Despite the integrality of palm mutes in thrash metal, Rigor Mortis‘ lauded, 1988, self-titled debut was at its core, little more than a blitz of rapid tremolo riffs, performed with an unfailing precision and feverish velocity that could only come from Mike Scaccia. It’s almost as if he never considered palm muting worth his time; […]

An oubliette, from the French word ‘oublier’ – to forget – is a dungeon. A particularly horrible and lonely sort of dungeon, little more than a hole in the ground. In you go, curled and cramped, and then a lid or stone is slid across the opening, trapping you in blackness while your body succumbs to pain, hunger, […]

As painful as it is to say, death metal is probably the most stagnant, saturated subgenre of metal right now with the majority of its practitioners either content to simply regurgitate the most well-known sounds of the early ‘90s or soullessly hammer away in only the most “brootal” fashion. How many early Entombed clones does […]

The cover art of The Depths’ Preaching Death is drawn in the rotten, decrepit style of Justin Bartlett, perhaps best known for crafting the artwork of Lord Mantis’ Pervertor and Dragged into Sunlight’s Hatred for Mankind, albums which blurred the line between misanthropic sludge and scorching black metal. Preaching Depth isn’t too far off from […]

WOW! I’m a newcomer to Australia’s self proclaimed ‘extreme progressive metal’ act Ne Obliviscaris, but after hearing Citadel, the band’s second album, there’s no doubt in my mind that this act has to be one of the more special and ambitious bands I have heard in some time. So much so, that I’m actually having a […]

John D. Reedy’s Writhe, a one person outfit from the United Kingdom, is a self-described atmospheric/post metal band. As I can’t claim to be an expert on anything post-any kind of metal, so my opinion is very simple. When I first listened to this self released, two-song demo EP, I got about halfway through the […]

From the same label and country that brought us the excellent The Great Old Ones, comes a similarly black/shoe gaze/crust  project with a dash of cascadian ambiance and ambition that shows great promise the the rather lengthy 2, twenty or so minute tracks that comprise this impressive debut album. Sliding comfortably in amid the likes […]

Just Before Dawn is a project started by Blood Mortized guitarist Anders Biazzi, just like the 2013 debut, the formula is devastatingly effective:  war themed, mid paced death metal rooted on Bolt Thrower and Hail of Bullets and a seemingly never ending parade of who is who in Swedish metal metal providing other instruments and […]

Exodus are an odd creature among the old guard of thrash metal. Having barely avoided the dreaded scourge of the nineties by breaking up after 1992’s Force of Habit (which was middling but not outright offensive), they reappeared in 2001 with the stellar comeback, Tempo of the Damned. That still didn’t stop them from turning […]

Another year, another new KMFDM album. If only every band were so prolific! Wait a second, that’s how I started my review of last year’s album… but it works, because they keep pumping ’em out for our industrial-dance/metal enjoyment. Every year there’s a new full-length, and in between, Käpt’n K and his hardworking crew constantly produce new remixes, compilations, and merch, […]

Perhaps it was the gloomy, autumnal cover art of this demo EP that had me thinking, “Ah, just what I don’t want to hear this season, another band doing a poor Katatonia rip-off.”  Don’t peel the bark off my tree please, I’ve been a longtime fan of the Swedish downer rockers, but I usually don’t […]

Unfathomed of Abyss is a new one man symphonic black metal project from Texas. Self released debut album Arisen upon Oblivion is an opus that’s been in the works by creator Kevin Price for fourteen years. While he certainly didn’t rush to get this work out, he did make sure to put some effort into […]

When it comes to brutal death metal, I often find myself turning to the Japanese for something more eccentric than the norm. Bands like Glossectomy, Jenovavirus and Infected Malignity have all satisfied this craving at one point or another, their abnormal, twisted song structures placing them a notch above the piles of boring Suffo-clones and […]

Despite being around since 1991 and releasing 8 decent eight albums, Sweden’s Centinex were always sort of an after thought in the Swedish death metal scene of the early 90s, especially since after the first couple of albums the band sorted of cleaned up their sound to be more melodic and with a blacker sheen. The […]

If you asked me prior to their releases which of the metal juggernaut albums of recent years had the greatest potential for failure, I would have probably went with the new At The Gates record. Despite many delays, we knew Gorguts would deliver a unique, organic experience, and while Carcass had a spotty past of […]

The new Scar Symmetry isn’t just an ambitious sci-fi concept album – the first in a planned trilogy – it’s also the extreme metal equivalent of Voltron. Melodic death combines with progressive metal, fuses with classic 70s radio-rock, and then activates with a core of pure Transformers-soundtrack awesomeness. Stan Bush and Vince DiCola: “Form feet and legs!” Kansas, Styx, and Foreigner: “Form […]

From my understanding, the tracks and album title take their name from an Icelandic form of dividing up the day/clock into 3-hour increments. Ótta is the 3am start. Knowing this helped me grasp the feel of the album a little more. With Ótta, Sólstafir has extended their departure from metal that was fairly evident on […]

The 2012 debut, My Empire, from this German death metal act was a solid, if unspectacular, typically FDA Rekotz affair, being an old school death metal record with a bit of modern polish. And now 2 years later this young group has released the follow up, and it improves on the debut significantly. The production […]

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 […]

Sometimes you have to realize just how much your relationship with a band is like your real life relationships.  For example, I’ve been in a relationship with 1349 for over ten years.  We’ve had six albums together including new offering Massive Cauldron of Chaos.  That’s longer than my marriage lasted and actually quite a good […]

I’m a sucker for album art. If an album looks semi interesting in anyway shape or form, I will want it. The album doesn’t even have to be good, truthfully. I don’t have a standard or a preference or a guide by which I follow. I impulse buy and either reap the benefits of having […]

“Aliencore” eh? That’s what the band has jokingly called their deathcore/death metal style, and after listening a few times it actually does seem to fit (and of course everyone knows we needed another sub-genre in the metal world). If you took Beneath the Massacre and Obscura and mixed them together with every Atari game ever […]

Believe in No Coming Shore is the third full-length album from Cascadian black metal act Falls of Rauros, now into their tenth year since their conception. Through these years their sound has remained fundamentally unchanged, and perhaps for the better; their brand of rural, introspective atmospheric black metal has always been very endearing to me. […]

Black metal has become a gigantic and multi-faceted genre in the past 30 (!) years, and each sub-style offers its own emotional and aesthetic experiences. Raw, orthodox, war, symphonic, folk, progressive, depressive, Cascadian, shoegaze, post, industrial, ambient, death/black, black n’ roll – the list goes on. Despite the differences in style, what I look for, […]

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 […]