Vader – Necropolis (Nuclear Blast Records)
Doubt creeps in when a huge lineup shift threatens the dynamics and chemistry of any band. The doubt can turn into panic though when it’s a long-running veteran death act such as Poland’s Vader. Necropolis features...
Echoes of Eternity – As Shadows Burn (Nuclear Blast Records)
California’s Echoes of Eternity play a ferocious brand of progressive power metal, separating themselves from the pack with the expansive vocal range from Francine Boucher and the twisted time changes that will go from...
Skyifre – Esoteric (Pivotal Recordings)
One of the more undervalued melodic death metal bands, Skyfire have emerged from five-year break with the quite excellent and sturdy Esoteric. Blurring the lines between Bodom melodic death metal and classic melo-death, Skyfire has continued...
Threat Signal – Vigilance (Nuclear Blast Records)
Threat Signal vocalist Jon Howard really does sound like Linkin Park’s Chester Bennington, which depending on who you ask, is a really awesome thing or total detriment. Sorry, but we’re guessing the mall music...
Cormorant – Metazoa (Saturnine Music)
In the American acoustic/folk-y/dark-y metal canon, no one tops Agalloch and surely no one ever well. Surprisingly, there are few imitators to this sound, only a handful of like-minded bands willing to bend beyond the standard...
Merrimack – Grey Rigorism (Moribund Records)
This scribe and several other more BM-inclined writers bought into Merrimack’s 2006 effort, Of Entropy and Life Denial and who wouldn’t have? In terms of primal, yet hardly dated BM, Merrimack shot the gap with a...
Korpiklaani – Karkelo (Nuclear Blast Records)
Boozing for a bruising or a cruising…it doesn’t matter – Korpiklaani are the preeminent “hummpa” metal band, Finntroll be damned. As productive as these Fins are, they regularly produce albums of worth, albeit a...
White Wizzard – High Speed GTO (Earache Records)
More retro and it’s not letting it up. And these guys are letting go of the past, which in metal, is acceptable – anywhere else, it’s not. So here we have White Wizzard from...
Paradise Lost – Faith Divides Us, Death Unites Us (Century Media Records)
Even during their very-experimental late 90’s/early 00’s period, Paradise Lost never totally lost their plot. Sure, 1997’s One Second and its follow-up,Host irked more than a few, especially those who cut their teeth on the seminal Gothic and to-die-for Icon and Draconian...
One Without – Thoughts Of A Secluded Mind (Lifeforce Records)
The last female-fronted Swedish “death” metal band (we’ve really stretched that term… “death metal”) to come along was Amaran, who in the span of two better-than-average albums, left little impact. It’s not an easy...