Not sure what seems to be reverberating in the extreme music world, but it seems like the hills are alive with the sound pf atmospheric Black Metal these days. Just speaking out of personal experience this is my third week of being charged with reviewing an artsy and multi-dimensional take of the tried and tested subgenre. This time around it’s Falls of Rauros with their new album Patterns in Mythology (Gilead Media).Continue reading
Holy Shit (Heavy Psych Sounds) is really the album title you want to go with for your fifth LP, Nebula? Okay, I can dig it. Do you know what else I can dig? The sheer variety of riffs and leads being traded around by Eddie Glass and his groovy cohorts. It’s like if the man had been stockpiling sweet licks in a fallout shelter since the band’s inception in far more innocent 1997. Continue reading
Get ready to subvert your opinions of what modern metal is and toss out your genre tags. Spirit Adrift is back to bash your eardrums in with riffs, melodies, beats, and deep thoughts. Like the perfect concoction of heavy, catchy and progressive music, the band has delivered a new album in Divided By Darkness (20 Buck Spin) that is just heads and shoulders above its peers. A few bands have danced on this wire before from Baroness, Mastodon, Elder, Kylesa, and others. Ambitious bands that initially got lumped in with the masses, but eventually set themselves apart with fearlessness and writing skills. Now we must add Spirit Adrift to that list of those who could pull off such a daunting amalgam of styles and do it so well. Continue reading
Hexhammaren (Century Media) by Martyrdöd is the type of album you only must sample one track to know exactly what you’re getting yourself into. Once the title track gives you the five fingers to the face you will have accepted that it’s going to be a hell of a night and of d-beats, raw guitars and lyrics barked at you with the ferocity of a Rottweiler.Continue reading
Designed Obsolescence (Unique Leader), the latest LP from Technical Death Metal supergroup (we’ll get to that) Continuum has a quite a bit going for it. Continuum hails from the modern death metal hotbed that is California and features former members of acts ranging from Rings of Saturn, Allegaeon, Pathology, Decrepit Birth and more, so you don’t even have to listen to a single note on Designed Obsolescence to know that these dudes can play. Yeah, they can fucking play with technicality and precision that this writer will never grasp.Continue reading
With The Onlooker (Season of Mist Underground Activists) Ukraine’s Windswept has issued an open invitation to any and all Black Metal releases this year to challenge them for the throne. And maybe time will prove my assessment to be wrong, but several listens into The Onlooker its hard to imagine another Black Metal release as sonically satisfying as this anytime soon.Continue reading
My guess is that Altarage just aren’t fans of people in general. Not in the way I claim to dislike people when I’m hungover on an early Monday morning, but in the I-wouldn’t-mind-if-humanity-just-totally-ceased-existing kind of way. One listen to their third LP The Approaching Roar(Season of Mist) is all I needed to feel convinced that Altarage doesn’t care for me or my eardrums.Continue reading
When The World Becomes Undone (Long Branch Records) is the type of album that at the initial scan I really wanted to love. I’ve discussed my fondness of all things early to mid-nineties Roadrunner Records ad nauseum on other reviews so I’ll spare you the love letter here, but with so much connection between A Pale Horse Named Death and Type O Negative you can likely understand where I’m coming from.Continue reading
Photo by Randy Edwards
Animals As Leaders frontman Tosin Abasi is excited to announce that he has officially launched Abasi Guitars. Continue reading
SIXX A.M. guitarist and hard rock shred legend DJ Ashba has teamed with Schecter Guitar Research to release the DJ Ashba Diamond Series Signature Model. More details below: Continue reading