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?

  • Skull Fist – Heavier Than Metal

    This album shows the real Toronto metal scene is sparkling with some great new bands.

  • The Vision Bleak – Set Sail To Mystery

    Like a ghost ship emerging from a heavy fog, Germany’s gothic duo have returned with an album that, despite some occasional flat attempts towards invoking a playfully dark atmosphere, is a fun record well worth a listen.

  • Blood Cult – We Are the Cult of the Plains

    I hope that more people will find the time to check out We Are the Cult of the Plains, because after repeated listening, it’s totally grown on me – a fascinating, schizophrenic, Syd Barrett take on black metal.

  • Apostle of Solitude – Last Sunrise

    Last Sunrise is an Epicus Doomicus Metallicus opus in every sense, faux Latin be damned. One can only assume that the two gun-toting lovers on the cover were driven to their suicide pact after repeated listens on a cold February nite.

  • Umbah – Trilobeth

    Trilobeth doesn’t offer much of in terms of a focused style, but its seeming adaptability and multiplicity are its strengths. It’s a release that is a musical tribute to our technological and frenzied reality.

  • Baptized In Blood – Gutterbound

    Playing a thrash, metalcore infused style, the music is fun, dirty, rocking and has your head nodding from the get go. The album is chock full of big sounding melodic passages that work very well and suck you right back into the moment.

  • Buzzoven – Violence From The Vault

    Violence is somewhat reminiscent of the early Eyehategod demos gathered by Century Media on 2000’s 10 Years of Abuse…And Still Broke compilation, particularly in its transferred-from-cassette-tape sound quality

  • Finntroll – Nifelvind

    Combining world music sounds (steel drums, tubular bells, an orchestra, occasionally and a barge-load of goth-sounding synths) with giant and meticulously executed black/death/math metal guitars, Finntroll (literally, the translation is ‘Finn Troll,’ taken from an old Finnish folk legend) come off sounding like the most cinematic and archaic metal band of all time as songs…

  • KEVI METAL’S RIMSHOTS v.2 #3

    The music world is filled with similar smoke and mirrors acts. We’re told over and over and over again that so-and-so’s new album is the one that’ll re-define the genre. How many times have you heard in the last couple years that this-and-that’s “stunning” comeback album is “highly anticipated” and their best yet? Better than…

  • Woods Of Ypres – W4: The Green Album

    W4: The Green Album is a difficult journey. There is a great deal of darkness, and there are certainly wolves (and worse) in these particular Woods. But, as a listener, you are never without a guide. However difficult and painful it may be, this was David Gold’s journey before it was yours, and it is…