METAL!!! I’ve got absolutely NO business liking this album. By all rights, due to the Rob Halford/King Diamond-like squeals of Cam Pipes alone I shouldn’t have even made it past the first song. However, a few things not only keep me listening but actually end up making this a damn fine METAL!!! album. First, to […]
Better late than never I suppose, but after purchasing this album (see not we reviewers are not always promos whores), I have a new addition to my top five albums of 2004.Hailing from Finland and caught in the vast net that entails melodic death metal, Insomnium are essentially what Amorphis should be now. While melodic […]
When I first started writing for Digitalmetal, one of the first discs I was received was Alien Breed by Internal Bleeding; a compilation of rare/demo tracks and one new track that was from the “upcoming” new album, Hatefuel. While I always kind of dismissed Internal Bleeding as nothing more than a decent Suffocation clone, the […]
‘Trailer-core’ was only term I could come up for this hazy Southern slab of fuzzed out, earthy metal. Equal parts sludgy, hazy doom-rock and groovy southern hardcore, BBTP have released an album that comes across as Crowbar and Floodgate meets Eyehategod and Down while in a Jack Daniels and Darvocet induced stupor and simply oozes […]
So former Ensiferum guitarist/vocalist Jari Maenpaa forms this solo project with the help of some session musicians (including Rotten Sound drummer Kai Hahto), and ends up delivering a debut album that instantly rises to the top of the Finnish metal heap, equaling his former bands pomp and grandiose scope while injecting the technical gregariousness of […]
“Sybreed sounds like nothing you’ve ever heard…literally. Unless of course you’ve heard a hybrid mix of Meshuggah, Nine Inch Nails, Placebo and Fear Factory, all taking place on a sonic landscape that reminds you of the Matrix – complete with visceral screams of human suffering and the never ending madness taking place here on Planet […]
I am certain that up until this point in time, I would never, ever consider using the words ‘tough’ and ‘Swiss’ in the same sentence, but the latest burly offering from Switzerland’s Cataract has prompted the impossible. After the solid but more metalcore laced Great Days of Vengeance album and Martyr’s Melodies EP, Swiss straightedge […]
So in a year that sees albums from not only legends Grave, Entombed and Dismember, you’ve also got ‘supergroups’ Bloodbath, Murder Squad and Chaosbreed throwing in their respective homage to the Sunlight sound. And now comes another ‘supergroup’ giving suitable homage to ‘that’ sound and it consists of four unequivocally qualified heathens ready to deliver […]
The Swiss have really latched onto the droning ambiance and ebbing builds of Isis, Cult of Luna and Neurosis with the likes on Zatokrev, Overmars, Impure Wilhemina and Vancouver (which features members of Impure Wilhemina) making a name for themselves on home shores. Signed to the usually grindcore and death metal based death metal Deepsend […]
Sometimes you just know if an album is going to be good. Based on Disillusions The Porter EP, I just had a hunch this German three man project was on to something special. And they are.Essentially rooted in melodic death metal, Disillusion add so many nuances of other genres, to pigeon hole them is unfair, […]
The bad/good/bad M.O of Crash Music again confuses me with this, a solid melodic death/black metal album hot on the heels of the god-awful Single Bullet Theory album. I know melodic death metal died eons ago, but its ghost often rises with a quality appearance and Colorado’s The Mandrake is one such example. Not bereft […]
I generally don’t care for most Southern Lord bands, but LOTM had a few things going for them that piqued my curiosity before I even listened to it; Greek Mythology as the central lyrical theme, a very cool Minotaur’s maze etched into the CD, 2 members of 7000 Dying Rats (Steven Rathbone & James Barracca), […]
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 […]
It’s amazing what a great production can do. This band’s debut album Behind Inquisition hinted at a perfectly blended array of grinding death metal and metalcore, but was rendered pretty flat because of a subpar production. Now as the genre is burgeoning to the point of saturation, WDHR have timed this nice little EP perfectly […]
So here is the follow up to 2002’s artfully sublime Reflection of the I from Norway’s heralds of classically laced metal. For those that don’t know, Winds is the brain child of one piano progeny Andy Winter, who has garnered the aid of some of Norway’s most respected extreme musicians to help him deliver his […]
I think most metal fans will agree that last years supposed “comeback” effort, Hell’s Unleashed was a laughably bad joke of an album, that one can only blame on the band’s inactivity or some form of cruel practical joke. So it was with some trepidation I approached this album, wondering if one of Sweden’s death […]
Lets be honest, after being of on the cusp of black metal elitism with their first two albums, Svartalvheim and The Cainian Chronicles, Norway’s Ancient became pretty bad, pretty quick, peaking with 2001’s embarrassingly bad Proxima Centauri, and as a result have become pretty much irrelevant in black metal circles. So with some lineup changes […]
2004 has been an important year thus far for American metal. With Unearth, Killswitch Engage, Bleeding Through, Beyond The Embrace all issuing that all important second album and Shadows Fall moving on to album number four, US metal seems to be as strong as ever. Massachusetts’ All That Remains made quite a stir with the […]
Slovakian grindcore on Obscene; you know what you’re getting here. The self anointed ‘mincecore’ of Abortion, while not as eviscerating as label mates Squash Bowels and with a irreverent sense of catchy humor, Abortion aren’t doing anything too special but it will probably please most die hard fans. With a classic Napalm Death/Carcass sound including […]
A Perfects Murder’s debut album, Cease To Suffer was a solid slab of Hatebreed inspired hardcore that didn’t really do anything special, so it was a surprise to me, that after a switch from Goodfellow Records to Victory, APM would come out with this absolute monster of a disc. Pure vein popping, chest swelling, boot […]
A taster EP to follow-up the ravaging Retaliate debut album, Dissent, released on the band’s own label, is a 5 song EP with the title track split into four parts. With Kevin Talley back in the fold for this EP’s recording, the drumming becomes immediately improved and is also emphasized immeasurably by a Scott Hull […]
Arguably the most anticipated metalcore album of the year and sophomore album from one of the genre’s most revered acts, The Oncoming Storm is the album that floppy black-haired, hip hugging jeans wearing kids have been salivating for, for over 3 years now. So is it worth the wait? Well yes and no. Yes, because […]
Here is some pretty nice early 90’s styled symphonic but primal black metal that hails from Brazil but sounds like it came from the mountains of Norway.With a sound and tone similar to very early Emperor, but less complex or very early Dimmu Borgir, Zargof weave and epic astral tapestry of raw but still grandiose […]
So imagine for a second that the last two In Flames and Soilwork albums had been really good. Same slight experimentation and clean vocal usage, but with the intensity of yore and deliberate thrash edge within the harsher Gothenburg sound. Intrigued? Then check out Denmark’s Withering Surface. With their fourth album, but truthfully the first […]
Melodic metalcore has grown exponentially over the last few years, but it has also been plagiarized exponentially also, with countless Poison The Well clones poring from Orange County and the East coast. One such band was the short lived 7 Angels 7 Plagues, who had a solid offering with Jhazmyne’s Lullabye. I tell you this […]