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?

  • Krallice: Dimensional Bleedthrough

    Dimensional Bleedthrough is the sophomore effort from New York’s Krallice. Like the band’s debut, the record is generally steeped in the more recent “avant-garde” or “post-Black Metal” sound, but it offers enough of the little details that are recognizably the group’s own. Jonathan Smith reviews the new Krallice album for Hellbound.ca

  • Barren Earth: Our Twilight

    Whenever a veteran metal band undergoes radical changes, like in Amorphis’s case, a new lead singer and a more streamlined sound, even if that shift in direction is successful artistically commercially and artistically, there will always be the stubborn folks in the background bitching and moaning about how their favourite band just isn’t the same…

  • Hypocrisy: A Taste Of Extreme Divinity

    Well, isn’t this a surprise. A Taste of Extreme Divinity could well be the best offering from Mr Tägtgren’s Hypocrisy in years.

  • Bastard Child Death Cult: Year Zero

    Year Zero really does live up to its name; it plays like a brand new band insofar as not playing it even a little bit safe at any point during the album – everyone just goes for broke.

  • Woods of Ypres: IV-The Green Album

    No strangers to change, the nomadic Woods of Ypres have once again, redefined their sound with their fourth independent release IV – The Green Album. Initially a pure black metal band, mastermind David Gold and company (a variety of different musicians have come and gone through the years) have mixed elements of doom to their…

  • Altar Of Plagues: White Tomb

    With the band’s notable lack of corpse paint and the absence of beloved horror show theatrics in its sound, White Tomb emerges as a debut that contributes to a growing subset within the wider black metal sub-genre.

  • Converge: Axe To Fall

    It took nineteen years but, in the opening guitar slashes of “Dark Horse,” listeners can almost hear the bandmembers collectively growl and then proceed to smash everyone listening over the head with thirteen of the strongest tracks this band has ever recorded; none of which fall into easy classification because Converge plays them all their…

  • While Heaven Wept: Vast Oceans Lachrymose

    If you want to hear passionate music played by dedicated musicians that have been reworked and reworked again and again into perfection (some of the tracks go back as far as 95), the final results are proof that this will be one of my absolute faves of 09 and possibly one of the greatest melodic…

  • The Melvins: Chicken Switch

    For this album, thirteen musicians weren’t just handed a single song and asked to artfully adorn it with electronics, they were handed as much source material from The Melvins’ songbook as they wanted and asked to get as creative as they wanted in creating something new from their source material selections; essentially being asked to…

  • Merauder: God Is I

    Brooklyn, NY’s Merauder bring forth God Is I, a hardcore album that is not too extravagant or chaotic. With strong musicianship and relevant lyrics, the band still manages to produce something solid.