✦✦✦✧ This album marks a subtle pivot for the band, emerging from CoViD as a djentier yet still proggy version of themselves (less Textures, more TesseracT). The music still tends to groove, it shreds when it needs to, and is remarkably listenable for an album that has three longform pieces (counting the 22-minute four-part title track). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Man, Saxon just don’t give up! Their twenty-fourth studio album is guaranteed to get your fists pumping, my olds. Also, I’m a sucker for historically-themed midtempo metal, and this album that in spades, from the Battle Of Hastings to aliens in Roswell NM). Who needs to stray from the formula when you’ve got The Goods? See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Man, this is the nasty. The production here both elevates and hamstrings the music; I really wish I could understand what the hell they’re even playing, but boy do they seem to be energized about something. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ I refer to you perhaps my most beloved piece of critical writing ever, my previous Panopticon first listen. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is catchy enough for power metal, almost shreddy enough for speed metal, and not nearly interesting enough for progressive. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Unrelenting tech death… you can really feel that Long Island rage! More than ever, this album has something old and something new for you. New vocalist Ricky Myers does a fantastic job filling Frank Mullen’s nasty shoes. There aren’t that many earwormy hooks on this album… but honestly I’m just saying that because I can’t think of anything else to criticize here. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ At last, a pretty solid album from Prong! Tommy Victor is an excellent form as ever. The songs are more reminiscent of Beg To Differ than anything else they’ve put out in the last decade, and that’s for the good. So what if some of the songs sound like Black Label Society, or Biohazard, or Body Count? See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ On this EP, Spiritbox wheel between ridiculously heavy djent and radio-friendly metalcore. The real standout track is “The Void,” in which the band successfully marries aggression and catchiness. Solid and eminently relistenable. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Solid OSDM from the fucking champs. Expect the expected! See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is BAN at their most discordant, most troubling, and ultimately most successful. Sure, their brand of avant-garde music is by now reliably atmospheric, but on this album they seem to really gotten much closer to the crawling chaos than ever before. Catchy, this is not, but I don’t think you want this nightmare fuel rattling in your head any more than the runtime requires. See the rest here
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