Category: Reviews
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JEFF The Brotherhood – Global Chakra Rhythms
It may have taken an unfortunate, poor experience with Warner Brothers to get JEFF The Brotherhood to start pushing the possibilities of what they could do with their music (the label didn’t really love the music and shelved a couple of the band’s releases during their tenure together) but, now that Global Chakra Rhythms is…
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Soon – Vol 1
What, are we running so low on new band names that even adverbs are now in play? As far as monikers go, Soon is the blandest I’ve seen since Accept… and I fuckin’ love Accept. But this Carolina outfit, which includes a couple dudes from emo indie rockers The Love Language, might be more like…
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Rhine – An Outsider
Rhine is one of metal’s best kept secrets… but not for much longer. Rhine play progressive heavy metal in the best sense of the word. With some progressive metal bands, there is often an over emphasis on the progressive over the heavy or vice-versa, but Rhine have got the balance just right. Drinking from the…
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Buffalo Theory MTL – Skeptic Knight EP
When it comes to Montreal metal, you definitely think of death-metal blastbeats more often than stoner/doom grooves. In fact, this outfit includes guys from bands like Ghoulunatics, Les Ékorchés and Arseniq 33, but they’ve been united by their love of Kyuss. Skeptic Knight, the third recording from Buffalo Theory MTL, kicks off with a conspiracy; “Conspiracy…
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Slash – Raised On The Sunset Strip Blu-Ray
Historians and critics may curse Raised On The Sunset Strip for presenting a documentary which features some pretty plainly revisionist history of the L.A. rock scene of the 1980s in general and Guns N’ Roses in specific, but there’s no way to deny that the film tells a really interesting story – at least at…
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Snow Burial – Victory in Ruin
How fitting was it that the promo for a band called Snow Burial hit my inbox just as the Northeast was getting snowed under? I do believe that Chicago, which this trio calls home, was largely spared, but I’m sure these dudes are no strangers to the white stuff. Formerly known as Oxblood, this outfit…
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Cancer Bats – Searching For Zero LP
Leave it to Cancer Bats to challenge metal convention by scaling back the production values which are normally strapped to metal albums (“bombastic” is an understatement) and just let the raw aggression and technical talent which is present in every damned microtone of each song be the things which make the album’s stylistic ambition undeniable…
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Dilly Dally – Sore LP
As music in general, Dilly Dally’s debut album, Sore, is incredible (not for nothing did it end up appearing on this writer’s Top Ten of 2015 list) – but the vinyl presentation of the album transcends such praise and offers listeners an experience several steps beyond that of the compact disc. It’s unbelievable. It’s a…
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Circle Jerks – Group Sex
At this point, six years after the band that Keith Morris, Steven McDonald, Dimitri Coats and Mario Rubalcaba started took off (ahem – no pun intended) and brought hardcore punk into a much brighter and broader spotlight before a much larger audience, the history of where OFF came from and the circumstances which got them…
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Rebel Wizard – Invocation of the Miserable Ones
Rebel Wizard released their first demo in 2013 and then went on a rampage in 2015 releasing 5 EPs of heavy black/speed metal. A band this new going this fast at the beginning of their career can sometimes run into problems down the road, but for now they seem to be going at a steady…