(Here’s DGR’s enthusiastic review of a new EP released last month by Pennsylvania’s Dissentience.)

For being such a short month, February was a wildly creative time for heavy metal. Perhaps, for all our prognosticating and bullshit being pulled from a hat in regards to how the year was starting, it was time for the dam to finally burst and unleash upon us a musical flood of sorts. You can get a real sense for this when you glance around our site for instance and see multiple summary articles of music that has been unleashed throughout the month, and barring the minor occasion of a crossed wire or two, there’s barely any crossover whatsoever.

It seems like our attention was so divided in so many different directions that we could just as easily portray our focus as a scatter plot drawn by someone in the middle of an earthquake while they fell into a manhole. If there is a unifier or throughline to be found, it seems it lays not so much in where our easily distracted pack of Golden Shepherds we call the writing staff here are looking at this moment, but what we are looking forward to in the future. We’re probably going to need assistance from multiple deities if we hope to make it through the April/May pre-summer festival torrent in one piece.

February’s EPs fell upon us like rain, alongside a sizeable gathering of albums, and thankfully there was even enough spread between the tried-and-true trying new stuff out and new bands to be discovered that it didn’t feel like we were subsisting on bite-sized morsels. One band that happens to have made very good usage of the EP format this time around is Philadelphia’s Dissentience, who took four massive songs and combined them into an equally massive movement of music they have named after the EP’s final song “Kaiju“. Twenty-three-and-a-half-minutes later you will feel as if you have been placed under the footfall of a gargantuan monster as well. Continue reading »