✦✦✦✧ Groovy, surly, and above all tight as a drum. This band have improved their parlor trick of making catchy, accessible, technical death metal with feel. The title track alone is worth the price of admission, but the whole album is a Must Listen. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This album feels like an unholy blend of every major nu-metal band’s example of their One Album After Their Last Good One. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is not exactly what I came to expect from Pig Destroyer. It’s oddly accessible… for a grindcore boot to the teeth. It’s also full of hints at a (dare I say) progressive streak running under the surface, if not quite erupting right on the skin. More than anything, this makes me excited for the next thing PD put out. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is Tristan Shone at the top of his game. Nasty, brutal, uncompromising industrial. This is also pretty much not metal. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Once again, Unearth bust out of their metalcore pigeonhole and bring us an expansive, reimagining of the genre. Do I detect hints of Acacia Strain, Meshuggah, and Machine Head between the breakdowns? Headnoddin’ good times, brah! See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ While I applaud Robin Staps and his voracious creativity, this time around the result feels less focused and enthralling. The music starts out in solidly familiar territory, but then veers into post-metal, sounding at times like Deftones and A Perfect Circle. You would think this would be a good thing; I’m just not sure it is. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ More or less, this is an embodiment of everything that djent is trying to get away from. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ On one level, this is every bit what you’d expect from a Revocation album: unabashed virtuosity in the most fun metal ways imaginable. On another level, the album laudably goes for a wide assortment of musical genres (rethrash, death metal, grind), but does not particularly stick this landings very well. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Somehow, Behemoth keep getting better even after all this time. Their latest is every bit as moody and emotive as anything they’ve done before, and epic as always. Also, I’m beginning to think that Nergal has something against religion. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ It’s an odd thing to hear a band try to be simultaneously accessible and fucking weird. In Haken’s hands, it comes across like an awkward fusion of Leprous and Muse. By now, the band have made the logical evolution from 80s-inspired prog metal to a metal-and-synthwave melange of influences. Just about the solitary cohesive element here is almost pathological usage of odd time signatures, which sometimes work out just fine, but often wind up euthanizing the material’s sense of flow or momentum. See the rest here
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