Ever since I met these, then kids back in 2008 at a Summer Slaughter (or maybe Sounds of the Underground?) show, I’ve enjoyed watching them stick out the genre saturation of proggy deathcore djent whatever ever core that blew up in the mid 00s (“Abstract Art” from the debut The New Reign is still cool as fuck over […]

I’ve heard of Lividity, veterans of the Chicago/Illinois brutal death metal scene since the mid 90s, but have not really heard them or owned any of their albums. Ive seen them lumped in with the likes of Gorgasm to Cannibal Corpse and of course Deaden and Broken Hope, and after hearing the band’s 6th album, Perveseverance, […]

To me, the career path of Australia’s Psycroptic has somewhat mirrored Poland’s Decapitated: 7 albums in, early career highlighted by a couple of critically acclaimed technical death metal albums, then both had a divisive vocalist change with Psycroptic moving to the Jason Pepiatt  and Decapitated moving from Sauron to Cowan then a slight style shift into less tech death metal realms. Those familiar […]

I’ll go ahead and assume that Germany’s Godskill is named after killing Gods, and not the skill said God possesses. Anyway, what we have here is a late 2018 release that is a pretty solid second album from these burly melodic death metalers. Imbuing the chunky Danish scene akin to Illdisposed, Corpus Mortale, Dawn of Disease and […]

Sacramento’s Wurm Flesh is Comatose Music’s latest signing (at the writing of this review), and they are exactly what you would expect from Comatose Music in 2018/19; no frills, brutal death metal that sticks rigidly to the label’s formula and delivers the goods, nothing more, nothing less. Samples? Check. Something awful happening to a naked chick on the […]

The Heretic’s Fork (an expectedly awful medieval torture device) is one of those ‘mysterious’ bands with no bio, information, facebook, or bandcamp page, heck these guys are not even up at Metal Archives. But here is what I’m assuming is their debut album, and its 8 tracks of muddy, chaotic, dissonant brutal death metal. At 27 minutes and […]

Founder and owner of now-defunct Canadian record label Blasthead records, Paul Shaw, always had an ear for good music, even if his own tech death band Hate Division was merely average. But it appears he and his Hate Division pals have a better knack for melodic death metal. With nods to Amon Amarth, Arghoslent, Helcaraxe, […]

Back in 2013,  Germany’s Sulphur Aeon made quite a splash in the death metal genre with their churning Lovecraftian based debut album, Swallowed By the Ocean’s Tide, then followed it up with the more miasmal, Gateway to the Antisphere is 2015, an album that had lofty expectations but still grew on me. Both albums made my year-end […]

First off- Love that cover- I want that on a giant print or t-shirt. Second, Valdur has quickly released their 6th album, barely a year after their last effort, Divine Cessation, came out. How’s that for production? Third, the band appears to have swung the pendulum ever so slightly back towards their black metal roots from the pure, noisy […]

So imagine  Mastodon got heavier instead of more progressive, added some Crowbar heft to a stoner metal backbone and were suddenly from Australia and you’d get Sydney’s Sumeru and their raucous second album, Summon Destroyer. After the intro, “Inanis Kultus” the band dive in to “The Temple”, and it’s a bit of a soft opening for the album as […]

On Weak Aside’s last album, The Next Offensive, I had to go after the band’s lackluster moniker as the everything was else was so damn solid. This time, the German warmongers are just as good as before, so I’ll go after that eyesore of an album cover…. I digress, Forward Into Darkness continues the band’s confident and […]

A staple and standout in the tech death metal scene since 2005s Neurotripsicks, France’s Gorod have delivered 5 albums of superb technical, yet playful and catchy death metal. And I’ll admit that I was a little concerned about the band switching to their own label, Overpowered Records, for album number 6, as this might indicate […]

Swiss djent/progressive deathcore act Mycelia are new to me, even with 4 albums under their belt, but their quirky take on staggering Meshuggah ish heft and polyrhythmic density has me impressed. And by quirky I don’t mean annoying Arsonists Get all the Girls synth injections or dance beats, but a love of classic movies and jazz mixing with the expected stuttering, […]

When you deliver an debut album that arguably reinvigorated melodic death metal in 2004s A Celebration Guilt, expectations tend to pile on and pile up, and despite a Children of Bodom like trajectory, founder and brainchild James Malone has largely responded well with subsequent albums, maybe with the exception of 2010s more rock based Starve for the […]

Full disclosure- I’ve completely lost interest in Between the Buried and Me. Starting with The Great Misdirect, I just haven’t got into the material and I’m less thrilled with each release. I own the Parallax duo and  Coma Ecliptic , but frankly I have net even given them a full listen and I don’t even own […]

The death metal scene was abuzz when Paradise Lost‘s Nick Holmes was announced as the new vocalist for Swedish Death metal super group Bloodbath.. The resultant album, The Grand Morbid Funeral was solid, but certainly nothing compared to the band’s first two Akerfeldt and Peter Tagtgren fronted, classic releases. Well, Holmes is back, and is […]

The debut EP from Milwaukee’s Prezir , Contempt, was a solid black/death metal assault, but I’d expect no less from a project that includes Rory Heikkila from Shroud of Despondency on guitar ,vocalist Luka Đorđević from epic Tolkien death metal act  Khazaddum, and has since added Milwaukee scene veteran Jerry Hauppa from Concentric, Northless and Ara on bass. And on the band’s full length debut, […]

After locking into their sound on 2005’s I. Monarch, Erik Rutan and Hate Eternal have delivered 4 damn fine albums of American death metal that’s one of the more solid discographies of the last decade or so. And with the addition of drummer Hannes Grossman (Alkaloid, ex Necrophagist) on drums to Rutan and JJ Hrubovcak (on his […]

Despite not being overly prolific, (only one EP, The Dagger and the Chalice and one album, Abysmal Thresholds,  along with a split and a 7″ since 2011) Finland’s Corpsessed remains my favorite Dark Descent Records band- no small feat when you consider the label’s quality over the years. So this has been one of my most anticipated releases […]

Lavadome isn’t the most production label out there, but when they do release something, its usually pretty darn top notch (i.e. Epoch, Zealotry, Destroying Divinity, Heaving Earth, Chaos Inception). And that continues with the third full length album from Australia’s Eskhaton, Omegalitheos, a splendidly  and typically murky and muddy delivery of Australian death metal chaos. In […]

Hang on, let me grab my Comastose Music and Italian brutal death metal review template and paste in here…. [Insert brutal album name here] is the debut album from  [insert band name here], hailing from [Italy], featuring current and former members of  [insert other brutal death bands from Italy here] and deliver exactly what you’d […]

“Tis the times’ plague, when madmen lead the blind.” ― William Shakespeare, King Lear Boy, who knew Shakespeare was a prophet? But I digress. After one self released EP, and a killer debut album, The Spear and the Ichor that Follows in 2015 on Dark Descent Records, Minnesota’s House of Atreus signed with Iron Bonehead Productions and […]

You know when you get a band with ******* hammer as the name, there’s a solid chance you know exactly what it will be, so I’ll make this simple. As simple as the music contained on DungeönHammer’s debut album. Do you like  classic Hellhammer or Celtic Frost? Do you like Dark Throne‘s latter material? If you answered “OUGHHH”  […]

One could argue that within the Finnish melodic death metal scene, you have the ‘big three’ comprised of Amorphis, Insomnium and Omnium Gatherum. But nipping at their heels are a couple of bands I really like in Noumena and Wolfheart, the brain child of Tuomas Saukkonen, whose former projects Before the Dawn and Black Sun Aeon, […]

Slam death metal fans: “Dude, the new Kill Everything album, is  sick, it’s the slammiest of the slammiest releases of 2018″ Kraanium : “Hold my Beer….” The fifth album from formerly Norway based, now international slammers Kraanium brings nothing new to the table at all and is all but indiscernible from the last two albums I reviewed,  2012s Post […]