✦✦✦✧ I’m going to slightly buck the inevitable deluge of fawning press on this album: it’s great by modern metal standards, but solidly in the middle third of Revocation’s own catalog, at best. That is to say, you’re going to want to listen to this at least once, even if it’s not an instant classic. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ You need to get past the breakers on this album, which seems to almost defy an openminded listen. If you can get past the kneejerk dismissal that a lot of American black metal inspires (not unfairly), you’ll find a surprising and compelling new voice of progressive metal, with tasteful smatterings of other styles and subgenres. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ No more than ever, Halestorm is Lzzy Hale is Halestorm. Her vocals are front and center in the mix, and the lyrical content is transparently autobiographical. There’s a good mix of emotionality to the songs as well. So what if it’s more hard rock than metal? See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ The band’s latest album leverages many of the successes of their previous experiments, expertly melded together into an intoxicating witches’ brew of progressively sludgey heaviness. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album is perhaps the band’s catchiest. Relatively speaking. It’s still a feral dog of a sound, with production values that border on antisocial. But there’s an undercurrent of melody and progression that feels new. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ The Long Island quartet’s third album is definitely the band’s best work yet: it’s much like its predecessor Crux, but tweaked and improved in almost every important way. The band’s trademark blend of bluesy hard rock and extreme metal sensibilities is very much intact here, but with more conventional and energizing choices in songwriting. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Shake them buns! See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Pretty damned good tech death by Decapitated, which shouldn’t be a huge surprise to anyone who knows the band. I applaud their maturation and experimental bent, even if it doesn’t always work. Okay, it rarely works… but I still want to give them props for trying. (That track featuring Tatiana Shmailyuk from Jinjer is straight fire, tho… truly don’t-miss material.) See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is the best that Cave In’s ever sounded. The band also feel as energetic and restless as ever. A runtime of 71 minutes is a lot to swallow, but it gives the band enough room to stretch out and entertain their various shadow selves. Listen for hints of Clutch, Soundgarden, Alice In Chains, plus (and knowing the Katamari-like propensity of various Converge members to keep cross-pollinating and uplifting each other’s and other bands’ sounds) Mutoid Man, Old Man Gloom, and Quicksand. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is obviously a djentcore album, with equal parts SikTh and After The Burial. Beyond that, though, the band are not trying to escape or even redefine who they are. Rather, there’s more of a focus here on quality over quantity, and the relative restraint lends an air of self-assurance, such a rare find in a genre plagued by overcompensation. See the rest here
This work by Metalligentsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.