Author Archives: arse

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The Acacia Strain — Step Into The Light

✦✦✧✧ This album has the same predilection for massive, plodding riffs, just like its companion piece Failure Will Follow. The difference is that, on this album, all but one track clocks in at under 3 minutes. The result is a collection of pieces that feel incomplete and fragmentary sketches. Perhaps this sort of thing will give metal new life on The Kids’ Social Media, but I find it harder to get into this particular material this particular way.

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Soen — Memorial

✦✦✦✧ Punchy and radio-friendly prog metal? Yes please! This is Soen sounding more than ever before like Porcupine Tree (or unlike Tool). The previous comparisons to Leprous still hold firm, only this music has more swagger. Interesting and fun!

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Pupil Slicer — Blossom

✦✦✦✧ As tempting as it is to pigeonhole this album as post-mathcore, there’s clearly more going on here, with the band toying with listenability, hooks, and expectations. Don’t be surprised to hear synthwave cozying up to moments of shred, industrial, or even prog… there ain’t a dull moment on this one, folks, so strap in and enjoy this unique ride.

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Godflesh — Purge

✦✦✧✧ Keep in mind that when I say the track "LAND LORD" sounds like it was rejected for the Matrix soundtrack, I mean that with corrosive, fistpumping love. The problem with this industrial noisefest is one of consistency; when it works, it’s glorious, but when it misses, it feels like underdeveloped material.

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Therapy? — Hard Cold Fire

✦✦✧✧ A suitably venomous album from these chronically displeased Northern Irish alt-rock bastards (their 16th). As ever, this sounds like five different bands simultaneously, but a mashup of contemporaries like Killing Joke, XTC, pre-fame Nirvana, and The Jesus Lizard is as compelling as ever. One of their strongest efforts in a decade.

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TesseracT — War Of Being

✦✦✦✧ I haven’t been this justifiably excited about a TesseracT album since Altered State. This is the band at their darkest yet. The two stars here are bassist Amos Williams and vocalist Daniel Tompkins, turning in a career-best performance in a career full of great performances.

Criticisms: the album, and most of the songs, are possibly 10-15% too long.

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The Zenith Passage — Datalysium

✦✦✦✧ This absolutely shreds, which one would expect, being that this band is, what, 75% The Faceless by now? Tech death bona fides aside, this music finds itself at times in the unfortunate uncanny valley between Unpredictable Metal Mayhem… and Just Goofy. This is territory best ceded permanently to Protest The Hero.

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