Red Sparowes / Casapian @ Bitmore Cabaret, Vancouver BC, April 30, 2010
Red Sparowes are a fascinating live band, but sometimes their performance almost gets overshadowed by what you’re watching on the screen.
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Haken – Aquarius
I am totally blown away. Haken is the best thing to happen to progressive metal in many, many years. Hailing from England, this relatively young band has unleashed a masterpiece.
Utopium – Conceptive Prescience
Raging from the get-go and never once losing track of its vision, Conceptive Prescience boasts 18 minutes of rudimentary blast-grind pulling from the ravenous, almost overbearing attack of early Napalm Death but shoved through the dirty filter of Nasum, Phobia and other crossover acts.
Overkill / Vader / God Dethroned / Warbringer / Evile / Woe Of Tyrants @ Dos Amigos, Odessa, TX, April 24, 2010
Overkill focused upon their latest effort, Ironbound, clearly one of their best albums in years, and one of the best albums of the year thus far. And they did justice to classics like “Hello From the Gutter” and “Elimination.”
SERAPHIM – S/T 7” / GLUTTONS – S/T 7”
The vinyl section of hellbound.ca is suffering a review shortage and while our discussion and review of these latest releases from Baltimore’s A389 Recordings won’t get this little bit of online real estate swinging like a 70s key party, it will at least take it off the proverbial life support of the past few months. Egads! There’s a certain amount of analogy in that metaphor as these two bands, as solid, serviceable and enjoyable as they both are, aren’t going to be the ones to set the world of extreme music alight.
Týr/ Crimson Shadows/ Bolero @ Sneaky Dee’s, Toronto, ON, April 30, 2010
Everything else fell away, however, when TÝR took the stage. I seemed as though I had handed the band a checklist of everything I hoped to see in their performance, and they generously met every request. They played “Hail to the Hammer,” “Hold The Heathen Hammer High,” and “Sinklars Visa;” Heri and Terji performed shirtless; they took long swigs from a bottle of rum throughout the performance.
Our Last Night – We Will All Evolve
Yet another case of toddlers ingesting the sick union between balls-out metal and does-it-have-any-balls screamo, We Will All Evolve suffers from insanely powerful heavy moments akin to metalcore’s more muscular contributors but quickly devolves into faltering bouts of off-kilter melodies striving to offer the album some semblance of sing-alongs.
Freedom to rock? Apparently not…
A disgruntled Gruesome Greg bemoans the lack of guitar music at the 4th Annual Toronto Freedom Festival…
Infanticide – From Our Cold, Dead Heads
[Infanticide’s] Scott Hull-produced debut doesn’t traffic in grotesque songs that are the equivalent of dead baby jokes set to stale death metal riffs and pedestrian drumming. It’s more like a potent combination of the misanthropy of Weekend Nachos with the anarchist impulses of Leftover Crack
Alcest – Écailles de lune
France’s Alcest have weaved a memorable album that manages to straddle the fence between black metal catharsis and ambient relaxation.