Sevendust — Time Travelers & Bonfires
★☆☆☆ This undistorted album of material is pretty. Pretty boring. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
Emmure — Eternal Enemies
★☆☆☆ When the band is firing on all cylinders, they deliver a loud, discordant, and undeniable kick in the teeth. Sadly, the band only seems to fire on all cylinders when vocalist Frankie Palmeri is out of the room. Worse, he keeps showing up, sounding like Fred Durst post-Significant Other, when the fame got to his head, and he was reduced to self-parody. See the rest here
Massacre — Back From Beyond
★☆☆☆ Give the people what they want, that’s what I always say. And that’s exactly what Massacre has done with their latest album. This is Grade A 100% Floridian death metal, straight out of Death’s “Scream Bloody Gore” or Malevolent Creation’s “Stillborn.” And the fact that I namedropped two lesser albums from important bands in the genre is your clue: if you’re going to deliver prototypical fare, at least have the decency to break some new ground. See the rest here
Hark — Crystalline
★★★☆ Norma Jean meets Unsane meets Tool meets Clutch meets The Mars Volta meets Mastodon meets Baroness. And so on, but through it all, this album is heavy and swaggery and compelling. Definitely worth checking out, even if it goes on a bit long. See the rest here
Cripple Bastards — Nero In Metastasi
★★☆☆ This is some choice noise, with hints of Sick Of It All, SOD, and Fantômas. The latter is probably why this album of 2-minute songs still manages to feel a little overlong, however. See the rest here
Shrapnel — The Virus Conspires
★★★☆ This neo-thrash album walks a thin line between sounding pleasantly retro and interestingly modern. Either way, we all win. You’ll be able to make out the band’s DNA easily enough: Exodus, Overkill, Kreator. But Shrapnel (great name, by the way) manage to add something new to the mix. See the rest here
Coffinworm — IV.I.VIII
★★☆☆ Slightly more palatable and melodic black sludge that goes down smooth. And while it does suffer from the monochromaticism typical of the genre, it does also offer interesting sound choices (and is blessedly not overlong). See the rest here
Destrage — Are You Kidding Me? No.
★★★☆ Wow. I’ll tell you that this bizarre album nods to the Dillinger Escape Plan, Mr Bungle, Between The Buried And Me, Skrillex, The Mars Volta, Green Jellö… but even all of that won’t really capture the nature of this hybridized beast. Nor will any of that tell you that, through whatever specific alchemy the band wield, it actually works surprisingly well. See the rest here
Gridlink — Longhena
★★☆☆ Jazzier than your usual grindcore fare, but just as typical in its brevity, this 22-minute EP is a fun enough hit-and-run that you’ll nevertheless have a hard time remembering past the first few tracks. See the rest here
Steel Panther — All You Can Eat
★★★☆ Steel Panther have elevated the act of crass party-time parody into high art. There’s a cognitive dissonance between, for example, between the near-perfect emulation of Journey’s brand of anthemic balladry and the lyrical content of “Bukkake Tears.” And so the whole album goes. The nonsense is right at the surface at all times, but the hair metal the band wields is expert enough to help you forget. See the rest here
