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
Author Archives: arse
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
Corrosion Of Conformity — No Cross No Crown
✦✦✧✧ Not only does this album mark a return to COC’s classic lineup, featuring Pepper Keenan, but it also marks a return to a very old sound (albeit with new sludgey Down-ish qualities, not surprisingly). I’m not sure exactly who this album is for, but it’s kinda nice to know that the band is still doing what they do. See the rest here
Watain — Trident Wolf Eclipse
✦✦✧✧ More engaging than your typical old-school Scandanavian black metal, but don’t worry: the shitty production values and Crypt Keeper vocal stylings are still in full effect. Not quite as experimental as past Watain albums, but the band strike a good balance here between unusual chord progressions and obligatory-screaming-in-the-cold-forest fundamentals. See the rest here
‘Tis the season
(The listening party starts over at TIDAL.) See the rest here
Re: Re: RIP Warrel Dane
I do believe this is one of the first metal albums that Zig ever made me listen to. Or was it you, JaPaBo? Pouring out a tall boy…. See the rest here
Krallice — Go Be Forgotten
✦✦✦✧ Take the band’s last release (the two-month-old “Loüm”) and blend it with… the Inception soundtrack? See the rest here
Morbid Angel — Kingdoms Disdained
✦✦✧✧ Doggedly ferocious and unpristine, this is what you want a Morbid Angel to sound like. It’s also more interesting than I feared, with some clever and unusual riffs and moments buried under the bare brutality. And yet, this album often feels like a Frankenstein’s monster of death metal B-sides and bridges crammed together. See the rest here
