DISTASTE: “DER ERTRAEGER UND DAS FLEISCH”

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Oct 302023
 

(In this review DGR revisits an old favorite, the German band Distaste and their new album, released a few weeks ago by FDA Records.)

We’ve had a long history with Austria’s Distaste, as we’ve watched them evolve their form of blast-happy grindcore, relentlessly focused on short songs and straightforward hammering, to a blackened death-inspired group with a light sludge flavoring, to the current incarnation of the band obsessed with fury, hellfire, and portmanteaus of their chosen language.

Previously, Distaste had done pretty well for themselves with albums like Of Abyss-Hearts And Falsity and Black Age Of Nihil but they really started to come into their own along about the time of the Rotten Cold/Distaste split and the Todt EP. Adopting a strong guitar-lead segment did the group well, adding another element to the otherwise whirlwind chaos and well-spoken language of grindcore circle-pit throwdowns, and Deibel was a strong culmination of that. Continue reading »

AUTARKH: “EMERGENT”

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Oct 272023
 

(In the following review our writer DGR takes a deep dive — a very deep dive — into the strange musical worlds created by the Dutch band Autarkh on their new album Emergent, which is set for release on November 10th by Season of Mist.)

One would suspect that a band like Autarkh are going to feature on heavy metal websites more due to their ethos of being as experimental and unapproachable as possible than their particular chosen instrument configuration. The wildly artistic group were founded on blurring multiple genre lines, and that includes the world of heavy metal, with large handfuls of other things – difficult to describe as they may be.

The group’s sophomore album Emergent walks further down that pathway, metal not just because the band like themselves a distorted guitar, or their history as being a branch budded off the tree that was Dodecahedron, or the fact that they’ve done a drone/doom set at the more high-minded world of Roadburn under the name Autarkh III – as far as I know, there is no Autarkh II: Autarkh Takes Manhattan out there just yet – but the band will also likely grab ears among metal’s crowd due to their usage of it as a style to further accomplish whatever strange and haunted otherworldly goals they may have had in mind. Continue reading »

TIDES OF KHARON: “ANCIENT SLEEPER”

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Oct 262023
 

(DGR has finally completed a review of the latest EP, released last June, by Tides of Kharon from Edmonton, Alberta, Canada.)

Believe it or not we actually do have a history with Canadian group Tides Of Kharon. Up to this point we’ve covered every EP the band have released – no full-length albums as of yet – most recently the 2021 release of Titanomachy alongside British group Ghosts of Atlantis in a two-fer review collective. June saw the Greek-mythology inspired melodeath group unleash a new one in the form of Ancient Sleeper, closing out a two-year gap of silence from the band in exchange for another five songs and near half-hour of music.

Tides Of Kharon‘s chosen release method feels a bit like checking in with the band as they forge and hammer new material, working on their sound and experimenting with the wide vareity of approaches that the genre has available to them. Both expert and continual student, Tides Of Kharon absorb into their sound as much as they issue forth, all in service of the particular tales they have chosen to craft a song around this time. Ancient Sleeper then, could be considered the newest check-in with the band. Continue reading »

INSOMNIUM: “SONGS OF THE DUSK”

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Oct 242023
 

(Our writer DGR tends to wait until after records have been released before reviewing them, even when he’s had them in his clutches long in advance of the release date. Today, however, he’s gotten the jump on Insomnium‘s new EP, which won’t be out (on Century Media) until November 3rd.)

Earlier this year, Insomnium unleashed a great full-length album in the form of Anno 1696. We dove very deep into the album around the time of its release, exploring its concept, guest musicians, and overall execution. We had a pretty good time with it and found that the band do well when they have a concept to dedicate themselves to, after initially seeming a little adrift musically, content to do a standard Insomnium act that didn’t push the band.

Regular, straight-shooting Insomnium is still pretty good but there’s always the worry of diminishing returns. In some ways it seems like the band themselves are aware of the times when they do settle into a groove for too long. They’ve gotten pretty good at evolving in one form or another, and Anno 1696 did well lifting the band back up and recharging them.

If there was one feeling that hung in the air a bit with Anno, it was that the album was surprisingly concise – from a group that just prior had multiple songs stretching into the seven-minute range – and wrapped up rather neatly. If, however, you were able to wrap your grubby mitts around one of the limited editions of Anno 1696 then you had access to the three songs being presented here in an addendum EP, Songs Of The Dusk. Continue reading »

WORMHOLE: “ALMOST HUMAN”

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Oct 232023
 

(This is DGR‘s review of the newest album by Baltimore-based Wormhole, which came out late last month on Season of Mist.)

With a new home on a new label, a new genre-approach, and a sizeable shift in the lineup, the Wormhole that is present on their late-September release Almost Human is an entirely different beast than the Wormhole that existed three years prior.

The guitar and drum positions haven’t changed, remaining solid since the days of 2020’s The Weakest Among Us, but the band are now joined by journeyman death growler Julian Kersey (Aegeaon, a few stints live for The Faceless) and bassist Basil Chiasson for a surprisingly different take on the group’s previous head-spinning hybrid of brutal death and slam. Continue reading »

CANNIBAL CORPSE: “CHAOS HORRIFIC”

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Oct 202023
 

(Here’s DGR‘s review of the new Cannibal Corpse album, which is out now on Metal Blade Records.)

In all the decade-plus I’ve been writing for this site – try not to think about that too much – and metal in general, I don’t think I’ve ever taken the chance to write about a Cannibal Corpse album. With a career that has also spanned multiple decades and with a fair bit of cultural cachet to their name outside of heavy metal in general, Cannibal Corpse were long a cultural pillar before I’d even considered pursuing this as a way to distract from the outside world.

You don’t reach a point like that without having the talent to back it up though, because even if Cannibal Corpse had decided to rest on their laurels after their first few releases, you’d be hard pressed to say whether or not they’d still be as big now. The thing with Cannibal Corpse is that although they’ve been known mostly for gore-soaked lyrics, horrific artwork, and movie cameos, is the band are shockingly consistent with their output. They found a core blueprint that worked for them ages ago and have stuck close to it, guaranteeing an overall discography that is surprisingly solid – even if the actual surprises might come further and further apart nowadays. Continue reading »

STRIGOI: “BATHED IN A BLACK SUN”

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Oct 192023
 

(Strigoi‘s new EP is set for release by Season of Mist on November 3rd, and so it’s a good time for DGR to share his thoughts about it — which he does here.)

The trend in recent years of bands collecting all of the material that did not make it into an album’s main sequence and releasing it on an EP later is one that I’ve particularly enjoyed. There’s a variety of reasons why songs won’t make the main cut, whether it be that the band felt they didn’t quite fit, or they were set aside for various global demands – some markets often requiring extra songs, for instance – or others were jammed onto the end of an album for deluxe editions released alongside the regular albums.

Whatever the reason may be, in recent years you’ve stood a pretty good shot of those songs being just as good as the ones on the main album, so when a band is later able to compile those into an EP of some sort, then the purchase is near guaranteed.

Strigoi are the latest to hop on that particular bus with their new collection of Bathed In A Black Sun, comprising five songs that didn’t make it onto the crawling doom of Viscera last year, and now about to be released into the wild. Continue reading »

DESOLATE SPHERE: “MALEDICTUS”

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Oct 172023
 

(On October 13th Necrogenesis Records released a new EP by the Japanese band Desolate Sphere, and it caught our writer DGR by surprise in more ways than one, as he explains in the following enthusiastic review.)

Who doesn’t love themselves a good ole’ fashioned Friday the 13th release date? Even across waters and international borders the idea is fun….or most likely lost, since Western world superstitions probably rest at the corner of fuck all and jack shit in terms of how much Desolate Sphere might be aware of it.

But needless to say, while we’ve often portrayed the date as being a harbinger of bad luck and decent slasher films in this corner of the world, last Friday gifted us a pleasant surprise in the form of Maledictus, a new EP from a newer death metal project hailing from Japan.

Lesser creatures out there might admit that they were drawn in almost by their album art alone but we…..oh, that’s what we did too? Oh, well in that case…with our attention initially grabbed entirely by the fiery and bright orange album art, Desolate Sphere‘s Maledictus proceeded to surprise on multiple fronts, though the tracklist being only five songs and the average tempo of every song hovering just shy of blisteringly fast was certainly a bonus. Continue reading »

EXHUMED: “BEYOND THE DEAD”

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Oct 162023
 

(Below is DGR‘s review of a new EP by Exhumed, which is out now on Relapse Records.)

Still catching up on everything that has passed through the void between the two eardrums in the last few months. This is going to be a weird/wild journey by the time we call it.

Exhumed‘s sudden release of their new EP Beyond The Dead came as a pleasant surprise. Their album To The Dead ranked pretty high with yours truly, and just about any time the band are tearing through a bevy of death and thrash riffs with a high-low vocal interchange tends to leave us in a happy place.

Exhumed have traversed through a few genres over the year but always within a familiar heirarchy; that a band calling themselves Exhumed are familiar with the worlds of deathgrind and goregrind should come as no surprise. Beyond The Dead comes from the grindcore songwriting philosophy of sudden-appearance/sudden-exit, and that includes the way Beyond The Dead appeared, with the band releasing it at the tail end of August just as they were gearing up to hit the road. Continue reading »

THE AMENTA: “PLAGUE OF LOCUS”

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Oct 132023
 

(On October 19th Debemur Morti Productions will release a new EP by The Amenta (albeit a 40-minute “EP”). We’ve already showered its advance tracks with attention, but today we have a review of the entire release by DGR.)

The fun part about any release from Australia’s avante-garde black metal clusterfuck The Amenta has always been the opening paragraph wherein the author spends a good five or six sentences tripping over their own feet while attempting to describe what The Amenta is. To say that the band have existed off the beaten path would be putting it politely; instead it’s more like The Amenta saw the ‘path’ and proceeded to beat it to death.

Early on, the group saw various permutations into and out of the symphonic black metal scene and their first few albums are jammed full of big sweeping synths, various noises, and plenty of riffs for their chosen vocalist at the time to soar over, but there’s always been a stubborn part of the band that has refused to be put down, and beginning with their V01D EP, the band have long settled into ‘fuck it’ mode and let their artistic tendencies run mad. Continue reading »

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