After gutting the band and coming back with a new lineup for a 2023 EP and 2024’s No Name Graves, the founder and guitarist Wyatt McLaughlin, sort of reinvented TLTSOL into a moodier, more down-tempo, and I dare I say, menacing take on deathcore, having more in common with Bound In Fear. Helped largely by […]
This is my first time reviewing a Darkthrone album. I know, right?! I’m shaking my head too… lame as fuck joke but whatever. I’m pretty jazzed about it. I found out about Darkthrone through the classic Transilvanian Hunger; picked up from an Albuquerque bookstore, used. It wasn’t some hole-in-the-wall store either; no lit candles guided […]
Here we are, nine years since Germany’s Anasarca’s last album, their fourth one, Survival Mode, was released. I have been in touch with vocalist/guitarist Michael Dormann for quite a number of years, and a few years ago, he sent me their Goddess of the Somber Shade – Promo 2024. They were shopping this three-song promo […]
Archaic Oath is a new but veteran Belgian duo comprised of instrumentalist Lykormas (Hemelbestormer, Lhaäd, Rituals of the Dead Hand, Wolven, ex-Entartung, ex-Gorath) and vocalist Arneriach (Astovidatu, Bleak Cold Irrelevance, Eternal Blood of War, Hail Spirit Noir). They apparently met way back in 2005, but recently decided to come together and form a project to […]
Last year, I reviewed one of the most unusual albums I think I have to this point… The Harvest by :Skull & Dawn: was my AOTY, and it was well-deserved (I even got a victory lap because I got the other guys to like it too). I digress because Twin Serpent is a bit similar […]
As I prepared for an upcoming Crowbar/Eyehategod concert earlier this year, I was listening to all sorts of other sludge-y doom-y bands and albums; Armed for Apocalypse, Tarlung, Soilent Green, Yellowtooth, Black Royal, and such. Then a promo came across my desk that touted Statement of Wills as ‘for fans of Doom metal, hardcore, 90s […]
So UK’s Venom have been around for a minute, eh?? If we are to look at the first three extreme bands using extreme lyrics, where devils, killing, and all things evil were first written about, the top three bands are: Black Sabbath, The Misfits, and Venom. I mean, with over 15 albums to their name, […]
For a while there in the 00s, I was heavily into the post-rock/post-metal genre. I mean heavily. After discovering Isis’ Oceanic, I was looking for everything and anything in the genre: The big ones like Cult of Luna, The Ocean, Rosetta, Callisto, Transmission0, and Burst, as well as more obscure ones like Impure Wilhelmina, Iron […]
Ohhhhh I thought I smelled something vile and putrid just now… Sniff…Sniff. Nope, not me, I took a shower today with my watering hose…Not my shoes….hmmmmm Oh it’s the new Cryptworm album – Infectious Pathological Waste. That’s what I smell….. These UK filthy death metal merchants released two prior albums and some EPs. Really quality […]
Apolaustic (meaning ‘devoted to enjoyment’) is the new project from former Stortregn vocalist Romain Negro, who departed the Swiss act after 6 albums. If you are familiar with Switzerland’s Stortregn, then you know they started as a melodic black metal band on albums like Emptiness Fill the Void, but transitioned to a more technical death […]
If you had told me in 1995 that down the road I would be reviewing the 19th album, Next to Die, from Six Feet Under, I would have said No Way!! I was very fortunate to have toured with them when I was in Internal Bleeding, with our first album Voracious Contempt, and Immolation was […]
Much like last year’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra effort, this short but blistering 6-track EP (though only 3 actual songs) from Indianapolis’s Mauled is a throwback to the Myspace, early /mid 00s era of deathcore. Specifically, the likes of Suicide Silence, Whitechapel, All Shall Perish, My Bitter End, and Embrace the End. No blackened or symphonic […]
Comatose Music keeps finding us more brutal slam death metal bands. This time it’s Engorgement, out of the UK, with their second album, They Rot Beneath Our Floor. It’s been a minute since the release of their debut, from 2012, Excruciating Intestinal Lacerations. That is a damn fine display of brutal slam death metal. Ricky […]
Lawd. It’s been since 2008 since I last heard Kentucky’s Blackened doom/sludge act Highgate. It was their debut self-titled album on Total Rust Music, and apparently, I really liked it. Now, since their debut, they have released a couple more albums with Shrines to the Warhead , Black Frost Fallout, and their last album, Survival, […]
With only their second album under their belt now, Beyond the Reach of Enchantment, Iceland’s Power Paladin show the metal world why they are climbing the rungs of the power metal ladder. I reviewed their 2022 debut, With the Magic of Windfyre Steel, and was pretty blown away. I need my power metal fast and […]
Knowing the circumstances behind The Ghost of a Future Dead, its recording, and the members, specifically, of course, Tomas Lindberg, made me listen to it from a different perspective. Adding on top of this, Tomas finished recording his vocals on the day before his surgery for oral cancer, making it impossible for him to ever […]
Indonesia is dumping out some brutal bands left and right. For me, the leaders in this scene are Decaying Humanity. I reviewed their monstrous debut album last year, and now here is the debut album from Multiwomb. Much of the time, the Indonesian death metal albums are super short, and this follows the format, with […]
Germany’s Schattenvald (Shadowforest) has been knocking around since 1998, but didn’t release an album until 2007, and has released 5 albums since, yet somehow neither I nor any of the staff here has covered them. And we love us some German black metal in these here parts. As I said in my review of Nazghor’s […]
Believe it or not, still now and again, a debut album surprises me in a really good way. I’ve heard every style within every genre for decades, folks. Back in 2019, my longtime friend Matt Bishop was on one of my favorite debut brutal death metal albums, in a long time, Excruciating Extermination, from Horrific […]
This is gonna be the easiest review I’ll have to write in 2026. It’s a Vomitory album. Done. I mean, of course I could flesh this thing out and ramble on about this being the band’s 9th album (11th if you count the Cut Up hiatus/ detour they band took after sort of breaking up […]
Gore Machine, from Philadelphia, returns with album number two – Congealed and Foaming. The debut from two years ago, Macerated & Liquified, was a pretty good brutal death metal album. Just like that one, this is a one-man show with Druesome doing it all. The first album cover was fun and gruesome, however this album […]
There have been stellar Black Metal bands coming out of the Middle East for years: Melechesh, Akvan, and Orphaned Land, to name three. Nile, while playing Middle Eastern Death Metal, is still from South Carolina, so they barely qualify (in sound only). So, having said that, I’m here to talk about Gomma, a one-man outfit […]
I know I’ve been reviewing a significant amount of metalcore lately, but it’s not been heavy enough. It’s been too sweet for my tastes, and I don’t have a sweet tooth. This is where Chamber comes in. To even call this “metalcore” is generous. It’s heavy, suffocating, in-your-face, and other adjectives. I am serious when […]
Germany’s death/thrash act Messticator is a relatively new act formed with former and ex- members of various other German thrash and death metal bands I am not familiar with, like Embers of Flesh and Devarium. Total Mastery is their second album, following up 2022s Forthcoming Revelation. As they all do, the promo materials tell me […]
I reviewed Immolation’s eleventh album Acts of God, four years ago and here we are with album #12, Descent. This album is a little more streamlined, and this lineup has been intact for a decade so they are firing on all cylinders with Ross Dolan on bass/vox, Rob Vigna and Alex Bouks on guitar and […]