The first Corrections House full length didn’t do a lot for me; some of it was “interesting”, but it felt like a lot of disparate elements that each of these well-regarded musicians brought from their regular gigs just didn’t stew into something I really found enjoyable. So, color me pleasantly surprised. Know How To Carry […]

It’s pretty much a given that I’m going to be all about anything that either Erik Burke or Dan Lilker put their hands to; they being two of my all-time favorite grindcore musicians. This is even moreso in light of the disbanding of Brutal Truth at the end of last year, which left a huge […]

Meatwound’s Addio is a bulldozing bludgeon of an album, taking a lot of elements of arty noise rock, hardcore, industrial, proto-sludge, and some of the noisier extreme metal of the 80s and 90s. This is all congealed into some sort of gelatinous mass of general nastiness and bad feelings, which Meatwound then force feeds you […]

This is Behold! the Monolith’s first release since Vocalist/Bassist Kevin Dade was tragically killed in a car accident a couple years back; not too long after releasing their sophomore album, Defender, Redeemist. That album was a pretty solid slab of whatever you call their punky/doomy/sludgy/thrashy/modern/traditional heavy metal; and an album that showed a lot of […]

This is an interesting release. Way back in the late 1990s, black metal was in a sort of flux; many of the pioneering bands feeling their original raison d’être were no longer there for whatever reason. You started to see established bands like Dodheimsgard, Mayhem, and Satyricon moving on from their original pagan/naturalistic themes, to […]

Auric is a band from my home state of Arkansas; which has always had a tiny, but vibrant heavy music scene. Arkansas has contributed a couple pretty notable bands to the whole southern/sludge/doom lexicon, as well as a lot of really good punk and hardcore. And now we have Auric, who could be the fourth […]

This is an album full of cheeps, chirps, skronks, bleeps, bloops, beeps, boops, and blarps. Noisy noise rock, with a lot of analog instruments making digital noises, and digital instruments simulating sounds in nature. If nature was made out of machines. Osso make very tactile music. Imagine solid state transistors being alternately over-amped, then under-watt’d […]

Ok, this one threw me for a loop. I have a pretty limited exposure to Supuration; my only real point of reference was their 1993 oddball of an album, The Cube; and then bits and pieces of the various Supuration/S.U.P. permutations. I was aware of their trajectory following that path that so many innovative bands […]

I usually dismiss the press sheet that comes with a promo out of hand; I don’t need no PR dweeb filling my brain with their hyperbole, before I create my own hyperbole to fill all of yours with. But for once, the press sheet describing Black Queen as “Witch Metal” is pretty apropos. Even the […]

Sigh. It’s been awhile. This is a band that I was once totally in love with; going all the way back to the release of their 1997 album, Hail Horror Hail. Sigh have always been a completely fearless musical entity; even from their formative, moribund Venom necro-worship on Scorn Defeat, they were already taking chances […]

Well here it is. At least based on this interview, this is Rory Heikkila’s final release doing business under the Shroud of Despondency brand. This is a huge bummer for those in the know, but I can’t be too sad about it, because Family Tomb is one hell of a consolation. I haven’t enjoyed a […]

This was one of my most anticipated albums in some time; a supergroup comprised of Amebix’s Rob Miller, Michel Langevin (Away) from Voivod, Jon Misery from crust punk stawarts Misery, and Andy Lefton, from the devastatingly crushing War//Plague. I don’t know what I expected that to sound like, given how wonderfully eclectic Ambebix and Voivod […]

Okay, lets see what we have here. If you are familiar with former Angelcorpse guitarist Gene Palubicki in the slightest, you know he’s a dude that does his thing and does it well, regardless of what band moniker he’s currently doing business under; and Blasphemic Cruelty is no different. What we have is about 20 minutes of […]

Like a lot of you, Drudkh first popped up on my radar with their 2006 release, Blood In Our Wells. It really took me a long time to look beyond the hype that album generated, but I eventually came to appreciate it for what it was. What it wasn’t was The Second Coming of a […]