Obituary – Darkest Day (Candlelight Records)
Now three albums deep into their reformation (wow…already?), legendary Floridian death metallers Obituary have come through in the clutch yet again with Darkest Day. It’s more of the same, and since Obituary has made a...
Glorior Belli – Meet Us At the Southern Sign (Candlelight Records)
Anytime anyone deviates from the norm in black metal, you run the risk of it working or falling flat on its face. Black metal may forever be out of its fully-experimental phase that occurred...
Suffocation – Blood Oath (Nuclear Blast Records)
The age-old question: “How do you keep brutal death metal interesting over the course of 10 songs?” is a tricky one. It’s a bit maddening really; you take music so rhythmically pummeling and brutal...
Jungle Rot – What Horrors Await (Napalm Records)
For those of you who like your death metal devoid of cliché then the cover of Jungle Rot’s latest release, What Horrors Await is going to be immediately off-putting. Once you get beyond that though, there’s...
Magrudergrind – Magrudergrind (Willowtip Records)
Opening with a sustained burst of feedback and slowly building noise, Magrudergrind are back, ready to tear off faces with the aptly-titled “The Protocols Of Anti-Sound.” It’s both a statement of intent and reinforcement...
Ex Deo – Romulus (Nuclear Blast Records)
A lazy person would dub Ex Deo as “Kataklysm without the hyper-blasts,” but it’s not that way at all, dude. Sure, all four current members of Montreal-based DM mongrels comprise Ex Deo, yet this...
Tyr – By the Light of the Northern Star (Napalm Records)
We’re barely a year removed from the quite excellent Land and here comes the even more excellent By the Light of the Northern Star. It’s no coincidence that Tyr are perhaps the preeminent Viking/folk/Pagan/whatever metal band –...
Alestorm – Black Sails At Midnight (Napalm Records)
Avast, this be pirate metal of the highest order mateys. Hang on, of the highest order? Anyway you get the gist. You’re not going to get anything groundbreaking or too mentally challenging with Alestorm,...
Entwine – Painstained (Spinefarm Records)
Entwine’s 2005 effort DiEversity remains a pop Goth metal hit in the Gehlke household, a domicile that is usually not very forgiving of such meanderings. Then again, those luscious, seductive hooks and muscular riffs heard on jams...
Amorphis – Skyforger (Nuclear Blast Records)
Is Eclipse not the best “return-to-form” album of the past decade? It is, right? Seriously, Amorphis’ 2006 opus has proven to have more staying power than most albums with that “hey, we’re going back to our old...
Battlefields – Thresholds of Imbalance (Translation Loss)
A boggy, almost stagnant doom concoction, Battlefields are yet another in a long line of sludge doom bands that like to make impatient people (read: me) wait for good things to develop. More often than not,...
Stratovarius – Polaris (Armoury Records)
A Tolkki-less Strato, eh? That’s like a Mustaine-less Megadeth or a Schaffer-less Iced Earth (which might be a good thing). Now finally beyond the soap opera that led to the axeman’s apparent dissolution of...
Trail of Tears – Bloodstained Endurance (Napalm Records)
It’s not like we throw a 9/10 rating around here every day, but the unbridled vitriol and contrasts on Bloodstained Endurance practically begged for this mark. All this, after Trail of Tears nearly split up in...
Endstille – Verfuhrer (Regain Records)
Lots of blasting here, almost too much, even for an album with nine songs. Being one-dimensional is not necessarily a band thing in black metal, but with variety not being Endstille’s forte, Verfuhrer bogs down pretty quickly....
Success Will Write Apocalypse Across the Sky – The Grand Partition and the Abrogation of Idolatry (Nuclear Blast Records)
It would be wise to keep SWAATS (sorry, we’re not spelling that name out again) away from the whole new-jack, deathcore nonsense. Clearly, they’re not playing that game, but when you have a moniker as...