You must respect any band that lives up to their moniker. Imagine being an impressionable metallic youth raiding the local record store and picking up albums from acts known as Poison and Slaughter. Seems metal enough, but then you get home only to realize the swindle and that those tapes were as hard as the Pillsbury Doughboy. When you listen to Hostage Animal (Southern Lord) by All Pigs Must Die, you don’t have that problem. Continue reading
I’ve mentioned before (and will again – us writers, like bands, have our favoured phrases we come back to, like the metaphoric pooch returning to its gut-chunks), but predictability is underrated. And a bloody good thing, too, at times, because back for the fifth time of asking, and spilling their fetid guts for the baying hordes in time honoured Sunlight styled fashion, is Sweden’s Entrails with World Inferno (Metal Blade).Continue reading
You ever hear that old adage about experience? The one that smug superiors like to toss around to mask their insecurities. There’s no substitute for experience, I believe it goes. Yeah, well Vallenfyre totally proved that right on their third full-length effort, Fear Those Who Fear Him (Century Media).Continue reading
Following a few excessively raw and highly abrasive EPs, the UK’s Employed To Serve turned a few heads in 2015 with the release of their hungry—nay, starving and salivating—debut full-length Greyer Than You Remember. Now, with The Warmth Of A Dying Sun (both Holy Roar), they are poised to turn quite a few more.Continue reading
Formed in 2015 after the well documented dissolution and formation of Entombed and Entombed A.D., Swedish supergoup Firespawn (known briefly as Fireborn) comprises guitarists Victor Brandt (Entombed AD) and Fredrik Folkare (Unleashed), bassist Alex “Impaler” Friberg (Necrophobic), former Dark Funeral drummer Matte Modin, and of course, legendary Entombed vocalist L-G Petrov.Continue reading
Once you listen to it, it’s hard to dispute that Septic, Bitter and Hardbitten (Cavernous) isn’t a suitable moniker for Phlefonyaar’s latest LP. Lots of bands and labels describe their music in many colorful nouns such as “brutal” or “weary,” but only a select few truly deserve that kind of praise. Septic, Bitter and Hardbitten is as brutal as a murder scene. Once the mildly spooky/mostly acoustic intro, ‘The Lingering Molly’ is out of the way, Phlefonyaar sets up a world of aural pain for listeners to willingly drag themselves through.Continue reading
For any fan of old Napalm Death, Morbid Angel, Entombed and the first two Cattle Decapitation albums, this is for you. Originally found on as a demo entitled Swallow The Symmetric Swab and a mini-album Nookleptia (Morbid Records), the songs on the 11 track compilation Swallow This (Svart) are remastered for this release to show the bands fully formed ideas of how the songs were supposed to sound on the original tape and vinyl pressings in 1993.Continue reading
Originally formed in 1992, Swedish band Evocation didn’t actually last too long the first time around, splitting up just a year or so after their inception with only a couple of demo tapes to their name. However, in 2005, four of the five members responsible for the band’s second demo reunited and eventually released their official début Tales From the Tomb (Cyclone Empire) in 2007.Continue reading
Take one swig of Tomb Mold’s debut LP, Primordial Malignity (Blood Harvest) and it’d be permissible to believe it was a lost recording from great death metal stock boom of the nascent 1990s. Somehow the young duo of Max Klebanoff (drums, vocals) and Derrick Vella (guitars, bass) made their way through time to scavenge Morrisound Recording studio archives and found untapped reserves of grimness.
R.I.P.’s début In the Wind (RidingEasy) is, quite simply, a grimy middle finger to the heavier cadre of bands that take themselves and their image a bit too seriously. Dripping with reverb and cavernous echoes, the album may very well have been recorded not in the wind, but in a dark, dank basement obscured in thick, pungent smoke. Peeling walls decorated with black light posters. Lava lamps and ashtrays scattered about on a carpet sporting thirty-one flavors of stains.Continue reading