★★★★ A stunning debut for a group of ex-members from The Safety Fire, The Faceless, Architects, and TesseracT. The first surprise is that the resulting sound doesn’t sound like a mishmash of styles culled from those other bands, or really even a mishmash at all. To be fair, you can hear elements of those bands in the music, but you’re more likely to be reminded of Tool, The Mars Volta, and Glassjaw. See the rest here
★★★☆ Not only is the best Periphery release of 2015 (which is saying something, considering this is technically only half of the band, working under a different name), but this is the best djentish instrumental EP since Chimp Spanner’s 2012 release All Roads Lead Here. With some editing and more of a story to tell, this could have been a four-star album. See the rest here
I was listening to the new Haunted Shores EP today, and fact-checking myself on whether it was the side project of two members of Periphery. So I took a side trip to the excellent Encyclopaedia Metallum… and suddenly found myself reading a thread about the age-old question: are they metal? See the rest here
★★☆☆ It’s not horrible, actually. Sounds more like a collection of Tesla or Alice In Chains B-sides. If you can get past the voice in your head asking why this was made in the first place, you might enjoy this platter of hard rock. At least, until the band succumb a bit too much to their cheesy inclinations on latter-half track “My Old Man.” See the rest here
★★☆☆ As technodeath bands go, Rivers Of Nihil definitely have the performance chops on lock. The songwriting however continues to be a tepid soup of riffs and screeches. It’s heavier than their debut album, to be sure, and I like that. I just have a hard time recalling anything I’d just heard, mere moments after hearing it. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ The vast majority of what you’ll hear on this album sounds like Sevendust lost a bet, and made a covers album of the worst nu-metal B-sides they could find. More tragically, if you were to remove all that offal, you’d find a handful of genuinely interesting riffs and metal moments. See the rest here
★★☆☆ While not quite as mechanical sounding as their last album, “Soul Sphere” is still solidly entrenched in the style of djentcore. It sure is loud and shinily produced, but hard to really care one way or another about. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ This album is a who’s who of metal, assembled to apparently churn out a lot of derivative and dated material. To me, this sounds not unlike Spin̈al Tap’s overproduced second album. To be clear, nothing here is overtly terrible in the David Draiman sense, and the musicianship is as good as you’d expect from the pedigree… but there should’ve been a higher bar set on this album than “Sound like another Roadrunner United release.” See the rest here
★★★☆ Sweet, sweet technodeath. Although perhaps death jazz is more like it. This is BTBAM with less carnival, more progginess (if that’s possible), and a distinctly European sensibility. When it works, the music is stunning. That’s certainly not guaranteed on this album, and the band not infrequently careens into self-indulgence… but at least the album’s failures are always fascinating. See the rest here
★★★☆ This is perhaps the heaviest album I’ve heard all year. It’s also bleak, and harrowing, and nihilistically listenable. Here, the band weaves together thin tendrils of thrash and djent into their otherwise devastating slab of doomcore. This album is not the world’s easiest listen, but its power is undeniable. See the rest here
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