Ufomammut — Fenice
✦✦✦✧ 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
Category: First Listens
Artificial Brain — Artificial Brain
✦✦✧✧ 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
Moon Tooth — Phototroph
✦✦✦✧ 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
Nazareth — Surviving The Law
✦✦✧✧ Shake them buns! See the rest here
Decapitated — Cancer Culture
✦✦✧✧ 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
Cave In — Heavy Pendulum
✦✦✦✧ 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
Monuments — In Stasis
✦✦✧✧ 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
Primus — Conspiranoid
✦✦✦✧ If you’ve never listened to Primus before… why the hell not? Also, don’t start here; you’re not ready.
Okay, now that those newbs are staring at the Frizzle Fry cover with alarm, I can tell y’all that this is the happiest I’ve been listening to Primus in a long time. See the rest here
Caliban — Dystopia
✦✦✧✧ Groovy German metalcore. It’s more effective as a collection of metal tones than as actual songs, but it’s fun enough to listen to while it’s playing. See the rest here
Watain — The Agony And Ecstasy Of Watain
✦✦✦✧ Without a doubt, the most entertaining album that Watain has ever released. The band have found great ways to generate that Norwegian black metal atmosphere, but within that sonic envelope they’ve managed to cram everything from musicianship to groove to hooks to… dare I say subtlety? There are surprises in virtually every minute of the album’s challenging length. See the rest here
