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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Pounder – Heavy Metal Disaster
What can you say: Matt Harvey is one busy artist. If trying to juggle his other bands Dekapitator, Exhumed, and Gruesome wasn’t enough, he goes and offers us this new project entitled Pounder. Pounder’s first EP release, Heavy Metal Disaster, is a refreshing throw back to the good old days of power metal, heavy metal…
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Venomous Maximus – No Warning
I had the chance to catch this Texas quartet at Milwaukee’s Days of the Doomed fest in 2013, where Venomous Maximus distinguished themselves as the most up-tempo outfit on the bill. Unfortunately, they got left behind at the border on the High on Fire/Pallbearer tour a couple years back, which was super-lame, cuz they probably…
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Ether – There is Nothing Left for Me Here
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: Florida man gets divorced, writes sludge-metal record. OK, so maybe that headline didn’t make the news. While divorce and separation have inspired countless classic country cuts, I think this second effort from Florida outfit Ether might be a first—the only sludge album dealing with marital breakdown. And…
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Dying Fetus – Wrong One To Fuck With
Catchy and brutal as ever Dying Fetus return to the forefront of brutal american death metal, a genre that they arguably ruled for nearly a decade. Unloading a full clip of ammunition on the world in the form of Wrong One To Fuck With the Maryland metalheads do not extend any level of mercy on…
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Ninjaspy – Spüken
Always a pleasure to review a band with an original sound and, really, they don’t come much more original than the memorably named Ninjaspy! Spüken is a real smorgasbord of influences, but the band also achieves the grand feat of being extremely coherent. Sure Ninjaspy will appeal to fans of System of a Down, Goijira, The…
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Slagduster – Deadweight
I have heard a lot of original monikers for bands in my time, but Slagduster is one of the most original (it’s the name of a piece of mine machinery from over a century ago). This four-piece from Grand Forks, B.C., plays progressive metal in the vein of Gojira, Voivod, Sikth, Meshuggah, Dillinger Escape Plan, and…
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Origin – Unparalleled Universe
“Oh, wow” were literally the first two words out of my mouth when I hit play on this behemoth of bombast. Fans of Origin, death metal, technical precision and speed will have found their new canon in Unparalleled Universe, the band’s Nuclear Blast debut. Seriously aggressive and technical are obvious descriptors for any of Origin’s…
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Deity – Deity
With a name like Deity (which means ‘Godhead; the Supreme Being; a fabulous god or goddess, a divinity’), this band have a lot to live up to, a self-imposed high water mark if you will. One the whole Deity more than do their moniker justice. Moreover, while being true to their death metal roots (indeed…
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Five Horse Johnson – Jake Leg Boogie
Five Horse Johnson, one of the best Clutch-adjacent (as in, this ain’t Clutch, but it’s Clutch-adjacent!) bands going, is back and burning beards with its eighth studio album, out on Small Stone Records. It’s hard to think of another band that’s been playing this heavy, hazy blend of blues-rock for 20+ years—aside from, y’know, Captain…
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Sigil – Kingdom of the Grave
Sigil have produced a most assured debut. Influenced by the likes of Discharge, Entombed, Black Breath, Death, Immolation and Morbid Angel, Sigil are ploughing their own furrow. A pleasing aspect to this album is the crusty sound to the riffs. I was reminded of the likes of Doom here; these are some seriously dense and effective…