★★★☆ This is a stunner, and really hard to do justice with a simple description… but, here goes anyway: imagine if Dillinger, Emperor, Evanescence, Sigur Ros, and Glassjaw were warring nations; this album would be the uneasy peace accord between them. One of the most original albums of 2015, without a doubt. See the rest here
★★★★ This is a challenging album, for both band and audience. This is still very recognizably BTBAM, but the music here also expands on the band’s bailiwick in virtually every direction. Indeed, in addition to sly tips of the hat to the band’s previous best works, there are also noticeable borrowings from many other prog metal standard bearers — Opeth, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, and Leprous leap immediately to mind — as well as a healthy reverence to classic rock, power metal, and musical theater at large. See the rest here
★★★☆ This album is pure meat-and-potatoes HOF. And while at times it can sound more like a collection of the band’s B-sides than music to stand up with the rest of their body of work, it never fails to deliver on the promise of any High On Fire album: snarly sludgey mosh fodder. See the rest here
★★★☆ The good news: this is shoegazey sludgey post-metal at its finest, with nary a misstep. Listenable, evocative, internally consistent… this is a well-crafted album. The not-so-good news: by dint of the genre, there’s not much on here to take away once the music stops (although the second half of the album comes closest to delivering memorable moments). See the rest here
Chris Squire had a bigger impact on my bass playing than anyone else I listened to in my youth. Ged taught me how to step forward and fill up musical space with the instrument, which is a great counterpoint to Mike Rutherford’s subdued, almost Frippian unshowmanship. But Squire was really my Coltrane. See the rest here
I’ve been in mourning all week. It’s still too soon to listen to Fish’s bass playing (although maybe I’ll break my fast by finally listening to “Fish Out Of Water”). See the rest here
★★★☆ On paper, there should be nothing remarkable about this album. It’s extreme noisecore, produced by Kurt Ballou, with no real standout performances throughout. But in a strange way, that chimaeralike quality is the album’s greatest strength; without the distraction of distinctions, the resulting impact is more pure and devastating. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ This pains me. I really wanted — almost needed — to love this album. The failure is not due to admittedly crushingly high expectations, but rather the band’s abandonment of virtually everything that is so adored in their landmark album “The Shape Of Punk To Come.” Most glaringly, the emotional resonance is a.w.o.l.; See the rest here
★★★☆ Waldo is in the finest form of his career, acting as a strong counterpoint to the musical meanderings of the rest of the band behind him. The metal here is solidly lo-fi, but also diverse in its tastes, careening from obvious Pig Destroyer influences to classic thrash to plodding moshfests. See the rest here
The Toast published a whimsical article about the most metal deaths in Tolkien’s universe. One of my favorite quotes is:
Gandalf died after he, “Threw down my enemy… and broke the mountain-side where he smote it in his ruin,” which is the most metal line in the entire trilogy, and possibly all of English literature.
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