus is the latest album from L.A.-based Dawn of Ashes, released in March of this year.)

Many, many moons ago – like last year for instance – I wrote about Dawn Of Ashes’ return to the industrial and electronic sound on their album Infecting The Scars. The group have gone through a few metamorphoses over the course of their career, careening into a symphonic black metal sound for two albums before settling on a harsher industrial metal approach for a few and creating something of a ‘scars’ trilogy, of which the current final act was the aforementioned return to the sound they started with on Infecting The Scars.

In listening to it, you could still hear parallels between the abrasive electronics, immensely catchy multi-layered keyboards, and effects-riddled vocals, and the more traditionally heavy metal influences that’ve played on the band’s shoulders for a while now. The distance between where they had started, where they wound up, and black metal’s taste for theatrics suddenly did not seem all that far from one another, and Dawn Of Ashes were acting as a bridge of sorts. Continue reading »

VISION OF TERROR: “DEMO 2026”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
May 272026
 

(Here’s DGR’s review of the debut demo from a pulverizing U.S./Canada grind band called Vision of Terror. It will take you more time to read the review than to listen to the demo. But you should read the review anyway, ‘cuz it’s fun.)

You’d think by this point the idea of reviewing a grindcore release and giving it the same sort of treatment we would give to a full album would cease to be funny, but never let it be said that we aren’t a bunch of children trapped in aging and frail bodies. Because, the idea is still funny – especially if we can double up on said humor by reviewing a demo as well – given that grindcore is one of the battle-hardened genres that’ve gone through the ritual scarification required to be the musical equivalent of an auditory tantrum.

The fact that the songs are short, usually three to four parts total, and generally speaking reflect a tremendous amount of passion but not a lot of technique, is one of the defining marks of a major root of the grindcore tree. That idea has been part of the genre’s virulent strain since the very beginning, like a DNA marker that allows us to figure out that someone had sex with a hippo four hundred years ago and that is why you now have to deal with a weeks-long coughing fit.

No matter what gets added to it, whether it’s the NCS-fave hardcore punk or even melodeath riffwork that in combination tends to result in the sort of manic and explosive material accredited to modern day grind groups like Rotten Sound, you are always guaranteed that short burst of energy and head-spinning drumming by the time you’re done. If it doesn’t sound like the band are racing against the time it takes for the venue to cut power to the stage, then what’re we even accomplishing? Continue reading »

SCUMBAG: “SCUMLORD”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
May 262026
 

(Our writer DGR obviously had a shit-ton of fun listening to Scumbag’s new EP, and probably just as much fun coming up with the word salad needed to describe the experience. See for yourselves. And listen for yourselves.)

Every year while questing in the wilds of heavy metal we find ourselves discussing a new death metal discovery out of New York. It goes without saying that New York as a state and its surrounding areas have a deep, deep, deep history with death metal and has long codified its own regional flavoring of it with mega-sized headlining bands that seem to inspire everyone nearby. You could name the greats for days but it’s likely you’ve known your chosen few already.

One of the reliable things about the area though is that for as boneheaded and dumb as death metal can be, New York, through its adaptations of brutal death and slam, has created something that exists on polar opposite ends of the spectrum, equal parts insanely technical and impressive and just about as brain-dead as a boulder. The megalopolis city on its own is a hive of activity. Continue reading »

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