CLEARING THE SLATE ISSUE ONE

 Album Reviews  2 Responses »
Jul 162026
 

(DGR is playing the game of review catch-up. Is today’s four-album installment the first inning of nine, or the first half of two? We shall see.)

I say this every time I’ve done it in its twice-yearly fashion, but smaller review collections like this are not ones that I feel good about doing. It doesn’t feel fair to the bands not paying the imagined debt I have with them, that I’ve done something so criminal as enjoy their music and yet not find the time within myself to dedicate toward the usual essay-long dissection and exploration of their newest release.

Yet, it is festival season now in Europe which means that metal’s biological clock is seeing fit to give birth to a ton of new releases. You may have noticed during the last month or so there has been a steady drip of reviews coming from my corner of the world, but truth be told, all of those were done just prior to our unwitting heavy metal May that we’ve created. The assumption being that they would run once a day so the site would always have something to post while we were out and about witnessing music or drinking ourselves into apocalyptic stupor.

You’ll note, that’s not how it happened, and instead the collective of releases that I had fished up from the world’s murky musical depths ran well into June. That doesn’t mean the exploration and listening stopped, either. Just as many were caught up in the nets or came out while we were on that aforementioned vacation, and we now find ourselves at the doorstep of a collection of music spanning months that needs to be caught up on.

You, dedicated reader of the site that you are, know next what is coming. It has traveled by many names: review roundup, things you may have missed, clearing the slate, material befitting the ethereal, music by swedes for long-haired plebes, a million other names that all translate to one basic idea – we need to catch up on stuff so we can maintain some semblance of being current yet refuse to leave these albums sitting in the dust. Continue reading »

BECAUSE WITTY YEAR-END LIST TITLES ABOUT RUINING THE HOLIDAYS ARE FOR SUCKERS — THE DGR YEAR ENDSTAVAGANZA PART ONE: 50-41

 LISTMANIA 2024  4 Responses »
Dec 162024
 

(This is the first part of a five-part countdown by DGR of his 2024 year-end list, with each selection accompanied by his very extensive thoughts about the releases. Our plan is to roll out the rest of the installments on successive days until this week ends or falls into a sinkhole under the weight of his words.)

It feels like I blinked and suddenly a whole year had passed. Maybe it’s just the flow of life finally catching back up to me but this year moved in extreme fits and extreme starts and somewhere along the way I lost track of it among the deluge and wreckage that seems to be a daily existence. Among the piles of charred wood and still yet burning cars is another three hundred and sixty-five days of existence slowly signing its final paperwork and preparing itself to move on from the mortal coil.

At the very least, there was some sort of notification that this was coming. It feels like every year I open with some variation of ‘hey, this previous year sucked shit,’ and I’m pretty sure I’ve taken a similar tack to open up a few of the previous year-end posts – if only some sort of dipshit had done an anniversary post whereby he might have easy access to all his previous years’ transgressions upon the internet and the collective heavy metal world at large –  so I’ll dispense with the usual landfill avalanche of thoughts pertaining to world events and the previous days gone by because, shock of all shocks, this year sucked.

Next year is likely going to suck too and the year after that will probably suck even worse. We’ll make the word ‘suck’ mundane through repetition, as if an ever-present shadow haunting our lives, by the time we’re done with this. Eventually, we will all lose all sense of what the word actually means and we will be permanently trapped in some sort of constant suck-vortex powerful enough that we’ll get dragged into court for infringement by Dyson and we’ll be numb to the common sense of suck surrounding us. We’ll have finally ascended into the boring dystopia I’ve bitched about that is coming for years. Just my luck I can’t even get one with decent Blade Runner lighting. Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SAVAGE: DISENTOMB / EMASCULATOR / PERSECUTORY

 SHORT BUT SWEET  No Responses »
Oct 242024
 

(Andy Synn presents three short but savage releases to terrify your eardums)

Look, a while back I promised I’d be better at covering more EPs this year.

And, let’s face it, I have failed in that task pretty abjectly.

But I’m trying… which is why today I want to draw your attention to three recently-released (or upcoming) bite-sized portions of brutality courtesy of Disentomb, Emasculator and Persecutory.

Continue reading »

SHORT BUT SWEET: EMASCULATOR — “DEPRAVED DISFIGUREMENT”

 Album Reviews, SHORT BUT SWEET  1 Response »
Aug 232022
 

(It appears that DGR has become captivated by the recently released debut demo from the brutal death metal band Emasculator, and he explains why in this review, hopefully with gonads still intact.)

Let’s try something shorter for a little bit, huh? Especially since we seem to have been caught in a vortex of hour-plus releases recently.

The world of brutal death metal remains as lively as ever, with musicians willing to forever add to the endlessly squelching pile of musical gore that is the endless barrage of drumming, literal guitar shredding, car-engine bass tone, and earth-rumbling vocals that the genre entails. Emasculator represent a recent addition to the pile, comprising musicians based out of the US and Czech Republic, issuing forth their first demo Depraved Disfigurement at the beginning of August. Continue reading »