Wormrot – Abuse
By Rob Hughes I thank Wormrot for making one part of this job easy. They’re easy to classify. They play grindcore, straight up, with…
Reviews – Audio
Orchid’s Curse – Voices: The Tales of Broken Men
Metalcore is a much maligned genre right now but it’s bands like Orchid’s Curse who are going to survive the ‘I’ve heard this before, booooring’ attitudes of today’s music consumer. Simply put, Voices: The Tales of Broken Men is a huge step forward and progression for the band.
Skelator – Death To All Nations
By Kyle Harcott When the bands manage to get it right, I’m a fan of the trend of new classic-sounding power metal bands cropping…
Black Sleep Of Kali – Our Slow Decay
The band’s first full-length, Our Slow Decay, constantly balances a tightrope between pronounced shades of Times Of Grace-era post-apocalypso, and modern-era thrash gallop on a par with Baroness, Bison, or High on Fire. As well, occasionally, the kind of vocal harmony work pops up that wouldn’t be out of place on an early ‘90s Dischord album – and holding the whole thing down, one hell of a masterful drummer in the drunken-fisted Gordon Koch. The band’s equally at home tossing around monolithic lightning bolts of slab-dirge as they are trotting through bone-jarring warhorse crunch, and Our Slow Decay is tempered with each equally.
Lordi – Babez for Breakfast
By Jason Wellwood Laughing out loud at the lyrics of a song is generally not a good sign when you’re listening to an album…
Ion Dissonance – Cursed
By Matt Lewis Ion Dissonance, a band among bands hailing from the great metal hotbed of Quebec. Their fourth album Cursed comes without much…
Beneath The Massacre – Maree Noire
“Musically this album doesn’t deviate from the standard computer like sound of BTM past works. It has everything you would expect, ridiculously fast double kick, guitar licks like a robot was playing the 6 stringer and vocals guttural and abrasive enough to use on paint you need removed.”
Hellbound’s Matt Lewis discusses Maree Noire, the latest output from Quebec death metallers, Beneath the Massacre.
Zodiac Mindwarp and the Love Reaction – We Are Volsung
People reading this review will probably be split in two groups: the people who have no frackin’ clue who Zodiac Mindwarp is and the people who thought he died after 1988’s Tattooed Beat Messiah. There might be a couple of you who know that Zodiac has been (not so) quietly making new records and playing gigs ever since being dropped from his label in 1990. However, this is the first record in 20 years that actually has a label attached to it with any sort of clout and SPV have jumped on at an absolutely brilliant point. We Are Volsung is a monster hard rock record!
Jason Wellwood praises the latest release from the relatively obscure Zodiac Mindwarp, who together with The Love Reaction, have released a gem entitled “We Are Volsung”
KYLESA – Spiral Shadow
But the album’s triumph for me, without question, is the majestic, heartfelt (hell, almost power-pop!) pageantry of “Don’t Look Back”; its two-note clarion-call intro causes the hairs on the back of my neck to stand up every time I listen– and the lyrics and vocals propel the song into sheer anthemic glory.
Hellbound’s Kyle Harcott reviews Kylesa’s latest effort, entitled Spiral Shadow, released on Season of Mist.
Enslaved – Axioma Ethica Odini
Despite some jagged rhythms and an unexpected groove Axioma Ethica Odini flows consistently to an abrupt not-quite conclusion, so that finally I’m perplexed but also persuaded that I want to work my way through it all again until I fully understand.