Tag: album review
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Tribulation – Children of the Night
On Tribulation’s third album, The Children of the Night, the Swedish quartet follows metal’s obsession with horror much further than their peers. On their past albums, 2009’s Swedish death explosion The Horror, followed by horse-sized hallucinogen The Formulas of Death in 2013, Tribulation showed they were onto a form of death metal as exciting as…
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Sigh – Graveward
There are bands that we call progressive; bands that think outside the box. Then there are bands like Japan’s Sigh, which have never acknowledged that there was a box in the first place. I got into them with the album Imaginary Sonicscape (2001), an album that to this day still pushes the envelope of what…
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Elderoth – Mystic
Elderoth are the brainchild of a certain Collin McGee, and his singular vision has produced a unique metal sound. Many years ago, the great Ritchie Blackmore said a wise thing (this was around the time of the release of the ground-breaking Rainbow Rising album): this was that so few guitarists had taken inspiration from Middle…
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Minsk – The Crash and the Draw
Y’know, I’m always a little leery when a 75-minute album comes up in my review queue. It takes a lot to capture my attention for such an extended period, and when you look at past precedent, well… Reign in Blood was 29 minutes long, Vol 4 was 43. Hell, Dopesmoker was 63 minutes, but that’s…
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Round Eye – s/t
Wow. A band grabbing listeners and shaking them by the head just to see the confused look on their faces isn’t a particularly common occurrence anymore (the Mothers Of Invention used to do it, Butthole Surfers were really good at it, Flaming Lips have had some great moments in the mindfuck field too), but no…
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Royal Thunder – Crooked Doors
Fair warning: Crooked Doors, the second full-length from Atlanta’s Royal Thunder, contains at least three songs that will burn into your unconsciousness with the ease of candy-coated crack to haunt your waking and un-waking hours. I wish someone would have warned me, but there’s little time – it happens almost instantly. The first song, “Time…
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Scott Weiland and The Wildabouts – Blaster
Love him or hate him, no one can claim that Scott Weiland isn’t adaptable. Since first appearing on the alt-rock radar with Stone Temple Pilots in 1993, the singer has changed his artistic focus with the same kind of regularity that most people have in changing their socks; he rolled through a series of compositional…
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Nest – S/T EP
Like a gratuitous steel-toed punt to a prone skull, NEST kick the shit out of restraint and then some with an overdriven, relentlessly brutal 2-man black-hearted doom beat down straight from the KEEPER/PRIMITIVE MAN/FISTER school of glacial extremity. Pummelling, ponderous drums wrestle with ursine-heavy guitars and some apropos samples on this raw, dynamic self-titled EP…
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The Bar Stool Preachers – One Fool Down 7” single
When’s the last time you listened to some punk rock, reader? That’s P-U-N-K R-O-C-K; the snotty stuff made in the face of mediocrity. The stuff that a band wrote because they had nothing left to lose because they’d been kicked around and told they were no good but still refused to remain down after having…
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Gorelust – We are the Undead
Maybe we’re not missing out after all. Twenty years late, Gorelust are following up their debut album with We are the Undead. After struggling to make a go of it in the deepening death metal pool of the mid-90s, the band dissolved for the usual reasons. Nevertheless, the story goes that about half of the…