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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Inter Arma – Paradise Gallows
Generally speaking, I like my coffee downtuned and doomy, just like my metal. Never been a big fan of the blackened stuff, but Inter Arma caught my ear with their 2013 Relapse debut Sky Burial, which owes about as much to Neurosis as it does to Emperor. Hailing from the same Richmond, Virginia scene as…
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Pentagram – First Daze Here
These days, when Bobby Liebling sings “These are gonna be my last days here…” he really means it. The dude looked like death warmed over when I saw ‘em down in Cleveland last year, and his touring troubles continued recently, with missed gigs and pissed-off openers on their last trek. The backing band behind him…
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Canadian metal playlist – Canada Day 2016
Hellbound is based in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada. This year, on July 1st, 2016, Canada turns 149 years old. Canada’s first contribution to the pre-history of heavy metal was (according to Wikipedia)* a band called The Sparrows, which formed in 1964 and went on to become Steppenwolf. Canadian heavy metal band Anvil released the album Metal on Metal in 1982.…
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Comet Control – Center of the Maze
This is the second release from Toronto psych rock outfit Comet Control, following their self-titled debut in 2014. A couple of these guys have some history with Tee Pee stalwarts Quest for Fire, although I found their new outfit to be a little more structured and poppy than its predecessor. Before I give that one…
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Arctic – self-titled
Three California skaters drop out, tune down and start jamming. Based on that backstory, I’m expecting some kinda cross between Earthless and The Shrine, and Arctic doesn’t totally disappoint on their debut EP. “Over Smoked” kicks off this five-track effort, a nine-minute slow burn that gets heads nodding almost from the get-go with its heavy-psych…
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It’s Not Night, It’s Space – Our Birth is But a Sleep and a Forgetting
This instro heavy-psych trio hails from New Paltz, a small town in New York’s Hudson Valley, which I believe is on the bus route from Cooperstown to Kingston, NY. After a couple independently released albums, they’ve signed to Small Stone for this, their third record. The artist often shortened to INNIS seems to share post-rock’s…
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Throttlerod – Turncoat
These Virginia veterans and Small Stone mainstays have just put out their first album in almost seven years. Turncoat is album number five from this heavy-rock outfit, and their fourth for the Detroit label, to which they’ve been signed almost since the turn of the century. (They have the distinction of covering “Black Betty” on…
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Diamond Head – Diamond Head
Diamond Head has been around for the better part of 40 years. They’ve been there since the beginning, when heavy metal as a genre was being created. Their influence is well-documented; their importance in the canon of the heavy metal story is solidified. But you’d be hard-pressed to find any metalhead worth their salt not…
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The Second Coming of Heavy, Chapter III (BoneHawk/Kingnomad split)
In some ways, Ripple Music is sorta like a modern-day MeteorCity—a great little label bringing underground heavy music to the masses. Ripple also has its own series of split albums; of which this is the third installment. I haven’t heard of either of these bands, so I’m not expecting Lowrider/Nebula here, but if Ripple’s logo…
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VENOMOUS CONCEPT – KICK ME SILLY – VC III
Venomous Concept is a supergroup built upon the backs of some of grindcore’s forefathers, but aside from several blasting passages, as with the accelerated latter-half of “Neck Tie”, the band is much more in tune with eighties punk rock and hardcore, not unlike the band which their own namesake pays homage to with a play…