Hey, even the most jaded among traditional/power metal fans would be just a little curious when the album sticker includes text like “the leading heavy metal band from South America” and “featuring Tim ‘Ripper’ owns & Ralf Scheepers (Primal Fear). And then there is that whole thing about being “for fans of Primal Fear, Dio, […]

Trying to get a reissue some face time in this day and age is a near fruitless endeavor. Chances are, someone out there has the album in question, and probably has gone to great lengths to post it as a torrent. Therefore, the term “reissue” loses some of its muster for a band like Montreal’s […]

I don’t think there’s a genre tag I dislike more than “post”. Post-punk, post-hardcore, post-rock, post-metal… Unlike its sister tag “proto”, which implies something basic, spare, or primitive, the word doesn’t have much descriptive power. When it comes to post-metal, it’s easy to see it as implying a combination of post rock and metal, but […]

After toiling away in the Mid West death metal scene for over a decade and 5 albums, Chicago’s Jungle Rot released the best album of their consistent, if unspectacular career last year in Kill on Command. And even though it was an album released on their much maligned home town label, Victory Records, it was […]

So this is what the kids are creating for their debut albums these days, huh? So much for learning the ropes and taking several years to create an album that can be deemed their finest to date. For California’s Xanthochroid, their magnificent debut full-length Blessed He with Boils is a creation that will most likely […]

Denmark’s Saturnus may not be one of doom metal’s most prolific bands with only four full-lengths and one EP over their roughly 20-year existence, but they have remained one of the most consistent and revered. Instead if cashing in on their uncanny talent for writing catchy tunes (just try listening to “Christ Goodbye” or “Empty […]

Ho Hum- another semi super group plying old school Swedish death metal and amazingly this one doesn’t feature Rogga Johanssen, though it  sounds just like one of his many projects  and does feature one of his other projects’ cohorts- namely P.Myrén (Paganizer, Facebreaker) and R Karlsson (Facebreaker, Edge of Sanity, Scar Symmetry, Devian, Incapacity) – […]

So much of the death metal coming out of Latin America is of a purity more apparent that most other regions of the world; that is, the energy flow and overall vibe is gut-delivered and soul-derived, the lack of pretense immediately obvious. That is exactly what one hears on Mortificy’s Burn and Suffer. The Brazilian […]

It would be easy to lump Sanctium in with Be’lakor; they are Australian, play a form of progressive melancholic  Opeth and Insomnium styled melodic death metal and they really good at it. However, this band actually has ties to some other Aussie bands, like Switchblade, Bane of Isildur and most notably, impressive  doomsters Myraeth, who […]

Wow. x2. Soilwork have returned with their strongest release to date, and they’ve done it with a double album. This means they’ve just topped themselves – and likely the rest of the entire melodeath genre – twice. These two albums coalesce everything that’s always been dazzling about Soilwork, from the early shredfest barrage of Steelbath Suicide and The Chainheart […]

Have to feel some type of pity for Norway’s Audrey Horne. Thanks to the current onslaught of retro-minded, bellbottom-lovin rock, they’ve cast as an afterthought while Rival Sons, Graveyard, and Witchcraft prance around like they’ve been doing this since the 70’s, while AH has been doing it since 2002, which in some weird twisted way, […]

Generally, most releases under the Seventh Rule banner come with an inordinate amount of distortion draped over them, falling somewhere between the crust and doom areas of classification. It’s what has made the label so successful in a short amount of time, and has polarized it to those who prefer their metal a bit more […]

The guys from Horna have been silent for quite some time. A cover song on last year’s Emperor tribute, and five new songs since Sanojesi Äärelle in 2008. I thought maybe they had fallen into the abyss, turns out they had, down there on the sixth circle as the house band playing to Emperor Frederick […]

Having not heard these guys before, but with them being from Denmark, featuring members of Cerekloth and Undergang and residing on Deepsend Records, I was fully expecting yet another slab of powerful, chunky Danish death metal a la The Cleansing, Dawn of Demise or Corpus Mortale. However, Deepsend threw me a bit of a curveball. […]

Ugly, brutish, and oppressive, Scorn has all the ingredients to be great. Primitive Man’s combination of d-beat crust, sludge, and crippling doom is a combination after my heart and they show a tremendous amount of potential with this release. Its aesthetic is almost grind-like, feeling like a Benümb album without any blast beats. There are […]

After finishing 2012 on a killer note with the likes of Gorephilia, Maveth, Desolate Shrine and Paroxsihzem, Dark Descent Records is off to an equally killer and equally Finnish start to 2012 with releases from Vorum and Krypts. One could argue that the Finnish death metal revival is almost equal to the Swedish revival of […]

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve waited almost 4 years, but it’s finally arrived:  the new Behemoth album!  Nergal has thankfully returned back to full health following his illness, and he and his fellow band mates are… wait… what is that?  You’re telling me this is NOT the new Behemoth?!?  Huh?!  Get through the intro, and there’s […]

Back in 2001, The Netherlands’ Centurian were on the cusp of death metal stardom after releasing their furious second album Liber Zar Zax.  However, the band stalled and disappeared for over a decade. But the members kept sharp and involved with notable acts like Nox, Severe Torture and recently, Infected Flesh. So now, three of […]

A lot of legendary thrash bands are past the point of having their current output deemed as “mandatory.” Frankly, no one is going to prefer what said band is doing now, as opposed to what they were doing then. And by “then,” we mean the 80’s, which were rather nice to thrash (in case you […]

Slice it and dice it any you’d like, but The Underground Resistance is Darkthrone doing what Darkthrone does best: that being whatever the Darkthrone wants to do. What that has meant on the last few albums especially (and back even further when you really think about it) is that Fenriz and Nocturno have immersed themselves […]

Place of no Pity is the fourth full-length album from Ruins, the Australian black metal crew featuring drumming extraordinaire Dave Haley (Psycroptic) in their ranks.  Although this is my first extended experience with the band, by all accounts it appears to follow-through with a similar formula to previous releases.  The band play a steroid-fuelled black/death […]

This scribe thought Ancient VVisdom would be the next breakout band from the swelling devil rock field; the sidebar act to Ghost’s carnival appearance and The Devil’s Blood straight-faced, no frills approach. They certainly had the album to do it in the form of last year’s A Godlike Inferno, which married mysterious acoustic rock with […]

So as we start to get a little further into 2013, a lot of reviews are going to be late entries from 2012, and I’m trying to limit them to ones worth your while or ones that grabbed my ear. And I was surprised to find that one such release is the self released debut […]

My only prior experience with this Aussie trio – now a four-piece – was a few tracks (in all honesty, I probably only made it through one) from their 2010 ear grater, Devil’s Poison, that I remember sounding like a drunken early Venom rehearsal. I guess that was the point, but it was lost on […]

With only 3 full lengths in almost 15 years of existence, Devourment has still managed to foster an almost obsessive, cult-like following.  Their brand of brutal, slamming death metal is almost notoriously hailed as the pinnacle of the niche genre.  On this latest output, and their first on Relapse, the same crew is back from […]