The Acacia Strain — Failure Will Follow
✦✦✦✧ This is The Acacia Strain’s Catch Thirty-Three. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
Soen — Memorial
✦✦✦✧ Punchy and radio-friendly prog metal? Yes please! This is Soen sounding more than ever before like Porcupine Tree (or unlike Tool). The previous comparisons to Leprous still hold firm, only this music has more swagger. Interesting and fun! See the rest here
Death Ray Vision — No Mercy From Electric Eyes
✦✦✧✧ This once-metalcore once-supergroup throws just enough metal into their blatantly hard rock formula on this album to make me pay attention here. (Do I detect hints of thrash and death metal?) That said, there’s a notable lack of variation that makes it difficult for me to keep my focus on the music even while it plays. See the rest here
Pupil Slicer — Blossom
✦✦✦✧ As tempting as it is to pigeonhole this album as post-mathcore, there’s clearly more going on here, with the band toying with listenability, hooks, and expectations. Don’t be surprised to hear synthwave cozying up to moments of shred, industrial, or even prog… there ain’t a dull moment on this one, folks, so strap in and enjoy this unique ride. See the rest here
Godflesh — Purge
✦✦✧✧ Keep in mind that when I say the track "LAND LORD" sounds like it was rejected for the Matrix soundtrack, I mean that with corrosive, fistpumping love. The problem with this industrial noisefest is one of consistency; when it works, it’s glorious, but when it misses, it feels like underdeveloped material. See the rest here
Therapy? — Hard Cold Fire
✦✦✧✧ A suitably venomous album from these chronically displeased Northern Irish alt-rock bastards (their 16th). As ever, this sounds like five different bands simultaneously, but a mashup of contemporaries like Killing Joke, XTC, pre-fame Nirvana, and The Jesus Lizard is as compelling as ever. One of their strongest efforts in a decade. See the rest here
Eleine — We Shall Remain
✦✦✧✧ Very well-crafted dark symphonic metal. Some of this feels a bit low-key and by-the-numbers, but the riffs are suitably heavy, and the scope feels nice and epic. Fans of Soilwork or Scar Symmetry should definitely check this out. See the rest here
TesseracT — War Of Being
✦✦✦✧ I haven’t been this justifiably excited about a TesseracT album since Altered State. This is the band at their darkest yet. The two stars here are bassist Amos Williams and vocalist Daniel Tompkins, turning in a career-best performance in a career full of great performances.
Criticisms: the album, and most of the songs, are possibly 10-15% too long. See the rest here
The Zenith Passage — Datalysium
✦✦✦✧ This absolutely shreds, which one would expect, being that this band is, what, 75% The Faceless by now? Tech death bona fides aside, this music finds itself at times in the unfortunate uncanny valley between Unpredictable Metal Mayhem… and Just Goofy. This is territory best ceded permanently to Protest The Hero. See the rest here
Orbit Culture — Descent
✦✧✧✧ Oh sure, this is loud and heavy and whatnot. But this is an album for people who think brickwall compression is still too dynamic, to the point that a lot of the potential shredding here is smeared out into the rest of the postimpressionistic cacophony. This sounds like the worst parts of soundtracks for Christopher Nolan movies… with screaming. See the rest here
