Back in  2013, Germany’s Sulphur Aeon made quite a splash with their debut  Swallowed By The Ocean’s Tide. And rightly so, being a crumbling, cavernous, but memorable sonic monument to Lovecraftian horrors. And yet here we are two years later, and the follow up seems to have been, well… swallowed up. I’m not sure I can […]

Hailing from Saint Paul Minnesota The Wolf Council is a relatively new group. According to their Facebook page they were formed in 2013 and after listening to their self-titled album I am surprised they haven’t been together for far longer.  Being just a three piece, The Wolf Council jam some very kick ass, stoned out, hard rock […]

I was so stoked when Morgoth reformed several years ago and even more stoked when the band announced they would write a new record.  I was a fan since their ep’s in the late 80’s.  I saw them live on their mini east coast tour, for The Eternal Fall ep and the band tore the […]

Switzerland’s Schammasch made quite stir last year with their second album, Contradiction (it made my 2014 year end list), so Prosthetic Records has reached back and dug up the band’s 2010 Black Tower Productions debut Sic Lvceat Lvx  (meaning ‘Thus, let the Light shine’), given it a nice new mix and remaster and new cover. And […]

Black metal is a sink or swim niche for me. Either your band rises above the dross, or it becomes dross to be risen above. Part of this is simply that the niche is not my favorite. My tolerance is lower than fans and fanatics. But part of it is that some bands try to […]

Belgium’s  Angakok play a depressive doom/sludge metal that is not long or drawn out like some doom bands (not a bad thing by any means) but is short and loaded with a sort of creepy atmosphere. I say creepy because within some songs and a few instrumentals there is spoken word parts as if heard […]

Bindrune with past and present bands/releases has really found a superb niche within a particular style with its folky, natural black metal acts like Panoptcion, Nechochwen, Obsequiae (though no longer on Bindrune) , Waldgefluster , Infera Bruo, Ahamkara, Falls or Rauros and such, so it seems that Washington State’s Alda and Bindrune is a match made in heaven. Clearly […]

Man this is definitely the best Unique Leader release I have heard this year so far.  France’s long running Kronos waste no time in beginning their technical death metal assault off the gates with the opener “Infernal Abyss Sovereignty”. Pummeling blast beats and churning vocals set the stage for an incredibly entertaining listen. Being that they […]

Translated as ‘loss’, France’s Verlies is a new three piece act, and Les Domaines Du Hommes was self released back in 2014, but the re-release has been picked up fittingly by Hypnotic Dirge Records. So the combination o the band name, country of origin and the label should clue you in as yo what to expect here. Yes, […]

Okay this is both cool and a  bit of a head scratcher, first the cool part. I know there are many of you out there that may miss Massacre both in the 90’s version and the recently aborted reformation of the selfsame band and if you are part of this fan base, you are in […]

Folk metal so often gets bogged down by excess layers of cheese, bombast and pretentiousness that it rarely moves me or finds a way into my listening rotation. But every now and again a style of metal that generally falls outside my comfort zone proceeds to blow me away and forces me to rethink my […]

Lately, my wanton lust for grinding, d-beat flesh is insatiable.  It could be the nice weather, a mental illness or some other factor bringing it out of me again, but shit man, I got the bug.  Scotland’s own sewerborn hellspawn Rats of Reality are really hitting me with a ball peen hammer right between the […]

Well here it is. At least based on this interview, this is Rory Heikkila’s final release doing business under the Shroud of Despondency brand. This is a huge bummer for those in the know, but I can’t be too sad about it, because Family Tomb is one hell of a consolation. I haven’t enjoyed a […]

This reissue was impossible to find in the U.S.  For imports, as usual, I had to go and get it from a European distro and paid over $20 for it. But it was worth it since Odium is my favorite Morgoth album.  In 1993 Odium was released and polarized a lot of Morgoth’s fan base […]

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 […]

Wait… what the hell is this? A brutal death metal band that actually has… a BASS GUITAR?!?  One that you can feel? And even the drums have a bit of pop to them? WTF?!?  Yes, I can honestly say I was pleasantly surprised when the new Coathanger Abortion (CA) had all of the above.  As […]

When James McBain the guitarist/vocalist of the excellent Rats of Reality isn’t breaking apart Pangaea with that band’s blackened, demonic d-beat, he’s at the helm of his solo project Hellripper.  He’s a veritable one man wrecking crew playing all of the instruments (aside from Mark Lerche’s lead on “Trial by Fire”) and the end result […]

Well, well, well, look who decided to reform??  New York’s Immortal Suffering putting out a brand new 7 song 22 minute ep, ready to rip your head off.  I could not think of a better cd to come back to sending in Teeth of the Divine some new reviews every once in a while.  I […]

Australia sure seems to do a wonderful job of producing unbelievably groovy and polished death metal, Ulcerate and Psycroptic to name two that come to mind.  Hailing from Perth, Western Australia comes Sanzu.  Sanzu’s Painless EP is a testament to experimentation and really well thought out song writing. “18 days of Rain”starts off with an extremely […]

I liked a few numetal bands. There, I said it. I once read an interview with Gene Hoglan where he indicated, very strongly, that we are lucky to live in an age where even the shitty metal acts are better than much of the dross he (and, as I am around his age, I) was […]

There was a time in the late 90s and early 00s where England’s Cradle of Filth were one of my very favorite bands, and whether you liked it or not, they were legitimate superstars in extreme metal. I enjoyed 2000s Midian, 2003’s Damnation and A Day, and really liked 2004’s Nymphetamine, but I never really loved […]

Even for well-seasoned metalheads, grindcore is a tough pill to swallow. It takes some very skilled manufacturers to produce grind that can walk the tightrope between borderline white noise extremity and a whiff of actual songcraft and something for listeners to latch onto. Personally my tolerance for grind has lessened in recent years, mostly due […]

I think most death heads will agree that there are a few immensely satisfying experiences when it comes to death metal; 1) a random new find that kicks ass and 2) that moment when death metal is done perfectly, achieving the immaculate balance of speed, power and brutality. Well, on their second album Italy’s new to me acts, Inverted […]

Doom blues don’t get any better than the church crushing abandon of Goatsnake.  ¾ of the original line-up return sans bassist Guy Pinhas (replaced by Scott Renner), and the boys haven’t lost a step.  Jesus Christ, Greg Anderson’s riffs make me want to get down on my knees and say the lord’s prayer, vocalist Pete […]

Okay, lets see what we have here. If you are familiar with former Angelcorpse guitarist Gene Palubicki in the slightest, you know he’s a dude that does his thing and does it well, regardless of what band moniker he’s currently doing business under; and Blasphemic Cruelty is no different. What we have is about 20 minutes of […]