I love getting my hands on obscure, previously unheard (to me) metal bands, and they turn out to be enjoyable – case and point Malaysia’s Humiliation, and their third full length album, From Strength to Strength.Admittedly I had zero expectation whatsoever, but amid all the proggy, tech death and deathcore ringing in my ears, Humiliation […]

Twice in a row now – for 2009’s Process of a New Decline, and last year’s Transcendence EP – I’ve dubbed France’s Gorod one of, if not the most creative tech death bands on the planet. For my money, they’re certainly the most entertaining – complex yet cogent, brutal yet playful, and limber and listenable […]

Astra is a psychedelic/progressive group from San Diego with just a couple releases under their belt, but they sure have created a mighty mature sound in the short period of time that they’ve existed. 2009’s The Weirding, the debut, was a sublime welding of earthy layers of sound with ’70s prog rock. The Black Chord […]

What is a midnightmare? Is it having a nightmare at midnight? Or a nightmare in the middle of a nightmare? I think that answer lies with Dreaming Dead, and it’s a lot of Death worship with some classic-Swedish metal (particularly Eucharist) thrown into the mix. Normally, this would not at all be a bad thing. […]

Old school death metallers Cardiac Arrest are back for their fourth album, and it’s old school death metal as you would expect it. Semi-decipherable death growl? Check. Buzzsaw guitar tone? Check. Raw production? Check. Horror/death themed lyrics? Check. It’s all here, and that’s all that can be said about this album – it’s just  ‘there’. […]

While Gus G’s debut with Ozzy Osbourne was a pretty disappointing mess, with Gus as primarily a hired gun playing other people’s riffs, his other outfit, Firewind, has yet to disappoint. It’s not that they do anything out of the ordinary or innovative in the power metal world. It’s just that they do what they […]

Hailing from Philadelphia, Fisthammer are a young band who have decided to eschew the current retro, throwback trend and go for a modern, clean take on death metal and throw in a smorgasbord of elements. The result is a pretty solid album that takes a while to get going, but has a lot of promise […]

Pensylvannia’s Order of Nine come up with a particularly proficient record in their fifth offering Seventh Year of the Broken Mirror. It’s a tactical and reflective journey that speaks volumes about large-scale introspection and vivid, tenacious emotion, albeit don’t be mistaken; it ain’t no lyric-centered album that only uses music as a foundation to lay […]

Over the years Moonspell have packaged their gothic, lycanthropic atmosphere into many different forms, from deathy black metal to radio rock to electronic metal and back again. Over the recent few albums they’ve settled into a rhythm of making heavy, violent metal albums with the huge and dramatic orchestration of the more radio-friendly stuff layered […]

Almost equal measures of technicality, melody, and intricate groovery can be found on this unclassifiable modern death metal offering that is Offending‘s Age of Perversion. Hearing them get name dropped in the same breath as the likes of Vile, Hate Eternal, and Immolation (especially in these Frenchies’ state-of-the-art knack for suspense and profound unpredictability characterizing […]

  Young bucks on the Swedish death metal scene Usurpress are, having yet to release an official full-length album. However, that hasn’t stopped the Uppsala fiends from creating solid, if not entirely original, death metal in the realm of classic Dismember, Grave, etc. Having just released their second EP In Permanent Twilight, the band is […]

Mechadoom. Color me jealous I didn’t come up with the term, but damned if Decibel didn’t hit the nail on the head with that genre descriptor when trying to concisely convey the sound of Author & Punisher. Hey, if the shoe fits, wear it, and this shoe sounds just like “mechadoom”. Ursus Americanus is the fourth overall album from the […]

‘Elegy of Blood is one of them power metal records I have mixed feelings about. There’s no doubt at all about the fact that Marauder (what’s with the longevity of their career so far) have the right energy going. They also have the chops, and the attitude to cook up a mean sound that is […]

The strangely named Bewized are a metal band from Greece who play an oddly enjoyable form of groove laden thrash/metalcore. Granted it sounds like it comes from the late ’90s/early two thousand and at times has a Nu metal feel to it, but thanks to a very big, chunky production, some catchy songs and a […]

Fear Factory’s last album, 2010’s Mechanize, reunited Burton C. Bell and Dino Cazares, and hammered home with a collection of fierce, fast paced, classic Fear Factory songs. Bringing Gene Hoglan in to replace the formidable timekeeping skills of Raymond Herrera (currently playing in Arkaea, along with bassist Christian Olde Wolbers) was quite the coup, and […]

Chicago’s Bible of the Devil is a group that’s always pulling from one place to the next, though you’re never really sure which direction they’re heading until they’ve arrived. Predictability is not in their repertoire. Stability, on the other hand, is — they consistently release high quality, high voltage rock’n’metal records at a pleasingly steady […]

Fans of Toxic Holocaust should stop smoking weed and crank out the harder stuff, for Philadelphia’s speedy thrashers Rumpelstiltskin Grinder are back with their third full-length studio album, which embodies everything fans of Joel Grind’s solo project will love, only much faster. The 12-song outing is pretty lengthy considering that it is a thrash metal […]

So back in 2009, Ohio’s Hammer Horde released their debut album, Under the Mighty Oath, which was a mighty slab of blackened epic pagan/viking/folk metal that belied its American origins and sounded like a very authentic European act akin to Ensiferum, Turisas, Finsterforst, Forefather, early Mithotyn, Equilibrium and such. An impressive feat considering not too many […]

Ever wonder what Intestinal Disgorge and Last Days of Humanity would sound like mixed together? Yeah. Me neither. But now that I have heard what that would sound like, I can say I’m in love. The band bringing this dose of gore grind brutality is none other than Russian sickos Inopexia. Myocardial Biopsy Had A […]

Vetterkult, the newest album from Norway’s Vetter, is one of those albums that just misses on almost all marks. It’s one of the classic albums that builds up to a crescendo but falls short of being dynamic. When the elements and ideas come together on Vetterkult, the album works well. Unfortunately, those moments are not […]

The Final Journey is a definite continuation of the First War of the World. The band obviously was quite happy with how that turned out. Finland’s Ensiferum have moved pretty fully toward the power end of metal though the black part of their name still resonates deep down with their black viking metal origins, and […]

The US of A’s All Too Human come up with a particularly huge bite of mathematically precise prog rock on Juggernaut. These knowledgeable lads’ range of influences goes from Symphony X to Nevermore, and even to a more remote place with what I recognize as a hint of back-catalog melodic Priest tendencies, topped by a […]

I have to admit, I’m not a massive fan of Hells Headbangers, as their primarily dirty black/thrash spikes and Satan roster doesn’t do a whole lot for me. But when they kick out some real nasty death metal like  Deiphago  or Sanguis Imperum, they seem to hit it out of the park. And such is […]

Accept’s 2010 album Blood of the Nations, one of my favorite records of that year, served as sort of an introduction to the new incarnation of the band and featured some departures from what I expected going in. Stalingrad, on the other hand, takes a small step back toward the band’s history with a sound […]

The debut album by Norway’s Omit is a monstrous work: five symphonic doom metal songs stretched across two discs, with song lengths between fourteen and twenty six minutes. Fortunate for me, I love long songs (hell, my favourite song of all time is “Close to the Edge” by Yes.) Omit perform a highly orchestrated, beautiful […]