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 […]

For the last entry in my 2011 Shiver Records catch-up run we have the debut release of Belgium’s Marche Funèbre, a swampy ooze of melancholy death-doom. One thing I need to just get out of the way is that I simply despise the clean singing on this disc. It’s a warbly, pseudo-operatic, sadghost voice that […]

In recent years it’s been increasingly difficult to accurately describe the growing sect of acts that co-opt black metal stylings with a variety of other genres, if only for brevity’s sake. “Umm, they’re kinda like atmospheric, psychedelic black metal with some shoegazey parts, blah blah…” Speaking only for myself, when a description such as “black metal” gets […]

I was less than impressed with Prong’s last outing, Power of the Damager. I preferred it to the more industrial stuff they’d been doing, but it hasn’t returned to my rotation in the nearly five years since it came out. I thought it was OK, but didn’t have a lot of passion or energy. So […]

While bigger named brutal/technical death metal acts (Cannibal Corpse, Spawn of Possession, Gorod, Nile, Dying Fetus) will get the lions share of the attention in 2012, as usual there are a number of under the radar acts that deserve your death metal ear. Recently, the likes of Nocturnal Torment,  Stalwart, Tombthroat, Fisthammer, Never to Arise […]

My first introduction to San Francisco’s Acephalix was on these very pages, after reading a review of Interminable Night by out very own Stacy Buchanan. And being a huge fan of Southern Lord’s Crust/D-beat revival with the likes of Nails, Dead In the Dirt, All Pigs Must Die and such, Acephalix was a no brainer. […]

That old adage about never judging a book by its cover, while generally a good idea, is especially prudent in the case of Fester’s A Celebration of Death. Expecting to be flung into a rotting grave of stench-riddled old school Swedish death metal based on the cover art, it was quickly discovered upon listening that […]

I distinctly remember getting introduced to Lunar Aurora from a Belgian friend back in 1996 and I have anticipated each and every release since. The number of bands that I have been listening to continuously for fifteen years or more and still looking forward to new material is a rather small list, usually I end […]

Here’s one that will get most so called ‘real’, old school metal heads’ panties in a bunch. Dub-Slam? Slam-Step? Techno-slam-core? Dropcore? Disfiguring the Goddess is the brainchild of Dubstep/DJ/electronica musician ‘Big Chocolate’ aka  vocalist Cam Argon formerly of Burning the Masses, Misericordiam and Abominable Putridity and numerous other brutal acts guest appearances and remixes. Being […]