You’ve got to respect the UK’s Twin Method for plying a genre that has become the laughing stock of metal over the last 8 years, but with Nu metal’s larger faces (Papa Roach, Limp Bizkit, Staind, Korn, Mudvayne, POD) being less relevant than Anna Nicole Smith, I’ll give some credit to Twin Method for at […]

Certainly, Twin Method is by far the most commercially oriented act on the roster of Crash Music. Listening to this single, which is intended to build anticipation for the band’s forthcoming summer release, The Volume Of Self, it’s pretty apparent that Twin Method has a certain affection for Mudvayne. Toss in a touch of Linkin […]

Unshine flashes through the same elven infested, misty forests as their fellow Finns, Battlelore. Pulitzer-worthily titled Earth Magick is yet another stab at female fronted, romantic, mid-paced metal musick (that’s an intentional typo, mind you). Where Finntroll actually sound like trolls on the roll and Korpiklaani like a pack of drunks on a fringe, I’m […]

Holy shit. Two major league things going on here. First, a great release on Crash Music. Second, a filthy, piss ridden exercise in death/thrash from Finland of all places. One part gritty Entombed, one part At The Gates and one part grimy leather and spikes retro black thrash a la Bestial Mockery, Pyuria deliver a […]

With former members of now defunct act Serberus, expectations were high for this Colorado band’s second album of self titled battle metal. Instead though, despite some fine individual performances the end results is nothing more than the usual Scandinavian influenced black metal, and while it might satisfy the most heavily corpse painted and spike ridden […]

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 […]

US black metal just never seems to find its way to these ears, and when it does it’s generally the grimier, warlike stylings of Epoch of Unlight and Forest of Impaled or the raw frozen grimness of Goatwhore and Leviathan. In the symphonic/atmospheric category, only Vesperian Sorrow has graced these ears with any true mimicry […]

So Gothicized symphonic black metal has been done to death right? Bands like Dimmu Borgir, Cradle of Filth and Old Mans Child have essentially set the bar for others to follow, and follow they have-in droves. Graveworm, Apostasy, Ninnumaum, Agathodaimon, Chthonic, Tidfall, and too many others to name have all delivered their own takes on […]

By nature, the somewhat static structure of death metal doesn’t allow for too many innovators, i.e. there’s only so far a band can stretch those boundaries before their music is considered either a rip-off of an already established band or an incorporation of other musical styles shunned by purists. Flipping through the CD booklet, one […]