Skinless — Only the Ruthless Remain
★★☆☆ This is a very serviceable 35 minutes of grindcore. Solid riffs, good darkness. The songs do tend to belabor their respective points, which is a weird thing to say for such a short album. See the rest here
Author Archives: arse
Chelsea Wolfe — Abyss
★★★☆ There are two kinds of music on this album, both seemingly from a sleep-deprived night in a house much too big for comfort. The first type of music is fuzzy and bassy and sumptuous and perfectly disorienting, familiar with but still unlike Godspeed, Sleep, Russian Circles, V.A.S.T., and St.Vincent. That stuff is pure win, and a must-listen. See the rest here
Fear Factory — Genexus
★★☆☆ Seeing as there’s a new Terminator movie in the theaters, it must be time for a new Fear Factory album. So what if there’s not a lot of evolution to the band’s sound; they got that out of the way with “Demanufacture.” And there are a few moments on here that inject new energy into the proceedings. See the rest here
Soulfly — Archangel
★★☆☆ No surprise here: the best parts of this album are the parts that don’t have Max Cavalera’s heavy hand all over them. There are some gusts of freshness in here, but they are quickly smothered by your usual brasilishit. But hey, if that’s your cup of tea, have another swig. See the rest here
Cattle Decapitation — The Anthropocene Extinction
★★★☆ You might as well call this “Monolith Of Inhumanity v2.0″… and I mean that in the best way possible. The band have taken the best parts of that previous album, and expanded on what worked before. This is a cohesive, self-assured blackgrind with plenty of twists and turns, but also tons of technical shredding. See the rest here
Drewsif Stalin’s Musical Endeavors — …Comes To An End
★★☆☆ When this album succeeds, it does so by distancing itself from its obvious bedroom recording djentisms. In this regard, the latter half of the album outdistances the former, which can’t help but feel like a collection of TesseracT B-sides. See the rest here
Tremonti — Cauterize
★★★☆ From an instrumental aspect, this album is metal as fuck. The pacing is excellent, and the extremes are as extreme as I could ever ask of a band with a hard rock pedigree. But vocally, it lies somewhere between King’s X and Saliva, and that’s hard to not hear. Still, this ill-fitting formula works really well when the metal eases up a bit, and the more emotive songs on this album work a kind of retroactive magic on the more jarring fist-to-face tracks. See the rest here
Noisem — Blossoming Decay
★★★☆ This 9-song, 24-minute living homage to classic/ancient grindcore is near perfection. It’s heavy as shit, and mean, and the energy is off the charts. And just when you think you know what playbook the band are using, they add enough flavor from other related genres (noise, doom, punk) to keep it interesting. See the rest here
George Kollias — Invictus
★☆☆☆ This album sounds exactly like what it really is: the side project of a talented metal drummer. It even sounds like a playthrough video, with the drums high in the mix and obviously the focus of the whole affair. And make no mistake: the drums here are top-fucking-notch. Unfortunately, everything else surrounding (or, more accurately, underpinning) the drums is lackluster at best, and unimaginative at worst. See the rest here
August Burns Red — Found In Far Away Places
★★★☆ ABR manage to walk a tightwire act of opening up their sound and adding experimental elements to their sound, while still being recognizably metalcore. At first blush, I can hear borrowings from near (KSE, AILD) and far (The Mars Volta, BTBAM), but even at their riskiest the band never stray too far from The Metal, which is a good thing. See the rest here
