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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Cathedral – In Memoriam
Cathedral are one of the greatest heavy metal bands of all time. Their influence is far, far beyond any commercial success they have achieved. Over two decades, Cathedral consistently made superb records, often under severe financial constraints, for the right reasons – love of their art. That more of us might have the courage to…
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Crusty Culprits: CRUST PUNK FROM BANDCAMP, Part Two
Welcome to part two of this Crusty Culprits feature. The point of the lengthy list below is to highlight a bunch of steel-edged punk rock that I’ve been enjoying in recent times. I stumbled on most of the bands featured here while exploring Bandcamp, and the majority of them are crust punk groups, because that’s…
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Pyramids On Mars – Echo Cosmic
When I went to see the film Jonah Hex in the cinema I was astonished by two things. One, how it was possible to take such a good character and make such an utter balls-up of a film. Seriously, all they had to do was adapt the graphic novel Riders of the Worm and Such…
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Shardborne – Living Bridges
Hailing from Limerick, Ireland (and thus, local lads!), Shardborne are on the right label with Out On A Limb, as they did a fine job with fellow Irish instrumental prog-metallers, Rest. On ‘Not That Axis’, Shardborne are very reminiscent of Voivod circa ‘The Unknown Knows’, whereas ‘Qualia’ displays virtuoso jazz influences. In a sense, Shardborne are a…
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Mad Trapper – Dead Living
Mad Trapper is a four-piece band from Toronto and this is their second full length. On Kill Us, Start Anew, which some would say was very popular in the metalcore scene in Toronto, the band demonstrated some fantastic hardcore and metal chops. Now with Dead Living the band is hoping to expand on that and…
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Helloween – My God-Given Right
There is indeed no happy medium with Euro-metal, either it is very good or very bad. Thankfully, on this album, Helloween are very good. Musically, we have some great Iron Maiden-esque songs. One thing that sets Helloween apart from so many metal bands is there sense of humour ( “Dr. Stein” anyone?), which is still…
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Iron Maiden – The Book of Souls
Whenever any of us listen to music, we bring the sum of our knowledge and experiences along for the ride. Those elements are called the beholder’s share, and they obviously shape our understanding and opinion of what we hear. I’m going to provide you with my opinion about Iron Maiden’s latest and sixteenth album,The Book…
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Leave The Living – Pacifist
There is a big Pantera-shaped hole in the metal scene. The question is, what band has the chops to fill it? On the strength of Pacifist, it could well be Leave The Living! That all important groove of Pantera is there, coupled with the raging intensity of At The Gates circa Slaughter of the Soul.…
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Crusty Culprits: Crust Punk from Bandcamp, Part One
I’ve loved heavyweight crust punk since I first heard bands like Discharge, Hellbastard, and Amebix adding metal to their respective visions of punk rock in the early 1980s. To this day, nothing satisfies my musical appetite more than some filthy battle-vested punk with a snarling metal accent. In recent years, Bandcamp has proven to be…
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Satyricon – Live At The Opera
“… on September 8, 2013 Satyricon shared the stage with the Norwegian Opera Choir in Oslo – a monumental extravaganza that has been captured on DVD and two bonus CDs…” Satyricon had previously done a version of ‘To The Mountains’ with the Royal Norwegian Opera Chorus. From this grew the idea of doing an entire show.…