Nov 032025
 

(Andy Synn highlights six gems from October you may have overlooked)

I’m going to say something controversial here, but… if you see someone talking a big game about how they “listened to 500 albums this month” they’re probably lying.

Ok, maybe not lying (though some are probably doing it just for clout and clicks) but definitely stretching the truth a little, because there’s a big difference in my book between hearing an album and actually listening to it.

Don’t get me wrong, I really do wish I had time to listen to that many albums each month, and I’m sure there are other writers/reviewers out there who legitimately rack up bigger numbers than I do, but chances are that anyone making a hyperbolic claim like that isn’t giving the albums in question the time and attention they deserve… especially if they’re a writer/reviewer who is supposed to actually be offering some insight into the albums/artists in question (something which takes more than just a couple of cursory spins to do).

So while I can’t, at the moment, give a full-throated and whole-hearted recommendation to everything I heard last month – the ones I’ve chosen to feature here are the ones I feel most qualified to comment on, but there’s still many more I need to spend time with and process properly – I would encourage you, once you’re done with this article, to go check out the latest releases from Galge, Scorching Tomb, and Torture Machine (if you’re of a Death Metal-y persuasion), Haeresis, Scalding, and Sunken if you’re more into Black Metal, and Mriodom and Stonebirds if you’re looking for something on the groovy, Stoner-y side of things.

Before then, however, here’s some albums I definitely can recommend to you.

Continue reading »

Nov 012025
 


artwork by the legend Frank Frazetta

(written by Islander)

I hope those of you who celebrated Halloween got through it with all your fingers intact. Oh wait, that’s a different holiday. But the wish still holds, even if the risks of losing digits might not have been as great. It all depends on where you put them and what you hold and whether some masked goon is firing rubber bullets at your raised fists.

I got through Halloween with all my digits intact, and the three I use for typing have been busily pecking away at this Saturday collection. It comes later than usual because I got a late start and was really confounded in deciding what to pick.

I was pretty thorough in saving links and files this week, which meant there were a fuckload of them staring at me this morning, and I had only sampled a small number of them during the week. I would say that more than half of them were of the black metal persuasion, so I shoved off a lot of those candidates (but not all of them) for tomorrow, which is also therefore guaranteed to be confounding. And there’s a bit of a curveball at the end, of course.

On we go…. Continue reading »