✦✦✧✧ Blisteringly technical technodeath that verges on the ridiculously inhuman. It’s fun to listen to the band’s perambulations, although I defy anyone (outside the band themselves) to hum a single riff from memory. But good lord, fellas, this is a long and busy album. I appreciate the price-performance of these 54 minutes, but it’s too much! See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is a delightfully sillier, deathier combination of Slipknot and Front Line Assembly, with a dash of Amon Amarth’s pomp dialed up to the extreme. While long-time TMD fans won’t be surprised by this, the band are showing sounds of even greater experimentation, largely around motifs you wouldn’t expect from a metal band… but also in the occasional sparseness (a word that I don’t think I’ve ever used in the context of this band before). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Classic technodeath from a veteran group of the form. On this, the band’s eighth album, Suffocation are tighter and more lethal than ever. They waste no time in unleashing the tempest in the front half of the album, and the punishment is meted out liberally. So what if it all just blurs together into a spasmodic assault that you won’t easily remember afterward; it’s still an impressive (and mercifully terse) metal experience. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is a welcome step-up from IE’s previous album “Plagues Of Babylon.” No huge surprises here, although it is nice to see the band eschewing their concept-album fetish, opting instead of a traditional collection of thematically disparate tunes. By and large, what you’ve got here is smooth sailing aboard the S.S. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ The latest from Gregor Mackintosh’s grindy sludgey deathrock side project is a fun, energetic, slab of evil: nasty, unvarnished, ponderous, and gloriously dark. The album goes from rockin’ to dirgelike and back again with entertaining aplomb. Also, it does not at all sound like it’s only 38 minutes. If you can say that, and not be bored, you must be listening to something good. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ If you like your metalcore free of nuance or surprise, have I got an album for you! The best things I can say about this straight-down-the-middle pitch are that it’s internally consistent, and mercifully terse. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This metal supergroup launched a few years back, but forgot to bring much “super” with them. And while I may have been presumptuous to expect more from Mike Portnoy and Russell Allen than what sounds like a better performed version of Disturbed, I did at least give them the benefit of the doubt, and hoped that they’d eventually find firmer footing. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ While the music is most closely aligned with stoner metal, Elder are so dynamic and driven here that the usual narcolepsy associated with the genre is replaced with a tireless roving spirit. You can definitely hear it most compellingly on “Sonntag,” the stoniest of all stoner prog songs of 2017. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album feels about a decade too late. It gets decently heavy in places, but for the most part you’re dealing with metalcore that alternates between calling back to AIC and Entombed, and visiting the same territory that’s been well traveled by Norma Jean, ETID, and a slew of others. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ SikTh manage to thread a very fine needle here, harnessing their djenty brand of prog (or proggier brand of djent) in service of a catchy accessibility that generally eludes the genre. Along the way, these veterans don’t return to form, so much as they call on old debts, incorporating elements from descendants such as Periphery, Protest The Hero, TesseracT, and many others. See the rest here
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