2008 was a pretty good year for melodic, contemporary hard core with the likes of Verse, Have Heart, Brothers, Take It Back and the almighty Killing the Dream. Yet here comes this nautical themed debut from this awesome SoCal three piece featuring members of Graf Orlock and comes close to taking the throne of 2008s […]

Due to their ferocious female vocalist Grace Perry and a solid mix of thrash, hardcore and Bolt Thrower, Arizona’s Landmine Marathon have always been in my periphery, but never quite taken it to the next level. With their 2006 debut release Wounded and subsequent split EP , they only come across as a band with […]

Seems like the whole retro punk/post-punk thing’s been around for so many years now that it’s become modern again. Band after band continues to crossbreed genres, reference points and each other to create output that maintains a core of familiarity, but still manages to sound fresh as well. New Hampshire’s Transistor Transistor sit somewhere in […]

Recently, I attended a Japanese Taiko drums show at my local performing arts center and during all the thunderous percussion, chanting, and Kai yelling I thought to myself how cool it would be it this stuff was mixed with metal… Enter Japan’s Birushanah. Leave it to the Japanese to take a tired metal genre, in […]

I hate it when bands try too hard. In the case of Drain The Sky’s album Haunted By Rivers, the band is trying too hard to sound creepy and intense, but all they manage to muster is boring. It’s a noisy mish-mash of blast beats, slow (trying to be) creepy passages and dissonance. They’re trying […]

Most splits I review are often at least by liked mined or musically similar acts, that’s not the case with this split as it combines the gnarly Bolt Thrower fronted by a manic banshee sound of Arizona’s Landmine Marathon with the classic thrash metal of former Exhumed members. Landmine Marathon’s, debut, Wounded, was a gritty, […]

Most splits I review are often at least by liked mined or musically similar acts, that’s not the case with this split as it combines the gnarly Bolt Thrower fronted by a manic banshee sound of Arizona’s Landmine Marathon with the classic thrash metal of former Exhumed members. Landmine Marathon’s, debut, Wounded, was a gritty, […]

Wow, Level Plane is on a tear of late what with Anodyne, Coliseum, and now this. And while most of you will instantly dismiss this as yet more “core,” watering down an already saturated US scene, many of you open to the noisy post-hardcore stylisms of Mastodon, Anodyne, Swarm of the Lotus and Burnt By […]