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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Vantablack Warship – Abrasive Pulmonic Speak
Vantablack Warship continue to progress in leaps and bounds, and I could see them being a valuable addition to any quality metal label’s roster. Imagine Rush colliding with At The Gates, and you will have some idea of Vantablack’s sound, but really with each successive release they become more and more their own creation. Their song-writing has…
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Young Hunter – Dayhiker
Young Hunter has graced the world with their latest album titled Dayhiker. A dreamy, doomy desert rock album pulling inspiration from modern masters of the genre, and time machines back to the 70s. Dayhiker does what it pleases, while tickling the stoner metal system in your brain. The tracks make you question whether you are…
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Ben Miller Band – Choke Cherry Tree LP
The catch, when any band attempts to infuse a time-honored sound and style with new energy and fresh inspiration, is that they often lose sight of all the reasons why and how that form worked in the first place. While the heart and hopes might be sound enough, the results often feel as though someone…
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Forming the Void / Pyreship split 10-inch
Both Forming the Void and Pyreship put out awesome albums last year, so this split certainly seems fitting. Of course, this kind of (post) sludge is too long for a 7-inch, so while there are only two songs here, it still warrants a bigger piece of wax. FTV takes Side A with “To the Wolves,”…
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Greber – Cemetery Preston
As you can see by the list of formats below, Greber are definitely committed to the physical format. For that, Sirs, I salute you! The cover artwork is superb too. But, as to the music contained in all these wondrous formats, does it deserve to be so immortalised? Indeed it does. On Cemetery Preston, Greber have produced some…
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The best uncelebrated metal of 2017
2017 was a solid year for metal, no doubt. I’ve noticed, while perusing “year end” lists, a lot of the same things coming in at the top. Credit where credit is due – some of the metal genre’s best bands released some awesome material – Enslaved coming in with another genre-bending masterpiece; Loss and Bell…
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Caroline Rose – Loner LP
I have to confess that, as soon as I began listening to Loner – the new full-length album by Caroline Rose – I realized that everything I thought I knew and expected from the singer was incorrect. My first contact with Rose was with the song “Yip Yip Yow” from an NPR live performance, and…
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Lemuria – Recreational Hate LP
The coolest thing about the moment after a new album gets released, people begin to find it and it proves to really connect with them in a popular way is that time seems to stop for a minute and everything the band did prior to the release of that album becomes a footnote. From the…
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Tony Tears – Demons Crawl At Your Side
It is fair to say a lot of metal fans like Italian horror films. I’m thinking of atmospheric works like Lucio Fulci’s ‘The Beyond’ or Dario Arngento’s ‘Susperia’, both fine Italian works of art and highly influential and respected. Moreover, Italy is a country with a long and bloody history and the birthplace of the Roman Catholic…
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The Opium Cartel – “What’s It Gonna Be” (Ratt cover)
The Opium Cartel is the sister band of White Willow, whose last album, Future Hopes, we gushed over last year. The Opium Cartel seems to be a necessary outlet for bandleader Jacob Holm-Lupo, a way to explore a lighter, poppier style away from the weight-of-the-world concerns of White Willow. You’ll hear a similar palette of…