Skindred — You Got This
✦✧✧✧ You could imagine The Black Eyed Peas making a hard rock album, but that’d be an insult to The Black Eyed Peas. This makes me want to listen to Buckcherry. See the rest here
First Listens With One-Star Ratings
Orbit Culture — Descent
✦✧✧✧ Oh sure, this is loud and heavy and whatnot. But this is an album for people who think brickwall compression is still too dynamic, to the point that a lot of the potential shredding here is smeared out into the rest of the postimpressionistic cacophony. This sounds like the worst parts of soundtracks for Christopher Nolan movies… with screaming. See the rest here
DevilDriver — Dealing With Demons II
✦✧✧✧ Pissed-off groove metal that just throws aimless haymakers all day long. There are a lot of ideas on here that could use some more development, but most of it feels underdeveloped and underbaked. Volume 1 is the better half of the pair of albums. See the rest here
Liturgy — 93696
✦✧✧✧ Oh great. More Brooklyn black metal Boris nonsense, only with even less listenability and more of their hellshrieking and unintelligible chaos. Good thing they made it a double album. I warned them last time that they were flirting with a one-star review. And here we are. See the rest here
Full Of Hell/Primitive Man — Suffocating Hallucination
✦✧✧✧ WHAT? HUH? FUCK, THEY’RE JUST SO LOUD! WAZZAT? YEAH, TWO BANDS THAT LOVE NOISE! …WHY? WHO KNOWS! Oh, good. Now they sound a little like The Jesus Lizard. Maybe that’s OH SHIT LOUD AGAIN! See the rest here
Kirk Hammett — Portals
✦✧✧✧ Moody, atmospheric, but ultimately not very compelling instrumental guitar rock. I can’t even make a wah-pedal joke about it until 12 minutes in! Maybe James and Lars let Kirk do this, on the condition that it didn’t challenge Metallihegemony? See the rest here
Tribulation — Where The Gloom Becomes Sound
✦✧✧✧ Dated, trite, and worst of all, just not very interesting. It’s almost like the band identified the most interesting, successful parts of the album’s 2018 predecessor Down Below, and resolved never to do that stuff again. See the rest here
Limp Bizkit — Still Sucks
✦✧✧✧ What we once loved so much about Bizkit, back at the height of their powers, was how deftly they fused metal and rap, with equal deft contributions from all members of the band. This, the Jacksonville quintet’s sixth studio album, is something else: a hip-hop-centric collection of songs from all over the musical map, except there’s virtually no metal here at all. See the rest here
Pallbearer — Forgotten Days
✦✧✧✧ Like a vintage yet less evil Sabbath clone with worse production. See the rest here
U.D.O. — We Are One
✦✧✧✧ This is 74 minutes of power metal bolstered incessantly by a German armed forces orchestra. So of course it’s over the top epic at times, what with the horns and woodwinds and whatnot. But aside from that, the latest from Accept frontman Udo Dirkschneider is surprisingly limp. Also, this album cover looks like it belongs to the Now That’s What I Call Music series. See the rest here
