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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Year-in-review 2015: Sean Palmerston
As another year draws to a close, we metalheads tend to take time to reflect on what the year in metal meant to us, and prepare our various lists of what was great, what sucked, and everything in between. This year we decided to get a little more up close and personal with Team Hellbound,…
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The Lion’s Daughter – Existence is Horror
I really dug this St. Louis outfit’s last record, A Black Sea, which came out late in 2013. But seeing as it was a collaborative effort with local folk band Indian Blanket, I’m definitely expecting some different sounds from The Lion’s Daughter this time around. What we get instead are 40 minutes of Midwest blackened…
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The Body – No One Deserves Happiness
Pop goes The Body!? On this record, they’ve set out to create the “grossest pop album of all time,” adding 80’s synths, dance beats and female vocals to their two-pieced sludge attack. This might be where you’d accuse them of selling out… but does anybody really wanna buy this? Oftentimes, the overall effect is more…
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All Them Witches – Dying Surfer Meets His Maker
Above all else, the first thing you need to know about All Them Witches is that nothing is exactly as it seems. If all you saw was the album cover, you could justifiably assume it was the work of a metal or stoner rock band – but you’d be wrong. If all you heard was…
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Publicist UK – Forgive Yourself
It’s always nice to hear new music in the form of yesterdays or decades gone by or in terms of genre. This may be even more true in the case of musicians who come from a background of extreme metal. This is just the case for Publicist UK, who have created a post-punk era album with some…
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Eternal Black – Eternal Black
For those of you who feel you were born too late, here’s a little EP from a Brooklyn band that feels the same way. Eternal Black unload three tracks of retro-styled doom on their debut, self-titled EP. Through a haze of grimy, overdriven tone and feedback the trio lay down seriously groovy, Wino-influenced doom riffs.…
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Arakk – Self & Distance
Self & Distance is a 25-minute piece of droning doom from Danish quintet Arakk. Originally released digitally in June 2014, Aonair Productions has given it the physical release it deserves. Casting light and shade over a desolate landscape shaped from a tortured soul, S&D tests the endurance of anguish against a backdrop of soul-withering atmospheric…
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Yidhra – Cult of Bathory
Countess Elizabeth Bathory has been the muse of many a black-metal band, from Venom onwards, but this is the first time I’ve seen her name attached to a doom-metal record. Mind you, L.A. outfit Yidhra are no strangers to the occult; they’re named after the dream witch in H.P. Lovecraft lore. This four-song, 10” EP…
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We Lost the Sea – Departure Songs
What drew me to Departure Songs, the third album from Aussie post-rockers We Lost the Sea, was the concept. All of these songs are about people who died helping others, from deep-sea diver David Shaw to the two men who shut down the Chernobyl reactor; they’ve even got a two-part epic about the Space Shuttle…