Norway’s Devil made an impression on me in 2010 with their demo Magister Mundi Xum and rightly so. Injecting some rough hewn overtones of NWOBHM favorites Witchfinder General in to a bluesy old school doom sound was a perfect antidote to the hordes of image conscious hippies and their retro rock bullshit. Their debut album […]

Though I usually don’t “do” compilation albums, this recent string of bands releasing their rare / hard to find / split / demo tracks on sets of CDs has been very enjoyable for me. Relapse is shortly releasing a 3CD set from Horseback (pre-ordered), Gilead Media has been slowly hinting at a 3CD set compiling […]

After a little bit of a misstep with the Netra release, Hypnotic Dirge is back on track with a handful of very solid releases (Odradek Room, Galaktik Cancer Squad, Lycanthia, Frigoris), the best of which is the second album from Massachusetts atmospheric black metal act Obsidian Tongue, and for those of you who are fans […]

If you’re a grind fan and haven’t hear of Squash Bowels well then… what the hell is wrong with you?!? The Poles have been blasting away since 1994, with a ton of splits and EPs and now Grindcoholism, their 6th full-length album. Despite their longevity, these guys haven’t quite reached the top tier of the […]

So here is only the second release from P2, a label co owned and run by one Paulo Paguntalan, guitarist and vocalist for Copremesis (whose debut Muay Thai Lady Boys still has some of the best cover art ever) and vocalist for Andromorphous Rexalia, so it should come as no surprise that the fledgling label’s […]

Suicidal Causticity is an Italian brutal death metal band and The Spiritual Decline is their debut album. Italy is not only known for their delicious pasta and pizza, but is also becoming known, in the underground death metal scene, as one of the hotbeds for brutal and extreme music. Fans of Hour of Penance, Vulvectomy […]

Full disclosure: My history with the now decade-old, German, one-man, black/doom project known as The Ruins of Beverast extends back a whopping 5 months. Why I didn’t investigate something that’s right up my musical alley much earlier is another one of life’s many mysteries, but once the brilliant new track, “Malefica,” hit YouTube on April […]

Much like my compadre Nick E’s review of this year’s other mega high profile, reunion release in Gorguts‘s Colored Sands, one has to wonder if there is really a need for a review of a release of this magnitude? Arguably the inventors of melodic death metal and a legendary band with 4 certifiably classic, game […]

Lesbian has been on my radar since their 2008 split with the amazing doom band Ocean. From there I snagged 2007’s awesome Power Hor, and anxiously awaited 2010’s killer Stratospheria Cubensis. So when I heard 2013 would bring a 45 minute, single track full-length titled Forestelevision, I was stoked. Lesbian are an odd group. They […]

Not only is Finland home to some of the best death metal bands on earth, but also savage Grind Kings, Afgrund. In their short existence, they have unleashed some of the most brutal grindcore, this side of their fellow countrymen, Rotten Sound, as well as the stripped down brutality of Pig Destroyer. So this mini […]

Destructive Intent is the debut release from Berlin’s Dehuman Reign, and don’t let the cover art fool, this isn’t some crusty lo-fi noise but rather a pretty solid take on Floridian death metal, notably the likes of Malevolent Creation and Monstrosity sprinkled with a dose of thrash, and it’s pretty good stuff. Consisting of an […]

Back in 2011, UK/New Zealand collaboration Monsterworks, featuring The Living Fields vocalist Jon Higgs released the killer, The God Album– and it was an awesome slab of progressive, experimental and undefinable modern metal. So here is the follow up, dealing with Man rather than God and is full of the same deep philosophical themes and […]

Considering how popular the entire folk metal subgenre has become over the past several years, it’s a wonder how a band like Fejd can continually fly under the radar. Having been an official band for over a decade and released three full-lengths and an EP, one would think that the Swedish quintet would be more […]

Victory Records has become such an anomaly for me. After being one of the true stalwart metalcore/hardcore labels responsible for releasing albums by Integrity, Martyr AD, Damnation AD, Hatebreed, Earth Crisis and Thursday and even being the home to Between the Buried and Me for 3 absolutely classic albums, the label is just hard to […]

After really thinking about what I wanted to say about this record, I began to question whether reviewing a release this high-profile truly mattered. Please let me know if you’ve never heard of Gorguts, and are just reading this review because you are interested in who they are and what they do. Contact me too […]

I’ve been a longtime Dream Theater fan – 21 years, in fact, since the release of one of the finest progressive metal albums ever released, Images and Words. And yet, in all of that time, I’ve never checked out any of vocalist James LaBrie’s solo material (4 albums’ worth). A friend slapped me around a […]

So Mike “Gunface” McKenzie, the guitarist for Deathcore titans The Red Chord and Beyond the Sixth Seal has a Doom project. How should someone like myself who pretty much despises anything with the Deathcore tag (full disclosure: I can still rock Fused Together In Revolving Doors hard, and even dug Clients), but is a long […]

Sometimes a name just grabs you, and Maryland’s Sloth Herder is one such name. And on their Second self-released EP, the music is often as interesting as the band name. With a name like Sloth Herder, you would expect a massive crawling, doom/sludge outfit, but that could not be further from the truth. At only […]

Murder Made God are a brutal death metal band from Greece, around for about 2-3 years. This marks their debut album and if you like your music fast and furious with hints of technicality to it, then buy this. If you’re looking for something original, that has not been done to death time and time […]

Sujo is another one-man shoegazy-black-doom-post-whatever metal project, who released a compelling E.P. entitled Ondan earlier this year. The opener, ‘Ondan’, wouldn’t sound out of place on a Deftones record, with its hazy atmosphere, melodies buried within the almighty fuzz. This dies in a swirl of claustrophobic electronics to conclude the track, before savage but rather […]

Nervecide is the brainchild of Italian do-it-yourselfer Giorgio Benedetti. He handles everything on this album, from the vocals all the way down to the drum programming. It’s a solid album, made more impressive by the fact it’s all done by one person. Following the intro, you get a blast-beat-backed stop-start riff, and this album brings […]

Southern Lord has been making some serious inroads to seedy underbelly of dark, crusty hardcore in the last couple of years. Their roster was originally accented with the likes of Nails, The Secret and Masakari, but has most recently seen the addition of bands like Wolfbrigade and Martyrdod. Now continuing on in that vein, and […]

Fleshgod Apocalypse‘s second full-length album, Agony was my favorite album of 2011, so I’ll warn you, you can throw objectivity and unbiased opinions out of the window right now. I love these guys. However, Agony was surprisingly divisive as the band integrated full-on orchestration to their vortex of Italian technical brutality, with the end result […]

When it comes to Black Metal in Kentucky, I typically think of bands with the ‘atmospheric’ touch. Bands like Wheels Within Wheels, Panopticon, and Merkaba are the standard fare it seems. It just so happens that Austin Lunn from Panopticon started Anagnorisis in 2003. After the first release in 2007, Austin left the band to […]

The Swedish death metal revival keeps on rolling and FDA Rekotz has found another fine German act to go alongside Revel In Flesh to add to their roster of solid old-school death metal. Whereas for most of this wave of retro bands, the primary influence is Entombed and/or Grave, Wound have a slightly different approach, […]