TheMadIsraeli Archives - Page 16 of 19

ABORTED: “TERMINATION REDUX”

Jan 042016

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new 20th anniversary EP by Belgium’s Aborted.)

I fucking love Aborted, especially their last two albums. It’s no secret that here at NCS we were foaming at the mouth like a horde of ravenous hyenas and cackling as we ripped apart the carcasses of Global Flatline and The Necrotic Manifesto when they came our way. To my ears, The Necrotic Manifesto, compared to Global Flatline, signified a departure from the sound the band had always been semi-attached to. Until then, every Aborted record had included the more technical, more tempo-dynamic flare reflected on Global Flatline, although I think most would agree that Global Flatline was their sound taken about as far as you were going to get.

The Necrotic Manifesto was even more aggro than any Aborted release before it. It was streamlined, grindier, noisier, faster, and more belligerent, while largely ditching the more dynamic song-writing of previous Aborted albums. And in between those two albums, Aborted had acquired guitarist Mendel bij de Leij, whose solo project we have covered before (along with his and vocalist Sven’s side project, System Divide — which appears to have transformed into the band Oracles).

So where does that leave Termination Redux? When it comes to EPs, I see them as serving one or more of three specific purposes nowadays: You use them to introduce your craft; you use them to tide people over with some goodies before the next big release; or you use them to plant the flag — to sow the seeds of a new direction and sound in a digestible format, or sometimes to make a defiant statement of said new direction and sound.

I do believe that Termination Redux is the third of those types of EPs, signifying an interesting evolution in the band’s music, capped off by the gesture of re-recording the opening song of one of their most praised early records, Engineering the Dead. Continue reading »

HATESPHERE: “NEW HELL”

Album Reviews 4 Responses »

Nov 302015

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Denmark’s HateSphere.)

Out of all the bands that came out of the post-Haunted neo-thrash movement, my two favorites — and I’d argue to a point the objective best — have been Carnal Forge and HateSphere. I was a rabid devotee of HateSphere’s first five albums, but then the majority of the band left and founding guitarist and song-writer Pepe Hansen was forced to find new blood. Their output has had varying results for me since then.

I loved the music of To The Nines but couldn’t stand the weak vocals of Jonathan Albrechtsen in place of the band’s original vocalist Jacob Bredahl, who was as feral as it got. I LOVED The Great Bludgeoning; it had riffs, it had aggression, it had frantic energy — and the new vocalist and still current vocalist Esben or “Esse” Hansen had that vomitus tone to his vocals that called back to Bredahl, and the result was that he fit the music quite a bit. I enjoyed SOME of the bands next record Murderlust, but I have to admit that a lot of it was really forgettable. The thing is, I still love this band, even if they aren’t exactly the same band I used to love, but the spirit is definitely still there.

So I guess the question is where does New Hell stand? Continue reading »

SOLUTION .45: “NIGHTMARES IN THE WAKING STATE – PART I”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Nov 242015

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Solution .45.)

I’d be rather curious to see a proverbial show of hands in the comments on the question of who still gives a shit about Christian Älvestam metal. The guy, despite having been regarded as one of the “it” vocalists of modern metal’s evolution, seems to have a loyal underground fanbase and not much more these days. I’m not sure if it’s the fact that his bands have all been a spin on the same sound in some fashion or another (including even his Unmoored-to-Scar-Symmetry transition if you look at Unmoored’s last album) and I could see or imagine that for some people it just got really old.

It’s only been recently that he, along with his cohorts in his various bands, most notably showed an effort to branch away from this with Miseration’s last album, which was a full-on death metal record with an oddly peculiar attack. Solution .45, though, with their debut For Aeons Past showed themselves to be a culmination of every single facet of the bands with Älvestam at the helm, and also the closest you could get to Scar Symmetry for sure. There were shades of them in the record, as well as Unmoored and Miseration, and overall the album was really solid, although I found myself taking more of a liking to what Scar Symmetry was doing after his departure. Continue reading »

THROES OF DEATH: BONE GNAWER, GRAVE, CRYPT INFECTION

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Oct 282015

(In this post TheMadIsraeli does some catching up, with three reviews of 2015 death metal albums.)

About my absence from NCS: I promise you all, it’s not that I haven’t been listening to music; life has just been rather chaotic. I’ve got a triple review here — one established band you already know are going to be good, and two under-the-surface death metal records I’ve been listening to on and off for a couple of months that I think are definitely worth your time. All three of these albums also have distinctly different sounds.

Bone Gnawer – Cannibal Crematorium

Bone Gnawer has some weight behind its name. With only two full-lengths since 2009, one back then and the one I’m going to talk about now, and mostly EPs to their name, I think these guys deserve to be looked at. I’ve not visited any of the band’s previous material (which included Rogga Johansson in the lineup), I’m only familiar with Cannibal Crematorium, but it’s pretty fucking good. Continue reading »

A DUAL REVIEW: MENDEL (“OBLIVION”) AND PAUL WARDINGHAM (“THE HUMAN AFFLICTION”)

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Oct 272015

(TheMadIsraeli returns to NCS with reviews of 2015 albums by two instrumental maestros — Mendel Bij De Leij and Paul Wardingham.)

Of the instrumental metal albums I’ve listened to this year, these two are definitely the top tier out of the bunch so far. There will be more multi-album reviews coming, in the spirit of clearing the way for the super big/important releases I’m also stoked about.

MENDEL: OBLIVION

Mendel is one of the most enjoyable instrumental metal listens you can partake of next to Jeff Loomis right now. Part Yngwie, part death metal, and all regality, Oblivion is an interesting listen that is so full of ideas it can also be rather exhausting — but in a good way. Continue reading »

I CHAOS: “MASTERBLEEDER”

Album Reviews 2 Responses »

Sep 032015

(In this post TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by the Dutch death metal band I Chaos, and we also have a stream of the first single from the new album.)

There’s going to be a bit of setup here, so please humor me.

I wrote a about a Dutch band named Cypher WAY back when I first started writing at NCS in 2011 (relevant pieces here and here) who had an unfortunately short life span. They were melodic death metal prodigies who never got off the ground in the way they deserved and still to this day, unfortunately, continue to be an unknown quantity to most.

Main man Tobias Borra quit music altogether for a few years, and that left bassist Joost and drummer Koen to seek new avenues of musical expression. One of those happened to be a band they both ended up in, named I Chaos. Continue reading »

FEARED: “SYNDER”

Album Reviews 3 Responses »

Sep 012015

(TheMadIsraeli wrote this review of the latest album by Sweden’s Feared.)

I am shamefully late on reviewing this, although for good reasons, both pertinent to the music itself and not. I’ve been pretty high on the Feared train since the band released Furor Incarnatus, and Synder is really no exception to the consistent roll they’ve been on. My problem has been both that my life has become a whirlwind of chaos (which has made finding the time for blogging pretty difficult lately), and that this album is very hard to detail and describe beyond saying that it’s really good.

But I feel like now I can write a review that sums up my thoughts — and oddly enough it was sparked by a negative review of this album. Brenocide of That’s Not Metal, a website that’s in our own sidebar of other blogs, did a post that was a carpet-bomb of mini-reviews of various releases back in May (here). He wrote this about Synder: Continue reading »

THE BLACK DAHLIA MURDER: “ABYSMAL”

Album Reviews 7 Responses »

Aug 272015

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by The Black Dahlia Murder.)

If Everblack was BDM’s darkest record, Abysmal is the band’s brightest, brimming with a raw, incendiary energy that calls back to the band’s early days of Unhallowed and Miasma. With a distinctly higher quotient of Arsis-isms in the riffs (undoubtedly due to Ryan Knight’s influence) and an overall recommitment to the band’s love of pedal-point-intensive harmonized riffing, Abysmal is to these ears a refreshing record.

I felt Everblack was less melodic death metal, and more of a death metal album that had melodic parts in it, which I think was the band’s goal at the time. I thought and still think it’s in fact the band’s best record, and while Abysmal doesn’t hit the sweet spot for me that Everblack did, that may be because Abysmal just isn’t punching my personal preference buttons hard enough. That’s not intended to detract from the fact that it’s a great record, among so many others that BDM have produced over the years. Continue reading »

AN NCS PREMIERE: KINNEFRET — “SALVATION”

Premieres 4 Responses »

Aug 172015

(TheMadIsraeli introduces our premiere of a new song by Kinnefret from Oakland, California.)

Kinnefret were recommended to me by Ted O’Neill of Oblivion a few days ago, and after checking them out, I rushed to see if I could secure SOMETHING with these guys. I’ve only heard two songs, but I’m thus far 100% hooked. The low down: They’re from California, and three-quarters of the band are Iranian immigrants who fled so they could play metal. Artak Ozan, the band’s founder and central pillar has told me that he is actually a political refugee here in the US for having already gotten on the Iranian government’s bad side.

The music is death metal that touches on all eras of the style. There’s some old school stuff, some modern hyper-technical stuff, a good dose of melody, and some grotesque Suffo/Dying Fetus shit thrown in, all with an underpinning of distinct Middle Eastern influence and melodic tendencies. The music is wicked, and the guitar front — the thing I care most about — is playful, complex, and interesting. The dual vocal assault of Ozan and vocalist Chelsea Rocha is also pretty overwhelming, with Rocha having a beastly and powerful voice. Continue reading »

FEAR FACTORY: “GENEXUS”

Album Reviews 14 Responses »

Aug 122015

(TheMadIsraeli reviews the new album by Fear Factory.)

I’m a pretty standard Fear Factory fan. Soul of a New Machine, Demanufacture, and Obsolete are the best albums; Digimortal was a nu-metal sellout with some keeper tracks; and everything Dino-less is awful.

Mechanize was a monster comeback record, seeing Burton Bell and Dino Cazares return with fucking Gene Hoglan, and it rivaled their early material while bringing in the more thrash and melodic edge of Dino’s other band Divine Heresy.

The band’s last record, The Industrialist (which ONLY involved Bell and Cazares, according to the only album credits I can find) was good, but I didn’t find it living up to the momentum Mechanize had. Continue reading »

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