✦✦✧✧ Another 41-minute grind/industrial/death/black metal maelstrom, this time with a hint of… growing maturity and reflection? This album is in fact unusually thoughtful (don’t like the song title “Libidinous (A Pig With Cocks In Its Eyes)” fool you), with Dave Hunt’s lyrics touching repeatedly on the state of the Western world. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ An album length of 22 minutes might seem a little skimpy, but that doesn’t stop these tech death shredders from cramming an hour’s worth of riffs into it. It’s blistering fun at a million miles an hour, of course, but the listening experience is a little like doing shots; I can’t remember much after it’s all done, but I feel like I got hit by a truck anyway. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ The band’s previous album Vector had me worried, but somehow the band correct for past sins here, without abandoning their trademark accessible eccentricity. Indeed, the band continue to wear their influences on their sleeves (Dream Theater, Devin Townsend, Leprous, SikTh, Karnivool, Porcupine Tree, Tool) while also managing to surprise and delight. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ More like Long Album Good Night, am I right?! 31 years after “Nothing Left To Say,” Fates’ thirteenth album of thirteen songs is 72 minutes long (about 20 minutes too many). The songs don’t feel particularly related to each other (and this is somewhat of an aberration in the band’s catalog of albums with unifying themes). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is definitely my preferred portion of the now collective 3 hours that make up the Phanerozoic suite. Seemingly more deliberate than Phanerozoic I: Palaezoic, Messrs. Staps et al find novel ways to express their creativity without sacrificing coherence or ferocity. Definitely listen to the whole album, as it looks to map the passage of geologic time, lyrically and musically, over a span of 250 million years… with accompanying genre shifts along the way. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Perhaps Pyrrhon’s most accessible album to date… by which I mean that normies will be all “NO FUCKING THANK YOU” after about 10 seconds of this virtuosic cacophony. If you stick with it, however, you’ll find the progressive death metal band’s malevolent logic is a bit closer to the surface than before. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This, finally, is an Enslaved album that I can enjoy without reservation. The pacing is great, bordering on psychic; the blending of styles (black metal, prog, beerhall, Viking, jazz) is tasteful, sensible, and pleasing to the ear. This is a Must Listen for sure, and my favorite Enslaved album ever. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Far be it for me to accuse DevilDriver of being experimental, but this album (or rather, this first half of a double album) takes a lot of chances with the band’s formula. By and large, those gambles pay off handsomely, leading to the most brutal yet interesting album they’ve put out in a decade. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Perhaps the most inscrutable, internally consistent album I’ve heard since The Mars Volta’s Amputechture. The band’s third album introduces a new element to their sound: throughout, there’s now a new sense of Something Gone Wrong here, which really hones the edge of their music’s inventiveness and unpredictability. Give it an honest chance; this album has surprises up its sleeve. See the rest here
Bold statement, Zig! It’s certainly the most electrifying debut hard rock album I can think of, that’s for damned sure. But….
Honestly, I’m not gonna fight you on this one, as it’d be like a knife fight: ugly, with both of us winding up bloody, and for no good reason. So, all hail VH I! See the rest here
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