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 […]
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 […]
Back in 2004, New York death metal veterans, Internal Bleeding released Onward to Mecca with then sole original member/drummer Bill Tolley and a bunch of NYDM hired guns. However, Bill was tragically killed in 2017 while performing his job as a New York firefighter. So now, in a case of history repeating itself, original member Chris Pervelis who […]
I have no prior experience with progressive Netherlands symphonic, melodic death/black metal duo, Shylmagoghnar ( a moniker the duo created), but their second album, Transience is one of the most wondrous albums of the year. Seriously, this is a really good album. It reminds me a little of Disillusion and their progressive melodic death metal magnum opus […]
I dug the second album, The Undying Season, from this US based melodic death metal band, but for some reason never checked out the follow up, 2016s Neuronic Saw. Maybe because it didn’t have the big name power of Oliver Pinnard (Neuraxis, Vengeful) or drumming royalty FLo Mournier or Dirk Verbueren like its its predecessors did, […]
Listen, I could try to force 1000 words into this review of the debut from Norway’s Ováte. i could try and dress it up and fill space, and get all sorts of creative with wordplay and shit but listen, all you really need to know that this is project is a duo spearheaded by guitarist /bassist Aindiachaí […]
The first two albums from Belgian/UK act Pantheist (2002 O Solitude and 2005s Amartia), are in my opinion, two of the finest examples of funeral doom of the two decades. However, with 2009s Journey Through lands Unknown, founder Kostas Panagiotou took the band’s sound away from the immense ‘church doom’ tones into more experimental and progressive […]
After being one of the top, but second tier Swedish death metal bands on the 90s, Wombbath broke up, but almost 20 years later, lone original member Håkan Stuvemark and some scene vets and released Downfall Rising back in 2015, a solid reunion, fitting in with the rash of releases and rebirth of the genre. […]
The post Hoffman brothers era of Deicide has been an up and down affair. From the excellent (but divisive to some), more melodic Ralph Santolla led release The Stench of Redemption, to the crap fest of ‘Til Death Do Us Part, the blistering To Hell With God, then back to crap again with In The Minds Of […]
Warning: negative nancy review ahead!!!!! (it’s been a while)….. Here’s one of those reissues that has be scratching my head. There are plenty of albums that deserved a reissue- for example Desecrator’s Subconscious Release a few years ago, or God Macabre‘s The Winterlong, or Gorement’s The Ending Quest. Hard to find albums that were overlooked, or […]