New Zealand’s Ulcerate set the bar pretty high for themselves with 2009’s Everything is Fire, a monstrous slab of churning, atonal death metal that ended up on many 2009 year end lists, mine included. How would they respond? The album title says it all. Even though the formula is the same as on Everything is […]

Well, it sure is big. And some metal people, you know, they like big ones. And Greeks, well, it almost goes without saying. They have this entire history of bigness. And now they have The Great Mass. Even though Septicflesh have been giving us really good big ones for a while, with 2008’s Communion flirting with great, they’re sometimes even […]

Germany’s Deadlock Makes it back on the scene with their 5th studio release “Bizarro World” which yet again doesn’t seem to quite cut it as far as getting them too much recognition in the metal community.  From what I’ve heard from their last albums and read online they don’t change things up too much.  Straying […]

I generally don’t go for gimmicks or over the top outfits in metal. Especially if such bands play second rate music, simply relying on their shtick to carry them. I also happen to think the likes of GWAR and Lordi are horrendously overrated. But if you are into that kind of a thing, A Band […]

I usually cover a lot of black metal, tech death and the like for this site, but finding a great power/progressive album is a real treat. It’s also rare, because I tend to be pretty picky about the vocals. I like a strong balance between beauty and brawn, with just the right amount of bravado, […]

Soulflesh Collector’s ongoing quest to rule in the death metal underworld continues, and again, they’ve enlisted more talent from outside their homeland (Russia) to aid in their endeavor. Hailing not too far from label mates Human Parasite, this five man Belgian killing machine specializes in an altogether more sinister strain of brutal death metal than […]

You’d be forgiven for thinking that The Famine were a Christian metal band (not that there’s anything wrong with that) due to their CD artwork, label affiliation, song titles like “The New Hell” and “The Cross and the Holy See” and for the fact that former and current members came from early Christian death metal […]

One of the most fascinating aspects of human beings is how they progress as they grow. Some would believe that growth equals regression rather than progression and that is certainly a fact in some instances. When it comes to the development of a group of musicians, particularly one within the confines of a genre such […]

Ladies and gentleman the almighty Neuraxis has returned from the depths of hell to enslave humanity once again. Their new album entitled Asylon, out on Prosthetic Records, is their first album in three years since The Thin Line Between. On this album, the band has managed to create more of the same, finely tuned technical […]

Newsflash! Amon Amarth is releasing a DVD containing all four Bochum shows in which the band played their first four albums in their entirety called Bloodshed Over Bochum. Since these shows were bonus audio on the reissues this time is video. This release comes as a CD+DVD digibook edition with 28-page booklet, a special boxset […]

More than a quarter century after releasing their debut record, the current lineup of Helstar has released the band’s heaviest record to date in Glory of Chaos. Like its predecessor, 2008’s The King of Hell, this record leans more on thrash influences than the band’s earlier power/speed metal tendencies, but it’s a more potent recipe […]

That Maruta is a quintessential Willowtip band may be more of a tribute to label than artist. Always leaning slightly more to the grind side of the death-grind divide while releasing material that is often technical, but rarely polished; the now decade old label has certainly established a trademark sound at this point. That there […]

Formed in 1993 under the name of Ravner, then resurfacing after a brief hiatus in 2006 as Hat (Norwegian for ‘hate’), Hat are a duo of corpse-painted, spike clad Norwegians playing brittle, frosty, hateful orthodox black metal culled straight from the early ’90s. While that little description is probably more than apt for me to […]

I had no idea Protest the Hero was dropping a new album, so when this showed up in my mailbox, I was like a small child on Christmas. Now, I know that Protest the Hero are a like Between the Buried and Me, in that they are a pretty divisive act with one side thinking […]

As disappointed as I was to learn of the demise of what certainly has been my favorite underground metal band for the past decade plus, I hate to say I was a bit relieved in a way too. Satisfied that there would never be a shit Japanische Kampfhörspiele album, I raised a glass to them, […]

To me, The End Record’s roster has gone downhill quicker and more noticeably than any label in recent memory. Back in the ’90s and early ’00s, they were releasing game changing albums by bands like Arcturus, Epoch of Unlight, Agalloch, Love History, Antimatter, Scholomance, Sculptured and such. Now with a few exceptions (These Are They, […]

I wasn’t overly impressed with Abacinate’s 2008 debut  albummRuination, as it was a simple mix of hardcore and death metal. It wasn’t quite brutal enough to be considered deathcore or death metal, and came across as a hardcore sheep simply trying to unconvincingly wear death metal clothing. But on their follow-up, Genesis (are these guys […]

The human brain excels at patterns. It does this all day long, interpreting and rendering an endless flood of sensory signals into a cohesive and constant presentation of reality. A large part of this process involves prediction, based on past experience and feedback, so that we have a natural sense of the next step in […]

Fans of Protest the Hero, With Passion (RIP), The Human Abstract and Between the Buried and Me, take note. Detractors of all four, go click elsewhere. Plying a borderline pretentious, yet brilliant amalgamation of chaotic, spazzy tech metal, death metal, power metal and thrash, Californian six piece Journal have delivered an epic self-released masterpiece that […]

I really wanted to like Margin of Error’s second self-released effort a little more, as it mixes deathcore with a sort of electronica/industrial sort of The Berzerker sheen, but in the end, the fusing of the two elements isn’t quite as impressive as it could have been. With a thick heavy production that has a […]

Since losing vocalist extraordinaire Carl Albert in 1995, Vicious Rumors has attempted to carry on with no less than four other singers: Brian O’Conner (on 1998’s Cyber Christ), Morgan Thorn (for 2001’s Sadistic Symphony), James Rivera (of Helstar for Warball in 2006) & Ronnie Stixx (who toured with the band but never recorded). At one […]

This was a bit of a rocky road initially for me. By that I mean “getting into” the music of this split release from Wooden Stake and Blizaro. Given my often mood-driven response to CDs, it is not surprising that the first time or two this one wasn’t clicking. And that’s exactly why one or […]

Consistency is the name of the game with Decrepitaph. Wayne “Elektrokutioner” Sarantopolous (drums, guitar, bass, keyboards, backing vocals) and Sinworm (vocals, guitar, bass) will never be anything but an authentically doomy death metal band that plays with a passion for the old school and takes care to write the best songs possible within those parameters, […]

It seems lately I’ve been getting into this newer version of post-hardcore that’s been hitting the market. I never been much a fan of the genre, as most bands tend to sound the exact same, but I finally decided to give a few bands in the genre some spins. Low and behold, I’m slowly gaining […]

What is it these days with so many bands who will come out with a debut that will knock you on your ass but then turn around and release a sophomore effort that flat out sucks and/or totally jumps the shark? Add the young and once extremely promising thrashers Lazarus A.D. to that group. As […]