★☆☆☆ 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.
I’m heading out of town tonight, on a red eye for a series of meetings this week. This is my first flight out of San Francisco in a few months. Since I was last here, someone got the bright idea of setting up a mini exhibit that speaks to the region’s important cultural art movements. See the rest here
★★★☆ While perhaps not as bold a transition as the ones we heard going into the band’s last two albums, this is nevertheless a fully-realized and utterly different take on prog metal, more “Coal” than “Bilateral” but with hints of both. Einar Solberg’s vocals take on more of a prominent role here, but the rest of the band are also tireless in their performances. See the rest here
★★☆☆ I give this band props for keeping “On Lonely Towers” interesting, in an Opeth-meets-Alestorm kind of rollicking way. But my god, the clean vocals are so jarring and distracting. Unfortunately, they’re the clearest part of the mix. Also, the songs tend to feel overlong and belabored. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ There’s nothing technically bad about this album, but it feels like a big slab of so-what. None of it is memorable — not the guitars, nor the drums, nor the vocals, nor the songwriting. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is like a more punk, more grind version of Entombed. It’s dirty as all get out, and some of the riffs approach neoclassical status. But there’s also a plodding that comes across as tiredness, and it plagues almost every song past the opening track. See the rest here
★★★☆ Not a lot of surprises here (but that’s not really what we want from an FNM album); there’s a little more room here for atmosphere and dynamics, but otherwise this feels like a proper spiritual successor to “Album Of The Year.” The songs range from exceptional (“Cone Of Shame”) to regrettable (“Motherfucker”), but on the whole, this is an entertaining album. See the rest here
I wouldn’t know — I have never sat down and given a serious listen to anything after “Union” (although I’ve certainly tried to!) See the rest here
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