OMINOUS RUIN: “REQUIEM”

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May 062025
 

(Below we present DGR‘s review of a new album by California-based Ominous Ruin in advance of its release this coming Friday by Willowtip Records.)

Is it possible for a band to do a complete lateral in their music and yet feel as if they are starting from the same spot they stepped away from? Bay Area tech-death group Ominous Ruin have been around a little over ten years now, yet it sure does feel like with their new album Requiem the group have stepped out to soft-relaunch themselves.

You’d almost never guess it based off the gap of close to four years between releases – and a lot can happen in four years, mind – but it’s as if the Ominous Ruin crew effectively never stopped. Instead, they just did a step to the side and started over again with about the same bar in quality that they established on their album Amidst Voices That Echo In Stone as the starting point. The result is interesting, less cross-pollination among three different subsections of the tome of death metal and instead a laser-like focus on one particular chapter, the tech-death section. Continue reading »

HATE: “BELLUM REGIIS”

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Apr 302025
 

(We present DGR‘s review of the newest album from the Polish titans Hate, which is set for release this coming Friday, May 2nd, by
Metal Blade Records.)

Poland’s Hate have been a musical monolith for blackened death metal for over two decades now. They’ve become a lighthouse by which you can orient yourself, ever fixed upon land and as steady as the world could allow it to be. With thirteen albums in their arsenal, Adam and the crew of the machine named Hate have been one of, if not the most reliable sources of extreme metal around for a long time. While erecting an unscalable wall of imperial riffs and relentless double-bass drumming, they have also become a gateway into the wider expanse of the dark arts.

Hate have stayed rigidly true to their formula, such that you could pull any album post-Anaclasis from their discography and use it as a guide into blackened death metal for anyone willing to take the plunge. Few have ever attempted the sort of fiery riff work that Hate build their music out of, and because of that there’s been little reason for the group to ever shift. Hate don’t do massive artistic evolution: the Hate you see now was a Hate set in stone a while ago, already concrete and recognizable. What Hate do now is to iterate on their sound, such that there’ve been a few distinct three-to-four album arcs over the course of their career. Continue reading »

DESERTED FEAR: “VEINS OF FIRE”

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Apr 292025
 

(Below you will find DGR‘s review of the newest album by Deserted Fear, released late last week by Testimony Records.)

Germany’s Deserted Fear have been the engine that could over the course of six albums now. A compact project that has been a three-piece for a large course of their career, the band have been a consistent mark within the world of heavy metal.

Since 2012’s My Empire, Deserted Fear have proven themselves reliable, with releases hitting like clockwork on about the two-to-three-year mark. Their artistic evolution has seen the group change over the years from a very groove-inspired and influence-worshiping branch of death metal – the classic one-two thump of swede-death and Bolt Thrower‘s primal hammering filtered through the modern era’s taste for ruthless efficiency – to something akin to a current-day melodic death metal band since the days of 2019’s Drowned By Humanity.

While the logo or their taste for artwork has remained suitably corpse-obsessed, Deserted Fear have embraced a surgical attack that has made the three-piece sound so much larger than they actually are and one that has also made them fairly easy to understand and get into a groove of your own with.

While the melodeath genre has seen its fair share of revivalism across multiple eras and numerous “influenced by the influenced by the influenced by” crews, Deserted Fear have grown more naturally into a role that could just as easily have been built for late 90’s/early 00’s era In Flames and Soilwork. Deserted Fear‘s newest album Veins Of Fire puts a big spotlight on that fact and also shows that the band have comfortably settled in as being vanguards for doing so. Continue reading »

VOIDFALLEN: “THE RITUALS OF RESILIENCE”

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Apr 282025
 

(In February Noble Demon released a new album by the Finnish melodic death metal hellions Voidfallen. DGR held fire and allowed the album to boil through his sensorium for a while, as he often does, and he’s now ready to give us his thoughts about it.)

Like many a melodeath band in this day and age, Finland’s Voidfallen are an interesting proposition. This is a genre well-known and well-trodden with an immense body of work to its name and just as many contortions and permutations as someone could even imagine – and then some. There’s been an insane number of groups looking to put their own spin on the catchier and more glamorous side of death metal, taking its penchant for hook-heavy riff work and shred-tastic guitar soloing and continually stacking new blocks atop it or bending it to their will.

When you have regional flavorings adding to the massive subgenrification of a style, you know you’re dealing with an unruly beast, one which at this point is beyond just the territory of a devil we know and well within the realms of a devil we may have been intimate with once or twice, assuming that quiet nod and knowing wink isn’t just suggesting future adventures post-expected drunken blackout.

Noble Demon then have an intriguing idea put forth with Voidfallen‘s second album The Rituals Of Resilience. Beyond the masks and spectacle, Voidfallen are a combination of classic keyboard and guitar warrior melodeath, slamming face-first into an insane tango with the darker side of Omnium Gatherum‘s slightly more progressive flavorings. The Rituals Of Resilience has Voidfallen smashing up against the plexiglass of their chosen genre in a classic act of attempting to do what could best be defined as ‘a hell of a lot’ while still hewing hard into their foundational drawings. Continue reading »

FLESHBORE: “PAINTED PARADISE”

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Apr 242025
 

(January releases sometimes get overlooked. DGR doesn’t want that to happen in the case of the new album from Indiana’s Fleshbore, which Transcending Obscurity Records brought us in the first month of this year, and he explains why at length below.)

February brought us a new release in the tech-death world from Indiana’s Fleshbore. Painted Paradise is only the group’s second album but already has them on a strong trajectory. The issue for the band right now is that they’re competing in an incredibly crowded and flush sphere of the musical world and at such a time in which even a genre like tech-death, long known as being the swirling mass of instrumental craziness, has long since codified into something fairly recognizable.

We have labels that even specialize in this sort of thing and, depending on which one a band is on, you could even guess with about eighty percent accuracy as to what they sound like based on that idea alone. Painted Paradise, then, is an interesting release because it is an album where you can understand almost immediately why someone would want to throw their weight behind it.

One of the biggest challenges for a modern day tech-death group is differentiating themselves within the wider genre-sphere and escaping the wall-of-notes stereotype or the rapidly shifting guitar dynamic that often has parts quickly devolving into auditory mud. Yet somehow – even with a healthy dose of influence worship – Fleshbore do so on Painted Paradise, but the bigger question of how may take a little more explanation than what an opening segment may allow. Continue reading »

DAWN OF OUROBOROS: “BIOLUMINESCENCE”

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Apr 212025
 

(Below we present DGR‘s review of the new album by Dawn of Ouroboros, which was released last month by Prosthetic Records.)

Oakland’s Dawn Of Ouroboros have been a vexing band since their founding, part of a class of black metal collectives for whom the genre is one more arrow in the quiver than something to be wholly defined by. They’re part of a grouping for whom the multi-faceted, multi-genre approach has led to something less conventional than straightforward songwriting and more avant-garde with the addition of many a post-black metal and shoegaze element into their overall approach.

Being frank, there’s even been a sense within the band’s music that they’re still searching for how to jam all the pieces together, and so a journey into their discography can be a journey through just as many generally beautiful and transcendent moments as there are times when the band are still learning how to juxtapose such oppositional elements together within the same particular song.

As a result, they’ve been difficult to pin down on each album – like a creature stubbornly moving just to the side every time you’re about to finally set the specimen in place for display. They’ve been a musical cat that doesn’t want to be picked up, somehow turning to liquid and falling through your arms every time.

There is no singular approach to a band like Dawn Of Ouroboros, and so a single- dimensional approach falls to pieces within a song or two. Very few musical narratives fit the band as a result, but the one that has been steady is that as they’ve gotten deeper into their career, they’ve gotten distinctly better. Each album shows a stronger understanding of just how to take these musical parts and jam them together without it sounding like you’ve broken out a brad-nailer for that particular purpose. Their newest album Bioluminescence is the strongest example of that yet. Continue reading »

DISARMONIA MUNDI: “THE DORMANT STRANGER”

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Apr 182025
 

(Last month brought us the first Disarmonia Mundi album in a decade, and it was just a matter of time before their sworn fan DGR would have something to say about it. Today is that day.)

In today’s exercise we’re going to try not to feel old. We’re going to ignore the aching backs and shattered knees, the thinning hairlines and bags under our eyes, the newly acquired arch support in our shoes, and we’re going to ignore that we’ve lately been on a kick of discussing the generational effect of music.

We’ll ignore that we’re now surprised whenever we see people at a show getting a mark from the venue that isn’t just a wristband stating that they can’t drink and we’re going to ignore that somehow despite showing no interest in two of the following three things, we somehow have still managed to attain a perpetual scent of black coffee, cigarettes, and Icy-Hot/Ben Gay that seems to follow us fucking everywhere.

The way things have been going lately, we’ve gotten pretty good about sticking our head in the sand. While we’re at it we’re even going to ignore that there exists written record of the last time we reviewed Italian melodeath studio project Disarmonia Mundi‘s previous album from almost ten years ago or that in the opening segments of that review, we even joked about just how goddamned long it had been between that disc and 2009’s The Isolation Game, an album that we’ve been going to bat for over the course of sixteen years.

Let’s just brush all of that aside and take things at face value and say that the perpetually underrated Disarmonia Mundi have returned once again after an impressive gap in time between albums for a new 2025 release entitled The Dormant Stranger, or else we’re all going to turn to dust. Continue reading »

DORMANT ORDEAL: “TOOTH AND NAIL”

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Apr 152025
 

(DGR provides the following extensive and evocative review of the new album by Poland’s Dormant Ordeal in advance of its April 18 release by Willowtip Records. At 3PM PDT today the entire album stream will premiere here.)

The idea of saving the best for last is something that is hammered into our psychology since early childhood. You must save the best for last, you must save the best for last, you must save the best for last, repeated over and over ad nauseum in mantra-like form until it eventually becomes unspoken sutrah to us as children growing up.

In the current age of instant gratification and the endless dopamine chase of modern society, however, saving the best for last is something that is long lost and a spectre of ages ago. Yet in a strange way it seems as if Poland’s Dormant Ordeal have taken the idea and run with it for their newest album Tooth And Nail because over the course of the album’s eight songs – barring one intro ambient bit – it isn’t so much the song itself that leaves the final impression but the way the song ends.

The final statement made for any particular song comes down to how you close out. Those last moments can prove to be integral to making a song live forever in a person’s mind. One of the things Dormant Ordeal demonstrate time and time again across Tooth And Nail is that one thing is certain: they know how to end a song. Continue reading »

THRONE OF ROACHES: “CHRYSALIS”

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Mar 282025
 

(Straight outta Malmö, Sweden, Throne of Roaches released their debut album Chrysalis last month, and today our writer DGR gives it an extensive review… after some extensive thoughts about what’s going on with death metal in the modern era.)

For those who’ve been paying attention to the recent spate of reviews the site has run – and those by yours truly – ever-observant as you are, you’ve probably noticed that we’ve had a recent string of album arts in which the predominant color has been blue. Well enough of that bullshit, it’s time for a change. Now, we’re going with the color green for an album or two.

Every year tends to bring with it some sort of theme – other than usual overarching abject misery – that picks at the brain until it finally unclasps like a louse killed and rots away into dust. This year in particular has been poking the cortex with ideas of how metal has grown and evolved each year, and its myriad changes and how newer groups must navigate a landscape that isn’t just shifting so much as it is turbulent enough that even the FAA these days might detect that there’s something happening with a particular plane before it hits the ground. They don’t have enough coffee in the world to keep that one guy fueled.

Metal has blended many times over its generations and death metal especially has time and time again found itself bisected, dissected, vivisected, septrisected, and intersected to the point of unrecognizability. Pantheons and towers erected and destroyed in one fell swoop and just as many merged together to resemble the security guard cenobite from Hellraiser: Bloodline. What is and isn’t has proven fertile ground for those who wish to engage in perpetual argument. The concept of death of the author becomes hilarious in this regard when dealing with a genre obsessed with the actual physical undertaking and not the philosophical aspect. Continue reading »

THY KINGDOM WILL BURN: “THE LOSS AND REDEMPTION”

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Mar 272025
 

(As of late our writer DGR has been leaning into melodic death metal, and that tilted him into the new album by Finland’s Thy Kingdom Will Burn, released in January by Scarlet Records.)

Any long-standing musical genre will develop its own regional flavorings over time. Many of them are echoes of the first handful of groups to break through in that particular style, later to become ingrained in the blood of any following acts. The tower of influences effectively comes crashing down to be compacted into a simple statement ‘this is recognizable as having come from…’ and so on.

This is how people end up specializing in styles from certain countries, and with a practiced ear and enough familiarity, you can conjure the basic tenets of a certain region simply by seeing it referenced in front of a genre listing. Some are way more prominent than others and those that fly under the metal detection sphere instead feel like an undercurrent and noticeable pattern.

Finland has been a fun country in this respect because the one genre they truly seem to dominate is the folk-metal and folk-song-inspired genre-sphere. There’s a plethora of groups all specializing in music that sways with the rhythm of drinking songs and veers hard on the edge of feeling like an extreme take on power-metal’s sugar-laden hooks. Were Finland to wear crowns, that would be one of a scant handful teetering precariously upon its head.

No shock then, that many of those melodic sensibilities – and even particular recognizable motifs – seem to have bled through into the country’s other musical aspirations, including what seems to be a recent revitilization of its melodeath sphere. Continue reading »

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