2017 is turning into quite the year for veteran American  death metal acts; Suffocation, Immolation, Broken Hope and Origin have all released albums and later this year we even have Morbid Angel and Incantation releases. But elbowing their way through all of them is Dying Fetus and their eighth opus, and for lack of a better […]

Atlanta’s Royal Thunder have developed into quite the rock outfit. I enjoyed their last album Crooked Doors that came out back in 2015.  WICK has quite a different vibe from previous efforts, and this is shown right away with the opening track, “Burning Tree.” Opening up with some trancy, psychedelic-type guitar chord progressions, Mlny Parsonz […]

Ever since Metallica’s infamous 1991 album, self titled albums have always made me a bit leery. They always seem to scream sell out, contract out out or flat out of ideas. Throw in the simple ‘just our logo’ cover, the 10th album, and a song from a prior stopgap EP, and my spidey sense is […]

  Well this is quite the slab of death tinged crusty grind core that will undoubtedly help 2017 get off to a smashing start. Washington’s The Drip are absolutely playing for keeps with their debut release The Haunting Fear of Inevitability.  “Blackest Evocation” get things off to a face ripping start. Brandon Caldwell’s vocals remind […]

In 1987 Death firmly put the stamp of the death metal genre on the map with the release of their debut Scream Bloody Gore album.  I received it on vinyl as a birthday gift that year and it is an album all us old bastards have memorized front to back.   Once again Relapse Records […]

Unless You live under a rock, and this is the first time you have ever visited this site or another heavy metal/extreme metal webzine, I’m going to assume you have heard of Arizona’s Gatecreeper, Relapse Records latest heavily hyped darlings. Partly because this is the first new band playing old school death metal Relapse has pushed in a while (let’s […]

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, […]

With last year’s Savage Land, Exhumed main main Matt Harvey and basically his Chuck Schuldiner cover band Gruesome, delivered arguably the apex early Death worship album. But at the end of my review, I wondered how the band would follow Savage Land up. Would they still basically cover Death’s first 3 albums or would they […]

Let’s just suppose that, in 1994 or so, Helmet wrote some songs.  Also they had a time machine. They used it to travel a few years further back and coerce the Melvins to write a couple more songs for them. Then they screamed forward to last year and forced Converge to show them how to […]

Portland, Oregon’s Graves at Sea and I go way, way back.  I reviewed their Documents of Grief outing before it was an official press; at the time just a handmade CD-R that the fellas put together on the fly.  Directly after its release I had the distinct honor of interviewing the band (Nate and Nick) […]

Starting out in the late 80’s Francis Howard (Guitars) and his brother, Moyses (Drums), along with bass/vocalist Scot Latour would put together one of the most under-appreciated death/thrash bands, Incubus.  Hailing from Louisiana, Incubus would go on to put out the outstanding 1988 Serpent Temptation, debut album. They bested that 2 years later with Beyond the […]

Every few years a album comes along that changes the game in tech death. Going back to this band’s namesake with Gorgut’s Obscura, Death’s seminal latter output, Origin, Atheist, Cynic, Necrophagist, Theory In Practice’s Colonizing the Sun, the Canadian scene, Gorod and others. And here is another one, in Obscura’s fourth effort Akróasis. These Germans are far from new comers  and certainly […]

As a longtime fan of these digitized, Maryland filth-grinders, I’m used to Agoraphobic Nosebleed slowing down with big, tumbling dirge riffs and back breaking weight.  They’ve showcased the tactic as early as The Poacher Diaries (split with Converge) and even back in the Honky Reduction days Scott Hull had a knack for busting his knuckles […]

Primitive Man’s latest ep is an oppressive, aggressive slab o’ sludge…and a bit of grind…fine, slip in some crust parts too.  It’s an anthropomorphic equivalent to the imposing brutalist style housing project high rise that populate the part of town ,as whispered of by parents, “you don’t want your car to breakdown in”.  Zooming in […]

Fuck the Facts is, right off the bat, just the best band name ever. The end. Musically, the band dwells in a grindcore geography, but is not of a grindcore geography. They are more akin to Today is the Day than Pig Destroyer or Napalm Death, and the point of each song is not to […]

This was one of my most anticipated albums in some time; a supergroup comprised of Amebix’s Rob Miller, Michel Langevin (Away) from Voivod, Jon Misery from crust punk stawarts Misery, and Andy Lefton, from the devastatingly crushing War//Plague. I don’t know what I expected that to sound like, given how wonderfully eclectic Ambebix and Voivod […]

Virginian, dual axe demons Valkyrie are back with this phenom of an album, their 3rd full-length to date and first for Relapse.  I make no bones or excuses about loving these guys to death.  I’ve seen them live thrice and they deliver more signed n’ sealed explosives than the Unabomber did in his heyday.  Guitar […]

I don’t have much patience with geeker-provenance or hero worship. I was pleased as punch to hear Carcass and Godflesh put out fantastic, true to form records after being away for a while, but for the most part I agree with Death Grips: “Fuck where you’re from, fuck where you’re going, it’s all about where […]

Grind is a specific kind of metal that describes, band by band, a single aspect of being, more so than any other kind of metal – or music. The bands that make grind tend to live for that aspect, create for it. Maruta is about tension; sailing riffs on the edge of the world and […]

So I’m sure by now all of you know about Gruesome, the classic Death homage act fronted by Matt Harvey of Exhumed and joined by members of Possessed, Malevolent Creation and Derketa. What you don’t know, if you have not heard the album by now, is exactly how fucking spot on Savage Land is in it’s recreation […]

In 2012, I covered the Slaughter on the Water III festival aboard the USS Hornet in San Francisco Bay. Yes, a death metal festival on an aircraft carrier. Actually, make that inside the hangar of an aircraft carrier, and you’d better believe that shit was loud. I got tinnitus in my balls. The day was a blur […]

So here is the result of a $60,000 Kickstarter campaign: Some killer old-school death metal Andreas Marschall artwork, a killer production, and a killer Obituary album. Pity that money could not have been used to fix John Tardy’s ragged vocal cords… After these death metal legends quickly churned out three albums after reuniting in 2005 for […]

As expected from the fickle metal community there has been both a lot of hype and hate towards the debut release from this one woman black metal project from Denmark. From the elitist ‘no women in black metal’ to ‘Deafheaven suck’ crowd and those that think this is the future of black metal. And as is normal, the […]

I guess, based by the number of bands playing the style currently loaded onto my Ipod (Nux Vomica, Stheno, Tombs, Plebian Grandstand, Direwolves, Young and in the Way, Wolvehammer, Black Monolith, Hexis, Protestant, Black Anvil to name a few) blackened crust/sludge/stuff, is the new black. However, what makes Brooklyn’s Mortals stand out (other than the high […]

It is a rare and beautiful thing when a band is heavy not for heaviness’ sake, but as a necessity to reaching a deeper, more worthy goal of expression. Both the post-sludge and post-black genres of metal are oft-exploited templates for such explorations, and therein lies their crossover appeal. With Savage Gold, Brooklyn’s Tombs joins […]