Power Trip — Nightmare Logic
✦✦✧✧ This album is a faithful paean to mid-80s Metal Blade thrash. ‘Nuff said. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
John 5 And The Creatures — Season Of The Witch
✦✦✧✧ This is one goofy but well-intentioned shredfest that harkens back to the simpler times of Shrapnel Records and endless solos. The album is as much bluegrass as it is rock or metal, and definitely more Satriani or Stu Hamm than Marilyn Manson or Rob Zombie. On the whole, this is music designed to be heard and wowed over, if not actually listened to for any reason not related to guitarwankery. See the rest here
Six Feet Under — Torment
✦✧✧✧ Everything on this album clashes. The guitar riffs are the only familiarly competent element on the album, and even then they’re hamstrung a bit by the Psalm-69-style mix. The drums and bass are unconvincing. But above all, the vocals are garbage: muddy, uninspired, and distracting. They don’t work when the band are going full-throttle… but then you’ve got stripped down tracks like “The Separation Of Flesh And Bone,” wherein Chris Barnes’ vocals have more room to stink up the place. See the rest here
Immolation — Atonement
✦✦✦✧ There is something both unabashedly old fashioned and cleverly fresh about this latest slab of death metal from Immolation. The sound here is nasty in that early-90s Deicide way, but also atmospheric in a way that leans almost progressive. See the rest here
Suicide Silence — Suicide Silence
✦✦✧✧ This album, from a dyed-in-the-wool metalcore, is surprisingly nü-metallic. Eddie Hermida and the band sound like Jonathan Davis & Co. half the time. (The other times, they sound more like Slipknot.) But the riffs and rhythms are sufficiently blow-out-your-speakers mean to not dismiss the album outright. Mostly, this feels like a band having a hard time moving in a unified direction. See the rest here
Emmure — Look At Yourself
✦✦✧✧ Apparently, new blood (in the form of former members of TDTE and Glass Cloud) can improve things for Emmure. And yet, the fundamental problem exists: the band’s raison d’etre seems to be a misread of djent as merely an invitation for nu-metal to tune down lower. So, if your idea of a good time is a detuned Limp Bizkit, have I got an album for you. See the rest here
Hark — Machinations
✦✦✦✧ The band continue their hofbrau’s-kitchen-sink pillaging of all other things sludgey and jangly, to great effect. What I said for their last album still holds: “Norma Jean meets Unsane meets Tool meets Clutch meets The Mars Volta meets Mastodon meets Baroness…” There’s a slightly more witchy influence here, which I’m diggin’. See the rest here
Witherfall — Nocturnes & Requiems
✦✧✧✧ The best thing I can say about this album is that it has as much arpeggiated shredding as anyone could hope to expect from anyone (other than. Other than that, this is progressive power metal by the numbers. Worse, this isn’t even updated for a modern age. Everything from the mix to the songcraft makes this sound like an early Iced Earth album, not a post-Iced Earth album. See the rest here
The Drip — The Haunting Fear Of Inevitability
✦✦✧✧ Grindcore leavened with equal parts Converge and Brujeria. The energy’s there, and it’s dark enough, but there’s something weirdly anonymized about the whole thing. Also, the drum triggers are so high in the mix as to be distracting, especially with Shane Brown’s penchant for fast syncopation. See the rest here
Soen — Lykaia
✦✦✦✧ You’ll find haunting hybridizations here of Tool, Opeth, Porcupine Tree, Karnivool, and Leprous… with plenty of hints of folk, indie, and ambient rock thrown in for good measure. The band is doubling down on emotionality here, focusing on sublimely excellent songcraft, but at the expense of any overt signs of self-indulgence. See the rest here
