CARRION VAEL: “CANNIBALS ANONYMOUS”

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May 222024
 

(Here, DGR devotes about 1400 words to extolling the virtues of Carrion Vael‘s newest album, which is out now on Unique Leader Records.)

There was a period maybe five or six years ago where a band like Carrion Vael would’ve found a good handful of compatriots within their current label home of Unique Leader Records. Their brand of high-speed melodeath, light implementing of symphonics to help break up the constantly whirring lead guitar, and tech-death hybridization has gone under a few names throughout the years – even cheekily referred to around here once as ‘black dahlia murder-core’ – but there was one pretty distinct carrier of that strain of metal, and at the time many of those groups would’ve been ensconced within the loving brutal bosom of Unique Leader.

However, things changed and something interesting happened within real time as the label’s priorities seemed to shift, favoring the low-and-slow approach of many up-and-coming deathcore groups, or leaning heavily into the brutal deathcore monstrosities that were being born out of former brutal death and gore-focused bands.

Nowadays the label is a tri-headed monstrosity of its own and many of the groups who were playing the high-speed, highly-technical style found a home in labels like The Artisan Era – whose own bands like Inferi found themselves leading the charge in recruitment – and Willowtip seems plenty happy to cast their net in those waters as well. Continue reading »

CONVULSING: “PERDURANCE”

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May 212024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new album from the Australian one-person band Convulsing, which was released this past March.)

If we can offer a bit of advice – armchair psychiatrists that we are around here – do not let anyone ever tell you that you’re going to have a good time with Convulsing‘s third album Perdurance.

Perdurance is not a ‘good times, happy fun times’ album. It’s a dissonant and ugly piece of work, one that is abrasive enough to smooth barnacles off of a ship. Perdurance is cavernous and noisey, Perdurance is expansive and heavy, but under no circumstances could you look at the bent contortions of Convulsing‘s third album and think to yourself ‘well, that’ll be a pleasant trip through the void’. Continue reading »

ULCERATE: “CUTTING THE THROAT OF GOD”

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May 202024
 

(Below you will find DGR‘s extensive review of the newest album from NZ’s Ulcerate, in advance of its June 14 release by Debemur Morti Productions.)

Weirdly enough, I had to check to see who had penned the last few reviews for Ulcerate’s releases as they’ve crossed our desks in the burnt-out husk that is more colloquially known as the ‘NCS Office’. The situation was one of those, ‘I’m pretty sure it was me, I am not a thousand percent sure it was me’.

You’ll forgive someone, of course, who has been spending a decent block of their heavy metal writing ‘career’ within the distant chasms of the Ulcerate discography for experiencing some sense of disassociation with the self. It turns out, it has in fact been yours truly for the most part, which means we can now add ‘Semi-Expert on Ulcerate’ to the resume, which’ll be only the third or fourth strangest thing on there, placed right up next to ‘balloon animal fluffer’. Continue reading »

WASTEWALKER: “TRAPPED BETWEEN REALMS OF SUFFERING”

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May 172024
 

(In April of this year Sacramento-based Wastewalker released a new EP dedicated to their late guitarist Nate Graham, and long-time Wastewalker follower DGR delves into it in the following review.)

Sacramento’s tech-death group Wastewalker have been put through the wringer lately. The band, finally somewhat ascendant after the release of a solid sophomore album in Vengeance Of The Lowborn, suffered from the tragic passing of guitarist Nate Graham in mid-2023. While the band were never short on talent, the group were put in a hard place on multiple fronts, yet in that time somehow managed to soldier on. The band returned in early April of 2024 with a three-song EP entitled Trapped Between Realms Of Suffering – their first as a four-piece act.

Wastewalker have been a slow burn, launching out of the gate with Funeral Winds back in 2016 and then growing into their sound from there. Funeral Winds had an air of expulsion to it, like the band had to get a ton out of their system and exorcise a cadre of demons before they could truly evolve into what is Wastewalker. Funeral Winds felt like it was moving in twenty different directions all at once, overstuffed with ideas – and sometimes even lyrically – and interesting on the front that there was a lot of promise there; Wastewalker just had to hone in on what was really working within those bounds. Continue reading »

PARTY CANNON: “INJURIES ARE INEVITABLE”

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May 162024
 

(DGR fires off the following review of the latest discharge from the Scottish band Party Cannon, which is out now on the Unique Leader label.)

The thing to keep in mind when listening to Party Cannon and their newest release Injuries Are Inevitable is that it is a supremely stupid collection of music. This has been the band’s M.O for the course of their career; the logo proclaims it, the album art proclaims it, and their album titles and song titltes spell it out for those of us denser than the band.

Granted, proclaiming yourself as being massively moronic does not make yourself critic-proof and portraying your music as being the cranial equivalent of an empty, infinite void doesn’t excuse endless braindead riffage – but it does soften the blow quite a bit.

You know upon entrance that Party Cannon‘s music will not be a high-minded exercise in philosophy. It is not something you’ll be sitting down to with a nice glass of sipping whiskey and a pipe full of fine tobacco and ‘appreciating’. Unless, your idea of this exercise involves putting all those things in a bowl, smashing it with a rock, and eating the shards and splinters.

Injuries Are Inevitable is an exercise in ‘dumb’ and just the group’s latest exploration in how far they can push that particular label without morphing into something completely different. Continue reading »

RIVERS OF NIHIL: “CRIMINALS”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
May 152024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of a new EP by Pennsylvania-based Rivers of Nihil, which is out now on Metal Blade Records.)

Strangely enough, writing about Rivers Of Nihil‘s newest EP Criminals feels like a little bit of a ‘gimme’. The three songs on Criminals – none of which is a cover of the titular Katatonia song – were all ostensibly recorded during the same experimental session for the band, one which saw the newly restructured lineup of the group getting together to see just what they could do and where they might be headed post-The Work.

They were then slowly drip-fed to listeners over the course of a little under a year, so listeners will have an immediate familiarity with prog-rock minded “The Sub-Orbital Blues” and the slightly more recent stomper in “Hellbirds”, which means the big draw for most people will be the unveiling of “Criminals” as a song, as well as the ability to take in all three in one go, providing an intriguing glimpse at Rivers Of Nihil‘s current headspace and lyrical inspirations, as well as peek through a smudged lense of where their future paths may take them. Continue reading »

ROTTING CHRIST: “PRO XRISTOU”

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May 102024
 

(We present DGR‘s review of Pro Xristou, a new album by the Greek legends Rotting Christ that will be released by Season of Mist on May 24th.)

If you’ve been following Rotting Christ for some time now you’re likely well aware the in spite of some decent-sized gaps in time between albums the group are notoriously prolific; always with a song on hand for a small EP, the occasional one-off, sometimes even a book. They are a font of music, and one glance at an overall collected works reveals just how much has been created by the group over the course of a decades-spanning career.

Much of this is due to project mainman Sakis Tolis – the voice and guitar of the group – who has been one of, if not the, primary songwriter of the Greek black metal heathens for most of its existence. Since the release of 2010’s AEALO, Sakis has shown that he knows his way around a melodic and folk-leaning guitar riff. It had long been a part of Rotting Christ‘s sound and often is referenced as being part of a particular ‘era’ of the band – imagine having a group that has eras – but they really came to the forefront on AEALO, an album whereby Rotting Christ not only defined a sound but also became defined by it. Continue reading »

GOTHMINISTER: “PANDEMONIUM II: BATTLE OF UNDERWORLDS”

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May 082024
 

(DGR has detoured off most of our well-beaten paths to bring us his review of the latest offering from the Norwegian band Gothminister, which was released late last week by AFM Records.)

I recently crossed the twenty-year mark of following Norway’s Gothminister, the result of an initial missing of the musical bus years ago and then a hurricane-force tour through their specific music scene way back in 2004 – courtesy of a gentleman I used to play Twisted Metal 2 PC online with. Having been sent “The Holy One”, it was difficult to not get hooked on Gothminister‘s hybrid of dancy-electronics and industrial metal.

It’s a hybrid that has held on strong too, even throughout a good-sized handful of lineup shifts over the course of the band’s career. They’ve become a comfort-food band for me, the music not overwhelmingly challenging and metal enough to scare the ‘normies’ among us but otherwise digestible near-pop in its assault. Sing-song worthy with a march to them, Gothminister have been a group that – for me anyway – are a tremendous amount of fun in their embrace of camp and caricature.

Since we have a little bit of free space in the release calender there was a goblin-esque part of me that declared ‘what if you did manage to get them on to the front of the site?’, knowing full well they’d likely be spaced in between death metal heavy enough to collapse buildings or black metal sharp enough to scrape concrete smooth. “What if…,” said goblin proclaimed, “we just reviewed the group’s most recent release even though there’s been little to no mention of them before on the site?”

“But it’s a sequel album,” I said. “We’ve never even covered the first Pandemonium“. “Even more funny,” stated goblin-DGR, “because now people have to wrap their heads around the idea of Pandemonium II: Battle Of The Underworlds with little to no explanation or context of what preeeded it”

And alas, here we are. Continue reading »

WHEEL: “CHARISMATIC LEADERS”

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May 062024
 

(We start a new week at our site with DGR‘s enthusiastic review of the new album by the Anglo-Finnish prog metal band Wheel, released late last week by InsideOut Music.)

Normally we try to keep the veil up when we cover a group, to keep the author’s personality out of the writing but in this case I feel that I have to place my neck on the chopping block in order to justify this one. If you’ll indulge more of my wanderings out of the metal world for a bit, let’s take a journey with the band Wheel.

Our history with this progressive rock/metal group is a long one. The Finnish/English combination have been hanging around the rafters of the NoCleanSinging halls for a bit now, largely due to my own fandom for their album Moving Backwards. Since then, I’ve tried to get a post or two up about them whenever they have something new to offer and in that time we’ve covered their album Resident Human – one of two albums to reference Heinlein’s writings that year – and their recent-ish EP Rumination, which was released upon them signing to major progressive rock label InsideOut.

The group’s combination of heavier metallic sounds, progressive rock, and yes, even some heftier guitar bending of the djent variety at times, is one that has allowed the band to create both short songs verging on radio rock with plenty of hooks and longer progressive numbers that have many times pulled back the curtain on shared similarities with the band Tool. Even with this in place there has always been room for Wheel to surprise, and that is still the case when it comes to the group’s newest album Charismatic Leaders. Continue reading »

MY DYING BRIDE: “A MORTAL BINDING”

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May 012024
 

(About 10 days ago Nuclear Blast released the 15th studio album from My Dying Bride, and DGR has sat with it long enough to now provide his thoughts below.)

My Dying Bride‘s newest release A Mortal Binding is a surprisingly turbulent album by My Dying Bride standards. Though My Dying Bride have been an adaptive beast over the course of a long-running career, the group have cycled back around into an interesting amalgamation of modern day doom and their early miserable forms.

Yet My Dying Bride have been the civilized and staid older-sibling of the doom scene, awash with despair yet seeming more ‘refined’ than their cohort bands. No stranger to longform song writing either, it hadn’t been until 2020’s The Ghost Of Orion that they forged themselves into a stately yet concise version of what they’d been before. Granted, they almost immediately followed that up with Macabre Cabaret, an EP with a ten-minute song as its opener, but it seemed like My Dying Bride had found a strong comfort zone with the fragile and mournful atmospheres of The Ghost Of Orion.

Which is what makes A Mortal Binding quite the followup. Continue reading »

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