Dead Cross — Dead Cross
✦✦✧✧ I’m sure there are great ways to avoid having Dead Cross sound like “Mike Patton, Dave Lombardo, and two other dudes.” This album, however, is not one of them. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
Paganizer — Land Of Weeping Souls
✦✦✧✧ This is what vintage Swedish Death Metal is all about: rawness and blast beats and “blech”s and nasty tone. This is also something you’ve definitely heard before. See the rest here
River Black — River Black
✦✦✧✧ This mostly-Burnt-By-The-Sun not-a-supergroup (also featuring ex-members of Municipal Waste and Revocation) is some nasty business. It’s first and foremost a tour of various kinds of aggression and swagger (evocative at times of Norma Jean, Entombed, and Sepultura at their punkiest). This, the band’s eponymous debut, is a weighty chunk of red meat without any filler. See the rest here
Byzantine — The Cicada Tree
✦✦✦✧ Groovy, surefooted, at once familiar and alien… this is classic Byzantine, doing what they do best. As has become par for the course with this band, I still don’t know whether to classify them as prog, thrash, hard rock, djent, agitprop… comparisons to Lamb Of God, Porcupine Tree, Alice In Chains, Meshuggah… all of these approximations fit, and yet all miss the mark. See the rest here
Rings Of Saturn — Ultu Ulla
✦✧✧✧ This is little more than an 8-bit chiptune album with breakdowns. See the rest here
Prong — Zero Days
✦✦✧✧ This is a wildly off-balanced album. Track after track, you’re not sure if you’re listening to a Prong deep cut, a latter-era King’s X single, a particularly aggressive Linkin Park track, the title track of the next Tremonti album, etc. But despite the odds, this makes for an oddly compelling listen. See the rest here
Decrepit Birth — Axis Mundi
✦✦✧✧ Neoclassical technodeath with an almost self-conscious fixation on deconstructing the form. This reminds me of Disincarnate’s debut, in the context of the early-to-mid-90s status quo. It is both unfortunate and telling that this Decrepit Birth album reminds me of something from 24 years ago; while there’s definite progress with great listenability on here, I’m left with the feeling that this album belongs to a different decade. See the rest here
Pathology — Pathology
✦✦✧✧ The good: this is good old-fashioned death metal, with tasty riffs that are sure to please and make you sneer and nod your head. The bad: you’ve definitely heard a lot of this before, except for the vocals, which are particularly disposable here, to the point of distraction. Nevertheless, the second half of the album is worth getting to, as its tunes are more memorable, its riffs more lethal. See the rest here
Origin — Unparalleled Universe
✦✦✦✧ Ridiculous technodeath is ridiculous. That’s to be expected from Origin. They may have taken things a bit too far this time around, with their wankery devolving at times into pure implausibility. The drums are particularly unbelievable. However, undergirding the comically precise shredding is a latest catchiness that feels more pronounced since the band’s last album (2014’s “Omnipresent”). See the rest here
Bison — You Are Not The Ocean You Are The Patient
✦✦✦✧ Bison (formerly Bison B.C.) return after five long years with a new label and a “new” take on their energetic stoner metal. The sound is brighter but not necessarily more polished, and their sludge has burrowed down so far as to come out the other side, sounding more like Unsane, Kyuss, or Fu Manchu than Baroness. See the rest here
