At now around a decade since their inception, Italy’s SYK have been garnering a, perhaps understated, but certainly formidable reputation with a penchant for complex and dissonant Death Metal. Continue reading
Tag Archives: Death Metal reviews
ALBUM REVIEW: Deicide – Banished By Sin
Dear lord in heaven, it’s 2024 and we’re still talking about the fact that Glen Benton has an inverted cross on his forehead. This is not a knock on Deicide, by the way, as they have consistently recorded and toured seemingly nonstop since the early nineties, hence the new album Banished by Sin (Reigning Phoenix Music). No this is regarding a text message I received from an anonymous listener during my radio show, The Stress Factor (cheap plug), last week when I played “Trick or Betrayed.” Continue reading
ALBUM REVIEW: Hypoxia – Defiance
Technicality, brutality, and a comforting display of aggression without being overproduced or artificial is the name of the game for Hypoxia.Continue reading
ALBUM REVIEW: Sepulchral Curse – Abhorrent Dimensions
A mere two full-lengths in, Finnish Death Metal outfit Sepulchral Curse sound and feel right at home with what they’re out to accomplish and Abhorrent Dimensions (Transcending Obscurity) digs deep into the annals of grotesquery and emerges as a festering titan of slop.
ALBUM REVIEW: Necrotted – Imperium
It certainly says something about a slamming Death Metal band when they’re able to both breed heaviness organically and give the listener a sense of being in good, capable hands throughout the onslaught.
ALBUM REVIEW: Crypta – Shades Of Sorrow
If Crypta failed to make it onto your radar after their 2021 debut, they’ve returned to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
ALBUM REVIEW: Olkoth – At The Eye Of Chaos
For seven years, the members of South Carolina-based Olkoth stewed over themes of horror and corruption. Interposed with a visceral hatred, At The Eye Of Chaos (Everlasting Spew Records) is the resulting debut full-length.
ALBUM REVIEW: Mithridatum – Harrowing
The juxtaposing contradiction that is Mithridatum’s debut album Harrowing makes it surprisingly difficult to reach a conclusion.
The Willowtip release sees the newly formed trio (featuring former members of Abhorrent, The Faceless) jockeying with a myriad of other bands in an ultra-saturated landscape that is just begging for a group to come along and shatter the mold. As such, it’s nearly career suicide not to stand out from the rest (unless you’re AC/DC). Continue reading
ALBUM REVIEW: Dryad – The Abyssal Plain
The vaunted Mariana Trench is nearly seven miles deep underneath the ocean surface. Or in other words, it plummets down into the Earth more than Mt. Everest stands tall. The creatures that occupy that type of ecosystem need to withstand unimaginable pressure, cold temperatures and a complete lack of light.
And if that’s not terrifying enough, Dryad took this notion to the next level and crafted a thirty-five-minute opus that does as good a job as anything else in positing what the environs found down there might actually sound like via the medium of biting blackened metal: The Abyssal Plain (Prosthetic Records) captures and exploits the paralyzing nightmare of finding oneself in such an alien, unknown world. Foggy, muffled production represents the complete disorientation that would be felt so far below.
ALBUM REVIEW: Faceless Burial – At The Foothills Of Deliration
There are (at least) two ways to ascertain if metal is going to be technically inspired: the cover or the song titles.
In fact, with an album entitled At The Foothills Of Deliration, maybe it was obvious all along.