✦✧✧✧ The best thing I can say about this album is that it has as much arpeggiated shredding as anyone could hope to expect from anyone (other than. Other than that, this is progressive power metal by the numbers. Worse, this isn’t even updated for a modern age. Everything from the mix to the songcraft makes this sound like an early Iced Earth album, not a post-Iced Earth album. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This latest from Ulver wears its improvisational heart on its sleeve, culled as it is from live jams. It’s good background music, very much in the mold of John Carpenter crossed with V.A.S.T. and Sunn O)))… but it doesn’t scratch a particularly metal itch. It’s more like a rainier Godspeed. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Super boring extreme/black metal by the numbers, produced as if the only natural way to hear this music is in a dark arena carved out of Satanic stone. Every clichéd trope you can imagine is here, with very little rhyme or reason. This feels like what DETHKLOK seriously think they sound like. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Korn’s interesting rough edges have by now been repeatedly bleached away into anonymized oblivion… except for Jonathan Davis’s trademark vocals of course. (If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear this was a solo album.) Worse, any semblance of real angst has long abandoned the band, only to have been replaced with well-honed but generic volume. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Look, I’m not gonna lie: there are a handful of tasty riffs in here. But there’s just so much hair-oriented swaggering going on, and the rest of the musicianship feels so lazy, that album is generally hard to sit through. Also, there’s gonna be two of these? Ugh. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This is an excellent caricature of Rob Zombie. All the superficial elements are here: big guitar tone, over affected vocals, infantile lyrics, and a fetish for utterly disposable B-movie and porn audio samples. What is regrettably new here is a penchant for out-of-nowhere pauses (including flourishes of acoustic guitar!), which disrupt any hope for decent pacing. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ The album starts with Otep yelling, “I don’t give a fuck!” That makes two of us, throughout this thoroughly derivative Soulfly-meets-Coal-Chamber-meets-Slipknot hour. You’re going to want to hear their cover of Lorde’s “Royals,” but probably not for the reason that the band intended. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ It’s not that the songs on this album are bad per se, but what you’ve got is 48 less-than-inspiring minutes of a hybrid of latter-day Alice In Chains, Godsmack, and Nickelback. Jason Suecof produced this, and you can definitely hear a bit of Trivium’s DNA in this, but the music here flirts with metal without truly committing to it. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ I’m giving this one star because it’s a fascinating car wreck to listen to. Otherwise, I just don’t get this at all. The biggest problem is that this album features a mix that only Brian Slagel in the late 80s could love. Why the fuck is the synth the loudest thing on this album? See the rest here
★☆☆☆ The best thing I can say about this album is that it sounds just like Def Leppard. To be fair, the band do try a few new tricks throughout the album (most notably, more groove), and they’re by and large interesting and laudable. And the band’s performances are all as excellent as you’d expect them to be. See the rest here
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