Broken Hope — Mutilated And Assimilated
✦✦✧✧ Very familiar cookiemonster death metal, cut from the same cloth as Cannibal Corpse. If that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this sort of thing. See the rest here
Author Archives: arse
The Acacia Strain — Gravebloom
✦✧✧✧ TAC are best when they aim for over-the-top detuned mayhem. What you get on this album instead are passages of riffs that are more often tepid rather than dreadful, interspersed with flow-killing bits of maudlin atmosphere, ill-timed tempo changes, and other bad choices. See the rest here
Decapitated — Anticult
✦✦✦✧ This is a terse, energetic, and fun Decapitated album, better than its predecessor “Blood Mantra” but not quite as insta-classic as “Carnival Is Forever.” This also feels like a gateway Decapitated album, in a couple of ways. First, while the songs are replete with stock Decapitatedisms, there’s also plenty of new influences to be found here (Meshuggah and Slipknot chiefly among them). See the rest here
Municipal Waste — Slime And Punishment
✦✦✧✧ No muss, no fuss, just well-executed, energetic crossover thrash. I love that the longest song on here is under 3 minutes long. I love that I’m reminded of S.O.D. and D.R.I. I love that you can hear bass! I just wish that this album offered as much innovation as it did adoration of the old. See the rest here
Powerflo — Powerflo
✦✧✧✧ The album opens up with the lyric, “…This is our time/the dawn of a new era.” But the debut from this “supergroup” (featuring Biohazard’s Billy Graziadei, Cypress Hill’s Sen Dog, Fear Factory’s Christian Olde Wolbers, and Downset’s Roy Lozano) is in no way new. In fact, it’s hard to not be cynical about this effort, which is a shame because there are interesting moments strewn about throughout this otherwise pervasive cacophony. See the rest here
Goatwhore — Vengeful Ascension
✦✦✦✧ Just as nasty as you’d expect from Goatwhore (think somewhere between Belphegor, Entombed, and Morbid Angel)… but damn is this groovy and tasty and interesting. Never have these guys sounded as self-assured and rollicking. The second half of the album is even more special than the first, so stay for the whole thing. See the rest here
Nickelback — Feed the Machine
✦✦✧✧ I was going to say that this isn’t half bad, but that’s the problem: it’s exactly half bad. The riffs are tasty and groovy (if forgettable), and speak to Chad Kroeger’s metal tendencies. But his vocals and lyrics are just so schmaltzy. And then there are the unforgivably saccharin intentional hits; “Song On Fire,” “After The Rain,” and their ilk constitute the kind of music I’d hear while driving quickly through some place I wouldn’t want to linger. See the rest here
Dying Fetus — Wrong One to Fuck With
✦✦✧✧ Blisteringly technical technodeath that verges on the ridiculously inhuman. It’s fun to listen to the band’s perambulations, although I defy anyone (outside the band themselves) to hum a single riff from memory. But good lord, fellas, this is a long and busy album. I appreciate the price-performance of these 54 minutes, but it’s too much! See the rest here
The Monolith Deathcult — Versus
✦✦✦✧ This is a delightfully sillier, deathier combination of Slipknot and Front Line Assembly, with a dash of Amon Amarth’s pomp dialed up to the extreme. While long-time TMD fans won’t be surprised by this, the band are showing sounds of even greater experimentation, largely around motifs you wouldn’t expect from a metal band… but also in the occasional sparseness (a word that I don’t think I’ve ever used in the context of this band before). See the rest here
Suffocation — …Of the Dark Light
✦✦✦✧ Classic technodeath from a veteran group of the form. On this, the band’s eighth album, Suffocation are tighter and more lethal than ever. They waste no time in unleashing the tempest in the front half of the album, and the punishment is meted out liberally. So what if it all just blurs together into a spasmodic assault that you won’t easily remember afterward; it’s still an impressive (and mercifully terse) metal experience. See the rest here
