Mike and Horror Pain Gore Death Productions are at it again, causing trouble with the fourth album from Spain’s Caustic, and in my opinion, their best album. It’s been a while since their last album, Hate Generation, from 2015. That album upped the game in sheer intensity from the band. They have now one-upped that […]
Riverflame is a new medieval melodic black metal band featuring members of Hail Spirit Noir, Ponte del Diavolo, and Owls, and it touts the likes of Stormkeep and Summoning as influences. Now, I love me some medieval black metal, as evidenced by my recent Gladium Regis review and my love of bands like Véhémence, Darkenhold, […]
France’s Towering has been around since 2016, and after a few demos released their debut album, Obscuring Manifestation, in 2019, on Dolorem Records. Tom J. Silver -Guitars (lead), Vocals, Christnach – Guitars (rhythm), Morte – Drums all return for album #2, The Oblation of Man. The band welcomes a new bassist, Arboria. The debut was […]
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 […]
Dave Ingram, the legendary Benediction frontman from the band’s early albums like The Grand Leveler, Transcend the Rubicon, The Dreams You Dread, and Grind Bastard, as well as the band’s recent reunion albums Scriptures and Ravage of Empires, has stepped down from the band. Just weeks after revealing that Dave Ingram would miss several live […]
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 […]
You ever feel like your brain just needs a complete shutdown? A total reboot? Just 5 minutes to shut the FUCK up? I feel that shit all the time. Between the ADHD and the I’m sure untold amounts of other undiagnosed issues in my head, there’s rarely a moment’s peace where I can just, like, […]
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 […]
Part 1: History and Memory I first heard Sepultura in 1990. It was Beneath the Remains, and from that opening acoustic guitar, I was hooked. It was brutal, beautiful, and violent. Its predecessors Morbid Visions/ Beastial Devastation and Schizophrenia, were still unheard mysteries to me, and I later was able to get a hold of […]
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 […]
So, I don’t have kids – and as a 40 year old man married to a woman of the same age, the likelihood of it happening at this point is… not great. Which is fine! We have dogs. We really like dogs! And I’ve been yelled at by more than enough of you parents of […]
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 […]