Category: Featured

Featured posts

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.

May 7, 2010
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.

May 6, 2010
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.

May 5, 2010
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.”

May 4, 2010
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.…

May 4, 2010
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;…

May 3, 2010
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.

May 3, 2010
Freedom to rock? Apparently not…

A disgruntled Gruesome Greg bemoans the lack of guitar music at the 4th Annual Toronto Freedom Festival…

May 1, 2010
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

April 30, 2010
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.

April 30, 2010