✦✦✦✧ While Narcotic Wasteland established their sound as blistering death metal on their 2014 debut, it’s not until this followup that the band really found their footing and comfort zone. It’s fun, it’s technical, it’s guaranteed mosh fodder, and most of all it’s relentless. Most Improved! And, dare I say it, the third-to-last track “You Will Die Alone” is an instant classic. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Wow. Just when I think I’ve got a handle on what APMD is all about, they go and weave more musicality into their caustic cacophony. The nihilistic anger is constant, but the band have found ways to explore their domain, and the result is more surprising, listenable, compelling, and yes heavy than anything they’ve done before. See the rest here
✧✧✧✧ Who is this even for? See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is not your run-of-the-mill black metal, although it ticks all the important black metal checkboxes. Instead of the humorless pastiche nature of the genre, Der Wag einer Freiheit opt for a more thoughtful, energetic, and thoughtful approach. You can hear it from the refreshingly calm intro, to the songs’ almost progressive composition, to the vigorous drumming (although the whole band is tearing it up throughout, in a way I’d have no reason to expect from other black metal bands). See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Well, at least this one has guitars in it. Otherwise, this is one uninspiring bit of Cascadian black metal. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Not quite as Carcassy as their previous effort, which is a good thing; this is still very much an alternate-universe grindcore album in the best tradition of Exhumed, but now with 25% more originality woven into the mix. In fact, there’s enough originality here that, somewhere around the third half of the album, one tends to forget that this sounded like anything other than a wholly original collection of shreddy tunes. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Brutally heavy, thuggishly singleminded, and punishingly long. This is as much an Expressionist reinterpretation of blackened noise than it is an overt collection of songs, with the tracks vacillating between those two blueprints. As such, it’s extremely effective at setting its atmosphere of dark futility, but this is not the kind of album that imparts a sense of momentum or offers a glimpse of variety. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is the best and most interesting Trivium album since 2011’s “In Waves.” It’s shreddily heavy even when it’s not trying to be (dude, blast beats!), even as the band suppress their muscularity long enough to tick the other checkboxes. As always, Trivium are more transparent than most with their influences and “this-sounds-just-like”s, but the unpredictability of their mood swings helps offset that. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Here is an album that is trying its damnedest to get me to hate it immediately. The amateurish album art, the stubbornly raw production, the tired opening gambit… all of these are sure signs of tiredness, if not vacuity. But push past the first impressions, and you may be surprised by the latest from these Norwegian black metal legends. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Ah, Unsane. God bless ’em. They keep on dishing out the same nasty, corrosive brew; take The Jesus Lizard, replace bourbon with ketamine, and crank the volume. It’s still as compelling and effective as ever. And also as repetitive and self-referential as I remember. But you should listen to it. See the rest here
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