Category: Reviews – Audio
Glorious metal in all its earthly forms, compressed onto shiny plastic discs or into digital files. Which ones will become the soundtrack to your life?
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Black Space Riders – D:REI
When I first reviewed this German band of Lars Ulrich lookalikes’ (seriously, the band photo in the press pack is uncanny) debut album, I made some remark about how it must be a concept album cuz every song had the word “black” in the title. Well, now they’ve gone and released a proper concept album,…
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Iced Earth – Plagues of Babylon
By Jason Wellwood Apparently Dystopia was a hard act to follow for Jon Schaffer and company if the reviews I’ve seen are to be believed. And I can believe it: Dystopia was a solid album and featured some of the best songs and performances from Iced Earth in over a decade. However, that shouldn’t overshadow…
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Noothgrush/Coffins split
By Gruesome Greg Both of these bands are certainly no stranger to splits—this is Noothgrush’s 11th and the 16th(!) for Coffins. And while they’ve shared sides with the likes of Sourvein, Hooded Menace and Corrupted before, this could very well be their most crushing collab yet. Noothgrush starts us off with three tracks, beginning with “Humandemic,” a…
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Run After To – Gjinn and Djinn
By Gruesome Greg While there are plenty of “noun the verb” bands round these parts, particularly within the metalcore genre, it’s safe to say that when a band’s handle ends in a preposition, they’re probably from abroad. Such is the case of these obscure Italian doomsters, who released a pair of EPs in the 80’s and…
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Tidal Arms – Tidal Arms
By Gruesome Greg Although their self-titled is actually the second album from this Brooklyn-based trio, it happens to be their first that I’ve actually heard. Can I just say props for having a song named “Jelloshotgun”? I could use one of those… Anyways, what we’ve got here are 10 tracks of angly, jangly, mathy post-metal that…
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Avichi – Catharsis Absolute
By Matt Hinch Dark times call for dark music. So it happened that following my grandmother’s passing last week Catharsis Absolute by Avichi came around on my playlist. And stayed there for days as I grieved. What Avichi mastermind Aamonael (aka Adam Markuszewski) performing as this one-man black metal project has managed to do is…
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Postures – Postures
By Gruesome Greg The album cover of this Swedish quintet’s debut reminds me of a 70’s prog rock record, and both female vocals and Hammond organ are said to feature prominently throughout, so colour me intrigued. The album opens with a mellow interlude, “Circles,” setting the tone for “Heavy Tremor,” which glides out of the…
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Indian – From All Purity
By Gruesome Greg These Chicago sludgesters are a filthy, dirty beast that would rather rape your ears than shake your hand. Case in point, the first song on their six-song, sixth album is simply entitled “Rape.” Yeah, they went there… And thus, they skip the foreplay and head straight to the pummeling with an opening…
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Harsh Toke – Light Up and Live
“It’s the perfect storm of elements for a stoner’s wet dream.”