(In this post, DGR reviews the latest release from Toronto’s Tyrant of Death.)

The Tyrant Of Death name should probably be familiar to a lot of you by now, especially since I’ve started making appearances at the lovely NCS. Tyrant Of Death is an industrial death machine that occasionally drifts into grind-filled territory, made up of two musicians. One provides the vocal work and the other, by the name of Alex Rise, handles the musicianship and most of the footwork.

For a long time Tyrant Of Death was an instrumental guitar project. Some of the releases (and there have been a ton) have come to include a lot of vocal work provided by musician Lucem Fero. Lately they’ve seemingly rotated, one instrumental, one more vocals-based. Also, until recently, the Tyrant Of Death stuff has been free (and occasionally still is) as a show of good faith. That changed with the last disc, ReConnect, which I thought was a good album but not necessarily the best of their work.

One thing that hasn’t changed is that the Tyrant Of Death project is still prolific, releasing a flood of material, although not quite at the breakneck pace of previous years. Only five months have passed since ReConnect, yet here we are again with another album called Cyanide. This one is largely instrumental, with the occasional vocalization (if you can even call it that) to provide atmosphere. As such, it’s something of a return to previous sounds and at the same time a combination of many older elements into something new.

Because of this I have to apologize that this review may be shorter than what I usually write (I know some of you are already looking for the nearest razor) due to the fact that Cyanide is Tyrant Of Death boiled down to its very essence. It is a disc consisting of a giant wall of loud guitars, relentlessly fast drumming, and eerie-as-hell song structure. Continue reading »

(For the fifth day in a row, DemiGodRaven serves up a review. Today, the subject is the new album by Canada’s Tyrant of Death.)

Tyrant Of Death has been one of my favorite solo guitar projects since I came across it. I don’t think many in the blog-o-sphere have waved the ToD flag harder than I have. The combination of noisy-as-hell distortion on the guitars and wall-of-sound production scratches the exact same itch that made Strapping Young Lad one of my favorite bands.

The project has seen a new lineup addition over time in the form of a vocalist who snarls his way through quite a few songs, So if you’ve known Tyrant Of Death as the goddamn guitar project that asshole DGR always posts about, then you may be surprised with some of the stuff that has emerged since early 2011.

Tyrant Of Death put out an incredible mass of material over the past year, and the fact that most of it has been released for free has been a fantastic bonus. Reconnect marks the first release of 2012 and it also marks an interesting change: It is the first ToD disc that you’re being asked to pay for. That means instead of saying, “Hey, this is excellent free music” and talking about it from a critical perspective, we now have to make a value judgement about this release as a whole. That is where things get interesting.

Having spent much time with the variety of material available under the Tyrant Of Death banner, I can say this: There seem to be two somewhat interlocking phases represented in the Tyrant Of Death discography. One of them is very electronics-focused and guitar-assisted. The music comes out sounding very computerized and includes hefty elements of electronica beats. Those releases aren’t as heavy as most of ToD’s stuff and they’re not my personal favorites, but they’re still interesting. Continue reading »