DIVERGENCE: “IN CYCLED AEONS”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 292025
 

(Here is DGR‘s review of the latest EP from New York-based Divergence, released last month.)

Following the paths charted by heavy metal’s history has long been a hobby around here, with others having taken up the travelling pack and walking stick and played musical cartographer as the genre became less one defining sound and more of a filter that conventional music was squashed through, only to have it emerge as its own ‘heavy metal’ counterpart. One of the things that is quickly revealed by such travels, though, is that heavy metal has a lot of divergences – four at least, if you trust the ole metal archives these days – and a person could easily lead a life in which many of those are ignored in favor of specializing in one or two breaks from the path.

This is how you have people who could easily name every sludge band to ever emerge from the muck of musical misery but would fail in separating a single song between bands like Sonata Arctica and Blind Guardian. It’s how you could lead a life in which you may never cross paths with a single band bearing the name of Divergence, even though there have been a few throughout the years with a concentration of them based on the East Coast.

This current Divergence then, hails from New York and plays a very technically infused style of death metal, with regional bleedover for taste when it comes to heavy, chugging riffs and a monstrous groove bordering on the overwhelming. Continue reading »

SCALP: “NOT WORTHY OF HUMAN COMPASSION”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 262025
 

(Scalp‘s new album Not Worthy of Human Compassion detonated last month with help from Closed Casket Activities. We’re detonating DGR‘s review of it now.)

One of the most consistently difficult challenges in heavy metal writing is to listen to an album like Scalp’s newest release Not Worthy Of Human Compassion and then try to avoid using the word ‘abrasive’ to describe the experience within your first few sentences. Acknowledging this doesn’t make it any easier nor does it absolve one of committing said sin.

Scalp hail from a charged grindcore and powerviolence scene, one whose music was given a turbo-boost in both increasing extremity and publicity during the ‘locked in our houses with just our thoughts’ COVID-era of music. From 2020 on we saw – and this is putting it politely – a lot of projects whose main goal was to reflect the ugliness of humanity at that particular point in its history while also serving as an outlet for an expulsion of emotion that, plainly, had nowhere to go. Many groups that had already been toiling in these mines – which included a lot of crossover with the more nihilistic black metal side of things as well – suddenly had themselves launched into a semi-cultural zeitgeist and used it to full effect.

Needless to say, recent years have become a stellar nursery for albums that are outright caustic, confrontational, overwhelmingly aggressive, and nuclear-hot on the intensity front while often clocking in under the twenty-minute mark. More traditional songwriting would barely be in the fourth song by the time many of these albums have left themselves a smouldering heap on the ground. Not Worthy Of Human Compassion is the newest addition to that particular pile. Continue reading »

SOUL DEMISE: “AGAINST THE ABYSS”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 212025
 

(DGR finally caught up with the German melodic death metal band Soul Demise via their latest album released this past March by Apostasy Records, and what follows here is his extensive review of that newest record.)

Much of what we do around these here parts is taking bands at first blush. Such is the nature of discovery; we cannot be experts in absolutely everything and were we to trot out the mighty statistics of just how many bands exist across this pale blue dot of ours it would be more of a sermon about being crushed under the weight of inevitability than anything valuable. There is a mammoth amount of music out there, and as self-cast spelunkers we are just as likely to cross a band when they are wee bairns in the musical world as we are to come across a group who are deep in their career.

When such a case does arise, we do try to make an attempt to look backward for context but that can only take one as far as one can be thrown, and the flesh is so spongy and weak these days. Instead, you get that aforementioned first glance at a group – a current-eye snapshot of a band who have enough releases to their name and a lengthy enough career that there are going to justifiably be fans of a group who are mind-boggled that we’re just getting around to them now.

And so we encounter Germany’s Soul Demise, who have existed in their Soul Demise form since 1998 and, barring some lengthy gaps in their recent two releases, were on a pretty consistent clip of music up until 2010. The group’s newest album Against The Abyss is also the first time yours truly has ever crossed paths with them. Continue reading »

AVERSIONS CROWN: “A VOICE FROM THE OUTER DARK”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 192025
 

(On August 5th Nuclear Blast released a new three-song EP by Aversions Crown, and below you’ll find DGR‘s review of the beast.)

The story of Australian deathcore group Aversions Crown‘s career is going to be a fascinating one to dive into when they call it a day. They may eventually find a modicum of stability before things wrap up just yet, but for now Aversions Crown are a band who have four full-lengths and a smattering of EPs to their name, and ever since the release of their album Tyrant, have had a different vocalist in each one.

Whether it is by virtue of the frontman shuffle that tends to happen to many a deathcore group or the recruitment of one into a more popular group, Aversions Crown have had a different talent behind the microphone for the requisite nigh-unintelligible sounds nearly every time. Continue reading »

CASTRATOR: “CORONATION OF THE GROTESQUE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Aug 152025
 

(Today is the day when Dark Descent Records releases the second album by the death metal band Castrator, and to help spotlight the event we present DGR‘s review and a full stream of the album.)

Sometimes, you just have an extrasensory idea that an album is going to be one you’re going to enjoy. It’s not enough to launch your own late night hotline to allow people to speak to dead relatives but wow, does it feel close to it. The combination of artwork, genre, musicianship involved if you’re extra nerdy like us around here, and sometimes even the cover song in the tracklisting manage to align the planets just right and you just know that this is one you’ll like.

Listening to such an album then becomes an exercise in watching a detonation cord burn. The lead up to the final explosion is exciting but it’s a tense exercise watching it burn down when you’re waiting ever so intently for that moment when the album catches fire for you and becomes one that you lock in with. In the case of Castrator and their new album Coronation Of The Grotesque, thankfully that wait is not tremendously long. In fact, a rough estimate would place that initial explosion around song two, and if not then, by song four, and if not then there’s a pretty good one at song six and if not… well you can guess how this is going to go. Continue reading »

STARLIT PYRE: “VEINS OF SULFUR”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Aug 132025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of Veins of Sulfur, a debut EP by the French band Starlit Pyre that was released last month.)

Observing the changes and outside perspectives people bring to melodeath has often been as interesting as the permutations people make of the music itself. It’s a long-been-known quantity, and as we’ve witnessed cycles upon cycles of retrograde nostalgia and the ‘influenced by the influenced by’ crowd slowly becoming crowd-becoming forces of their own, so too does the genre change. Not necessarily evolving, but new strains are born or echo outwards into the wider metalsphere.

Given melodeath’s already pretty blatant mass-market trappings, the chosen aesthetic for some groups to approach the genre’s two-step-heavy guitar leads and thrashier rhythms to make it appear ‘refined’ qualifies for a certain amount of sense. We have grown older, so too does the genre. We’re past the days of snot-nosed kids sticking the middle finger up at a bunch of old folks in favor of an ambitious wildness and an ear for the catchy.

The calling cards that we’re following down that path are pretty recognizable as well, one being an ever-present keyboard layer in the band’s music… and the other? Well, sometimes that other one is uniforms, and French melodeath group Starlit Pyre seem to have both in spades with their July EP Veins Of Sulfur, a solid seventeen-minute block of melodeath that goes on a whirlwind tour through the genre before quietly sneaking out of the back of the room. Continue reading »

CTHULUMINATI: “TENTACULA”

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Jul 312025
 

(In March of this year the Dutch avant-garde metal band Cthuluminati released Tentacula, a Faustian concept album about Thomas, an illusionist who was granted his power through a most nefarious deal with the ancient deity Tentacula, and Thomas’ subsequent (and unsuccessful) efforts to expose the truth and make amends. Our writer DGR developed a “weird fascination” for the record, and he attempts to explain why in the following review.)

Waste Of Space Orchestra‘s one full-length album Syntheosis came out six years ago, yet I think about it constantly. Syntheosis is an album that I think serves as a prime personal example of being fascinating while at the same time it is so far either ahead of me or just off the beaten path of my musical sphere that I just don’t fully get it. It challenges me on a listening level but at the same time I’m not sure after listening to it that I’ve ever enjoyed myself – yet I am happy that it exists as a reflection of heavy metal’s ambition as well as its mark on the overall art of the genre.

For every painting of recognizable pop art and soup cans, we need our avant-garde weirdos whose ambition far outstrips either the listener’s abilities or the musicians’ own. With no one willing to poke and prod at musical boundaries we’re left with nothing but an already well-laid-out playground and recognizable throughways. Eventually, everything becomes musical suburbia with the same nuclear family and picket fence, with nothing left for us to discuss other than who is fucking who.

The Netherlands gifted us an album of a similar vein a few months back in the form of Cthuluminati and their newest release Tentacula. While far less meditative, psychedelics-obsessed, and psychosis-inducing than the aforementioned art-project (though not by much), I have found that I am weirdly fascinated with Tentacula for much the same reasons. Continue reading »

COFFIN FEEDER: “BIG TROUBLE”

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  No Responses »
Jul 232025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the debut album from the Belgian death-dealers Coffin Feeder.)

We’ve joked about it over the years but there does exist something in the vocalist world that we’ve referred to as the “Sven effect”, wherein any band that has a feature from vocalist Sven de Caluwé is going to inevitably sound like one of his projects. Him being one of the more consistent and prolific guest vocalists out there certainly doesn’t help matters either; the guy is just so recognizable that he could almost never commit a crime because someone would be able to pick him out of a lineup while in another country.

The recipe is simple too: if you take Sven and put him over some sort of grinding death metal or deathcore riff, inevitably it is going to sound like it has emerged from his wide-reaching works within the infrastructure of his biggest project, Aborted.

You have to work very, very hard in order to avoid this, though a handful of bands have managed to do so over the years. Most recently and impressively, the progressive death metal group Eternal Storm featured him on their song “A Dim Illusion” and it actually played out more like the band bent him to their will rather than the other way around.

But does this same effect exist when it comes to Sven‘s own projects and the works he has brought into his orbit over the years? Is one person’s taste for rapid-fire blast and grinding guitar enough that all of them become one amorphous mass or is there enough on offer that part of the interest will come from hearing how a particular sculpture might’ve been crafted in spite of one guy’s spotlight being so suffocatingly bright that even when it’s not his choice, any similarities to his career are going to fall into his lap?

It has to be vexing at times, but by that same token perhaps it is worth it to just throw caution to the wind. Continue reading »

GRAND CADAVER: “THE ROT BENEATH”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Jul 222025
 

(Today we present DGR‘s review of Grand Cadaver‘s new EP The Rot Beneath, which will be out on August 15th via Majestic Mountain Records.)

When you’re spread among many projects in the way Dark Tranquillity‘s Mikael Stanne has been over the past few years, there is a chance of one of them going consistently underrated in the face of all the other material being put out. The throwback riffwork of swede-death project Grand Cadaver has flown under the radar among many in metal fandom, and it has reached a point where you can’t help but wonder if people are unintentionally robbing themselves of an awesome time by just breezing past the group and chalking them up as another band pining for older days.

Grand Cadaver have proven to be a rock-solid foundation of music since their founding in 2020; the five years since have seen the group chalking up an array of singles, EPs, and two full albums to their name, all of which, yes, look backward in order to progress forward, and have either been stealthily melodic or pushed at the boundaries of floor-stomping death metal enough to keep the events interesting. Continue reading »

EMBERTHRONE: “CURSIVE”

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Jul 112025
 

(Sacramento-based DGR reviews a very recently released EP by Sacramento-based Emberthrone, and comes away happy.)

Sacramento’s Emberthrone are one we’ve kept a curious eye on for a little bit now. Part of a small-town-sized wave of deathcore-leaning projects that sprang up in the lockdown years wherein a lot of people suddenly had a bunch of free time out of nowhere for some reason, Emberthrone seemed like a solid union with a lot of potential just based off of its lineup alone at the time. Uniting some of the scene’s workhorses for vocals and drums in the form of Monte Bernard and Gabe Seeber, the group’s complete portrait included bassist Quentin Garcia and guitarist Martin Bianchini.

Their group’s four-song debut Godless Wonder found them a home on Seek & Strike, a label that has slowly developed an arc for being the home of boutique ass-kickers in prefix-core heavy form. Godless Wonder was a reliably solid brick of music that fell perfectly in line with a lot of the bruisers that’ve emerged from California’s filing cabinet over the years. In the three years hence, though, the lineup for Emberthrone has remained fairly solid save for what seems to be a new face behind the kit, translating into an interesting round two for the band.

Now more matured and gelled together as a band, Emberthrone returned in early-July with a second EP bearing the name Cursive that seems to be forged by experience and a stronger vision of what sort of project they want to be, while also much more determined to throw its heft around than they did before. Continue reading »

 Older Entries  Newer Entries