TOTD’s very own E. Thomas, knowing my affinity for mangled metallic crust punk, tipped me off on Scottish quartet Razor Sharp Death Blizzard…and I’ll be goddamned if he didn’t have my face nailed up on a wanted poster for this one. These nuts bring crust, hardcore and Am-Rep/Touch and Go noise-rock tonalities to the table […]

Featuring Michael Gilpatrick on bass and Chadd Beverlin on drums (both of Ohio solar sludge titans Mockingbird), Enhailer’s debut LP Grisaille is a bad trip through the bad lands full of psychedelic tonalities, dry heaving riffs and shattering rhythmic shifts that break Tectonic plates like teeth.  To keep my own personal record straight, Mockingbird didn’t […]

Cleveland’s finest purveyors of the riff, Contra, busted my nose up with brass knuckles in the form of 2015’s Son of Beast EP.  A storm n’ swell of throttling blues riffs and homing missile rhythms, the instrumental trio comprising members of some of my favorite Ohio heavies were off to a greater than excellent start.  […]

  As a big fan of Andi Macht’s lead guitar firestorms in German dirt doom kings Black Wasteland, I was all ears to find out he moonlights as bassist for ruthless punk/thrash/old school black metal bastards Hellburst. If Celtic Frost, Saviours, Hellshock, Venom, Discharge and BL’AST had a mutant six-headed baby baptized in an amniotic […]

Guitarist/vocalist/mastermind Aaron Lewis has culled Connecticut doom cult When the Deadbolt Breaks into his own singular backwoods, backwater doom vision for over a decade now (he’s also been in Cable and Thunderhoof and currently has the smokin’ Buzzard Canyon goin’ full swing). I’ve had the pleasure of opening for Deadbolt twice, including a devastating show […]

My buddy Hassan Amin, vocalist for the almighty grind lords Multinational Corporations always turns me onto cool new bands.  Props brother Hassan!  Death by Fungi is a hardcore/punk/crossover unit hailing from India and their debut 4-track EP In Dearth Of scratches several of my extreme musical itches all at once, gettin’ my leg kicking in […]

Bloodlet/Hope and Suicide alumni Scott Angelacos and Tom Crowther have been insanely busy with music lately.  As a huge fan of Bloodlet since The Seraphim Fall came out, I couldn’t be a happier 34 year old hate bastard fucker.  On top of the release of the pure Floridian sludge classic Hollow Leg’s Crown, which also […]

German doom overlords Black Wasteland blew me away with a pair audio gallows’ hangings; the Where Light Can Not Intrude LP and the Dehydration EP.  Capable of twin axin’ their way through forests of Lizzy, Valkyrie and Priest, filthing a path to the toughest biker bar dirt doom show (think St. Vitus, Turambar, Earthride and […]

Holy fuck, this is some good, goddamn heavy ass shit.  Warcrab is an English sextet that plays self-proclaimed death/sludge metal and they ain’t fuckin’ joking with that labelling.  Rampaging grooves, a nice mesh of guttural growls and sickly screams, dirty speed-ups, mid-tempo double-bass blasts and three guitarists with two digging into the riffs while Geoff […]

London’s soul cooking, noise-ridden psychedelic doom titans Sonic Mass were a complete and total happy accident for me on Bandcamp.  I couldn’t even recall to you at this point in time what exactly I was trying to find instead but one start to finish listening of You People Never Learn made a believer out of […]

First review back after a three week long hand injury, so excuse me while I pull my tricycle from underneath a wreckage of doctor bills, a limper than a wet noodle wrist and a fuckin’ sling.  Hand and foot injuries are a bitch but that’s nothin’ a good riff can’t cure and New Hampshire’s druggy, […]

Eidolon is the third overall release from New Brunswick doom bruisers Zaum and it’s certainly something different.  I must sadly declare ignorance of the debut full-length Oracles and the split with Shooting Guns, so I come into this review with negative brain cells in terms of their past work.  Opting for the increasingly popular duo […]

Stroudsburg, PA doom champions King Dead are another band that recently won me over in the live-setting; clogging my arteries with their twin bass carnage and slicing my gut wide open with a broken feedback bottle as the band gleefully watched my innards spill out on the club floor.  The instrumental trio excels on the […]

Largely a punk rock band with tones that live up to their moniker, I.E. overdriven with fuzz and swimming in an ocean of beer suds, Arizona power trio Fuzz Evil doesn’t bring anything too complex to the table but they don’t really need to.  Sporting a greasy, brain-burnt riff onslaught that will latch onto the […]

Nothing quite beats the feeling of seeing a band live (that you knew nothing about prior to the show) and getting your head completely beaten in with a wet mackerel.  That was my experience with DC punk/doom/psychedelic rock trio Caustic Casanova.  The band has a pretty extensive discography and they’ve been at it for a […]

It’s a goddamn shame when you just lose track of a great band.  I’ve got a pretty sweet, silver-screened, fancy dancy version of Seattle’s crusty sludgers Into the Storm’s debut LP Amidst a Sea of Chaos that still gets playtime in 2016.  In the meantime, it looks like my blind eye missed at least two […]

Good fuckin’ lord my ears!  That’s praise by the way.  This two-way grindcore orgy is some of the foulest, filthiest, fastest and most fucked up stuff I’ve heard in a long time.  You get your organs embalmed twice; a pair of incisions by Michigan’s manic lords of grind, Sunlight’s Bane (formerly known as Traitor) and […]

Man, there is just no replacing the classic sludge bands.  Bands like Grief, Negative Reaction, Cavity, Eyehategod, Buzzov*en, Crowbar, Acid Bath, Cable, Green Machine, Noothgrush Kilara, Iron Monkey, Sour Vein, etc. still resonate with me just like they did in the 90s when I first got into all of them; each one had a unique, […]

Crack open a bottle of Mead, wash it down with a few shots of Absinthe (the kind with wormwood, not that wimpy shit), slash both of your wrists and slowly bleed out while the debut full-length Fiber from dreary Georgian dirge merchants Dead Register takes you off to the land of no light.  The band’s […]

Tee Pee Records always puts on a helluva duchess and the proverbial mind spread.  Hell, I still listen to Titan’s A Raining Sun of Light and Love for You and You and You on an almost weekly basis.  Why Relapse never seemed to give Titan’s stellar follow-up Sweet Dreams any big sort of push is […]

Switzerland quartet Buried Souls self-proclaim their love for New Orleans sludgecore on this Self-Titled debut and I’m not going to argue with them.  They might just shoot me up with black tar and then drag my lifeless corpse to drown face first in the swamps of Switzerland.  I am hearing shades of Eyehategod, Soilent Green, […]

Boy, I’m a shameful idiot for missing out on Italian death metal decapitators Dominhate and their debut full-length Towards the Light.  What I’m hearing on the band’s EP follow-up Emissaries of Morning is a band in complete control of the craft with every switch, flinch and twitch that made me a fan of the style […]

You’re walking alone on a desert highway.  The last of your water ran out around 3 hours ago and the sign you saw 5 minutes ago said “Rest Stop 50 Miles.”  You think you get a break when you see a dustcloud of human life, but end up getting rundown by a ruthless gang of […]

I’ve been a huge fan of Swedish sludge butchers Pyramido since their debut full-length Sand came out on Totalrust Music in 2009.  The follow-up Salt was even heavier and saw the band stretching their songs, riffs and viciousness into a technologically advanced weapons platform that was far deeper and more desiccated than any number of […]

West Virginian power trio Rhin laid my constitution to rubble with their debut album Bastard.  I was an instant convert when it came to their anger overload; splicing together the best parts of pissed off punk rock, a touch of Seattle’s dark side (Willard, early Tad, Skin Yard) rhythmically focused and feedback blasted noise-rock ala […]