The Atlas Moth — Coma Noir
✦✦✦✧ The Isis-meets-APC vibe of TAL is more finely tuned on this album than ever before. Heavy, moody, and unique. See the rest here
Author Archives: arse
Legend Of The Seagullmen — Legend Of The Seagullmen
✦✧✧✧ I swear to god, when this album started I thought at first that I’d popped on a Primus album. Unfortunately, that’s probably the listening high point of the debut album from this high-concept stoner band. I’m hardpressed to think of another supergroup as intent on casting its constituent pieces in a worse light. See the rest here
Tribulation — Down Below
✦✦✧✧ This album feels both novel and dated at the same time. Its production values and humble musical ambitions lend the proceedings a tiredness that’s hard to look past. But the album is also fresh in some of its riffs and chord progressions, as well as its interweaving of Swedish death metal, thrash, and black metal. See the rest here
Black Label Society — Grimmest Hits
✦✦✧✧ A syrupy, grungy hard rock album for a modern metalhead’s sensibilities. Zakk Wylde et al channel their inner Tommy Iommi and Jerry Cantrell, but put enough enough spit on it to make the album moderately smirk-inducing. See the rest here
Orphaned Land — Unsung Prophets And Dead Messiahs
✦✦✧✧ This album vacillates between routine prog metal (with light Israeli flavor) and straight up mizrahi rock with heavy metal adornments. This winds up sounding a lot like Serj Tankian singing along with a very good band overseas. Interesting. See the rest here
Into The Great Divide — Into The Great Divide
✦✧✧✧ This is a different project than usual for Dream Theater’s drummer Mike Mangini: a “rock novel” that reimagines the narrative of Joseph Campbell’s “A Hero’s Journey,” an instrumental album save for “chapter” “intros” from voiceover actor Larry Davis. And it’s pretty much what you’d expect: utter wankery, more fit for a drum clinic than anything else. See the rest here
Harms Way — Posthuman
✦✦✦✧ Goddamn, this industrialcore album is unapologetically nasty. There are fun and clever flourishes throughout, which only accentuate the otherwise singleminded pummeling on every track. See the rest here
Portal — Ion
✦✦✧✧ This album is nuts. Lo-fi avant garde progressive black cvlt noise, like Boris played on vinyl that also happens to be a cat’s scratching post. Put another way, I imagine this must be what non-metalheads think all metal sounds like. See the rest here
Good Tiger — We Will All Be Gone
✦✦✦✧ The supergroup’s sophomore album still has a lot of the magic as was evident in their 2015 debut “A Head Full Of Moonlight“, but the band’s musicality, emotionality, ambition, and strangeness are all dialed down a bit. This comes across more as a new maturity than any loss of momentum or inspiration, the result still captivating in its not-quite-*core pop-metal sensibilities. See the rest here
Machine Head — Catharsis
✦✧✧✧ What the actual fuck with this album.
There are touches here (isolated riffs, really) that remind me of the Machine Head I thought I knew: precise, mean, effective metal. The vast bulk of this album unfortunately is something else: a confused and incoherent melange, liberally peppered with references to latter-day nu metal staples like Slipknot and Korn. See the rest here
