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...
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...
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...
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...
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 –...
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’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...
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...
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,...
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...