★☆☆☆ The vast majority of what you’ll hear on this album sounds like Sevendust lost a bet, and made a covers album of the worst nu-metal B-sides they could find. More tragically, if you were to remove all that offal, you’d find a handful of genuinely interesting riffs and metal moments. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ This album is a who’s who of metal, assembled to apparently churn out a lot of derivative and dated material. To me, this sounds not unlike Spin̈al Tap’s overproduced second album. To be clear, nothing here is overtly terrible in the David Draiman sense, and the musicianship is as good as you’d expect from the pedigree… but there should’ve been a higher bar set on this album than “Sound like another Roadrunner United release.” See the rest here
★☆☆☆ This album has a tendency to sound like a hybrid between Static X, Hatebreed, BABYMETAL, Arch Enemy, and Oingo Boingo. At least it’s an interesting carwreck. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ This death metal album makes the tactical mistake of starting with a slow dirge. Not an instrumental intro, but a full five-minute mood piece. Unfortunately, that is one boring mood, and no amount of energy that the following tracks spews can completely shake free of it. There are still glimmers of the once-mighty Malev magic here and there, but those are tempered by unsuccessful attempts to sound like Slayer or Cannibal Corpse. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ There is a surprising and unwelcome degree of guitar wanking on this album. In similar but worse news, Dave Draiman is still singing into a microphone. Everything else on this album — the riffs, the musicianship, the songwriting, the overproduction — exists merely as a backdrop to these two guiding lights. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ 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
★☆☆☆ My opinion here bears some explaining. This supergroup and album are quite intentionally a tribute to the first three Death albums (ie: the really lo-fi pre-Cynic ones). As such, they succeed brilliantly: listening to “Savage Land” is like listening to a remastered version of “Scream Bloody Gore,” assuming you’ve never heard a moment of that album before. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ I’m giving this a star for good production. That said, this is one well-polished but tedious album. Once you get past the very slow beginning, and the alleged single “Failure,” the album opens up and reveals a few genuinely fun moments in its second half. But you know you’re in trouble when all you can aspire to is being Sevendust-Lite (especially if you miss the mark more often than you hit it). 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
★☆☆☆ 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
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