Category: Reviews
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Lord Dying – Poisoned Altars
Lord Dying’s 2013 debut, Summon the Faithless, kinda caught me by surprise. Hey, it’s not every day that a relatively unknown band outta Portland issues its debut album on Relapse. But it’s grown on me over time, and translated well to the live setting when I caught ‘em in a shitty Tex-Mex bar on tour…
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Clouds Taste Satanic – To Sleep Beyond The Earth
Take the minimalistic, defiantly monotonous widescreen dynamics of Dopesmoker era Sleep out of its vast desert backdrop and into the claustrophobic urban confines of contemporary Brooklyn. No, this isn’t the setup to a cruel Invisible Oranges joke. Glacially-paced NYC instrumental doom quartet Clouds Taste Satanic (nothing like a Flaming Lips reference to bolster yr tr00…
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The Ramones – s/t (vinyl reissue)
How long does a band require in order to change the world? How fast can they affect that change? The Stooges managed to change a lot (in the styles which were called the norm in rock) in their time together; in their first seven-year run, they laid out the groundwork that much of both punk…
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Ruby the Hatchet – Valley of the Snake
Female-fronted Philly buzz band lands on Tee Pee for its first major release. By now, the whole female-fronted retro-rock genre has been done to death, though to their credit, this outfit, Ruby the Hatchet, didn’t just come together yesterday—their self-released debut album saw the light of day in 2012. Anyhoo, this second record offers six…
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Nightingale – Retribution
When most music lovers who favour the heavier side of things think of Sweden the first genre reference that comes to mind is Swedish Death Metal, but over the past 20-plus years bands and people like Opeth, Katatonia and Dan Swanö having been trying to change that. Returning to the ranks of the progressive, classic, technical and…
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Black Sheep Wall – I’m Going to Kill Myself
Harsh. Caustic. Slower than molasses dripping off a tortoise’s nutsack. These are all terms to describe the new Black Sheep Wall album, which isn’t anywhere nearly as friendly as its cover might suggest…though tis certainly more befitting of its title. Lemme put it this way: there’s this one riff on “Metallica,” the cheekily named, 34-minute…
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Vintage Caravan – Voyage
I suppose it’s understandable that The Vintage Caravan‘s Voyage hasn’t garnered as much press as could be expected from a band on Nuclear Blast. The Swedish retro-rock movement continues to roll along, and beside releases from bands like Blues Pills and Spiders it’s easy to get overshadowed. But wait! The Vintage Caravan are from Iceland!…
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Dö – Den EP
You’d think that with a name like Dö, these guys would be completely unGoogleable, but in fact both the second and third search-engine results are related to this band. I guess the umlaut must be what does it. Anyhoo, this Finnish doom trio has just put out its second EP, a half-hour slab of blackened,…
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Monolord – Empress Rising
There are a number of things pulling me toward Sweden. Better government, a strong hockey program, blondes, Swedish death metal, the whole retro/stoner rock movement and more. But what has the greatest pull is the sheer sonic mass of Empress Rising, the debut from doom heavyweights Monolord. They’re so heavy they have a tidal influence.…
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NOFX – Punk In Drublic (vinyl reissue)
One look at the list of albums which came out in 1994 reveals that it was a red letter year for punk rock (Offspring’s Smash, Green Day released Dookie, Bad Religion released Stranger Than Fiction and NOFX released Punk In Drublic), but what’s even more impressive in NOFX’s case is that Punk In Drublic‘s success…