Category: First Listens

First impressions do count. Here are ours.

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The Ocean — Phanerozoic II: Mesozoic | Cenozoic

✦✦✦✧ This is definitely my preferred portion of the now collective 3 hours that make up the Phanerozoic suite. Seemingly more deliberate than Phanerozoic I: Palaezoic, Messrs. Staps et al find novel ways to express their creativity without sacrificing coherence or ferocity. Definitely listen to the whole album, as it looks to map the passage of geologic time, lyrically and musically, over a span of 250 million years… with accompanying genre shifts along the way. 

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Pyrrhon — Abscess Time

✦✦✧✧ Perhaps Pyrrhon’s most accessible album to date… by which I mean that normies will be all “NO FUCKING THANK YOU” after about 10 seconds of this virtuosic cacophony. If you stick with it, however, you’ll find the progressive death metal band’s malevolent logic is a bit closer to the surface than before.

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Enslaved — Utgard

✦✦✦✧ This, finally, is an Enslaved album that I can enjoy without reservation. The pacing is great, bordering on psychic; the blending of styles (black metal, prog, beerhall, Viking, jazz) is tasteful, sensible, and pleasing to the ear. This is a Must Listen for sure, and my favorite Enslaved album ever.

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Good Tiger — Raised In A Doomsday Cult

✦✦✦✧ Perhaps the most inscrutable, internally consistent album I’ve heard since The Mars Volta’s Amputechture. The band’s third album introduces a new element to their sound: throughout, there’s now a new sense of Something Gone Wrong here, which really hones the edge of their music’s inventiveness and unpredictability. Give it an honest chance; this album has surprises up its sleeve.

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Psychonaut — Unfold The God Man

✦✦✦✧ This is a fun old-style prog debut that’s halfway between Mastodon, Tool, and Intronaut… but with more grit than any of those. It is remarkable (in a good way) that an album this full of innovative twists and turns can come across as so unsurprising or natural. Aside from that faint praise, my only gripe is that this album feels overlong by a lot.

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Deftones — Ohms

✦✦✦✧ If you’re a Deftones fan, this album offers tantalizing glimpses of near greatness. It’s the first time in 17 years that the band have worked with the great Terry Date, and their combined production choices yield very listenable, if not always straightforward, sonic decisions. Those choices just contribute to an overall sense of the band now being so post-meta that us listeners are just going to have to play catchup.

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