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?

  • Kvelertak – Kvelertak

    Kvelertak hold nothing sacred, aren’t afraid to whip out their six schlongs to piss on the walls of convention and are getting the appropriate attention – both positive and negative – because of it, whether you like it or not. It all starts with their sound: a furious, kinetic and coruscating blend of 85 octane…

  • 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 pure bloodlines going back to Napalm Death. No sax solos, no circus interludes, no ambient digressions dilute the mix. There’s no bass guitar either, which has no effect on the scathing…

  • 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 up. There are a handful of bands that pull off the retro sound flawlessly enough to sound as though it comes naturally to them. But, as with any trend, the majority…

  • 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…

  • 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 for the first time. If it’s Lordi though, not only is it okay, it’s kind of expected. Mr. Lordi and his costumed crew sound a lot more refreshed and ready for…

  • 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 fanfare or anticipation, their previous album Minus The Herd was a nuclear bomb made of shit. I recently saw them live and was blown away… by the new songs off of…

  • 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…

  • 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…

  • 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…