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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Speedtrap – Straight Shooter
Reviews I’m seen for this simply splendid album seem to focus on two bands as influences on Speedtrap, Motorhead and Chrome Division (I don’t see them as an influence but they share attitudes and influences). For sure I hear Motorhead, which is as it should be, if you don’t love Motorhead, you don’t love life.…
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Crux of Aux – Mona
Despite the best efforts of No Why Records founder Mark McGee and his former bass playing cohort in I Hate Sally/The Chariot, Dan Vokey, I have never found the time to check out Shallow North Dakota. And my knowledge of Cursed is cursory at best. But it was that same rhythm section (I think) that…
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Tau Cross – Tau Cross
Tau Cross features Rob Miller from Amebix and Away from Voivod and draws great strength from both bands. Amebix and Voivod are two of my favourite bans of all time. Moreover, they are two of most influential bands in the history of metal. And bear in mind that both bands expanded and moved beyond the…
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Kowloon Walled City – Grievances
I had read somewhere that Kowloon Walled City‘s new album, Grievances, is a concept album about office culture, workplace conflict and the rat race. You get a bit of a sense of that in the lyrics, but had I not been alerted beforehand, I probably wouldn’t have picked up on it—post-sludge often tends to be cryptic,…
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Lucifer – Lucifer I
Lucifer open this splendid album with ‘Abracadabra’, a magical phrase that implies the opening up of new vistas and worlds. Which, following the sad demise of The Oath, Lucifer most certainly are. The music contained within the grooves of this album is truly marvellous, utterly sincere, timeless… it belongs to no particular time. It is…
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Bevar Sea – Invoke the Bizarre
When Reverend Bizarre penned their tongue-in-cheek anthem “Doom Over the World” back in ’05, I’m not sure they could have foreseen a doom outfit from India invoking them 10 years later. This is actually album number two from the Bangalore-based Bevar Sea, whose Billy Anderson engin-eared debut landed them a slot at MDF in 2012.…
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Unleash the Archers – Time Stands Still
Napalm made a very good decision in signing Unleash The Archers: they have all of metal’s strengths and none of it’s weaknesses. Time Stands Still is a very positive, very up album. In some respects, it is very traditional – great playing, great songwriting – but in other’s – production and influences – it is very…
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Windhand – Grief’s Infernal Flower
I’m probably one of the few doom critics who didn’t put Windhand’s Relapse debut Soma in his year-end top 10 in 2013. Not that I really had anything against that album; I just thought it tested my patience a tad, what with its whopping 77-minute runtime. Since then, I’ve seen ’em live twice, and while…
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The Meads of Asphodel / Tjolgtjar – Taste The Divine Wrath
It is releases like this that are the reason I’ve dedicated so much time to this genre. It comes as no surprise that the Meads of Asphodel would do yet another fine split release, as they were one of the first British black metal bands to do so, releasing for instance, the fine ‘English/Black Punk…
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Motörhead – Bad Magic
It’s hard to tell what happened to Motörhead between the release of Aftershock and the recording of Bad Magic, but there’s no missing the change in the band’s demeanour as this album plays. It’s possible that the new energy so apparent in Motörhead’s 22nd album comes from the new company that Motörhead majordomo Lemmy Kilmister has…