✦✦✧✧ This album has a few standout moments of melodeath excellence, and the musicianship is expectedly topnotch. But there’s a pervasive and formulaic familiarity to a lot (possibly most) of the material here. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Imagine if Cynic had decided, ten years ago, to double down on their tech death leanings. Then imagine if they’d released an EP and gone into hiding for a while, quietly working on their craft in secret, before securing a gross vocalist and dropping a masterpiece on an unsuspecting metal landscape. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ This latest from Ulver wears its improvisational heart on its sleeve, culled as it is from live jams. It’s good background music, very much in the mold of John Carpenter crossed with V.A.S.T. and Sunn O)))… but it doesn’t scratch a particularly metal itch. It’s more like a rainier Godspeed. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Strictly speaking, my first impression here is that this is some gloriously dark scifi/space metal. It’s a curious blend of Gojira, Nothingface, ETID, and Misery Signals. The production, which at first seems perfect, never relents from its excessively compressed assault on the eardrums. DR5 makes sense for the band’s more devastating tracks, but just sounds silly otherwise. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Holy fuck is this heavy. “Paradise Gallows” makes Inter Arma’s previous releases sound like “(Listen To The) Flower People.” But that sledgehammer to your balls is not without finesse; how else could this band pull off 90 minutes without it feeling overly long? The expert pacing makes possible the band’s ability to cover a vast terrain of moods and progressive elements. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ The newest incarnation of Katatonia begs a few comparisons to Opeth (“Damnation,” anyone?). More pointedly, any vestiges of metal on this album are largely relegated to the status of ornamentation in service to a pervasively gothy form of prog. Look: props definitely due for the band burrowing deeper into their softer side. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is perhaps AAL’s best album since their 2009 debut. The band take a more spartan, less-distorted approach to their fourth album, which pays off handsomely. AAL’s brand of metal has always been less about walls of overdriven sound and more about precisely frenetic rhythm, and that’s all the truer here, where clean strings are even more predominant. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Wow. This album defies categorization. You could, with equal precision and certitude, call it black metal, stoner metal, space psychadelia, prog metal, 70s prog rock, world music… I could keep going. It’s surefooted in its dominance, without being ostentatious about it. And it’s full of surprises. A fascinating must-listen, which reminds me of Ihsahn but with more ambition, if you can imagine such a thing. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Super boring extreme/black metal by the numbers, produced as if the only natural way to hear this music is in a dark arena carved out of Satanic stone. Every clichéd trope you can imagine is here, with very little rhyme or reason. This feels like what DETHKLOK seriously think they sound like. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is some highly polished stoner metal, equal parts Kyuss, King’s X, and latter-era AIC. But I mention all of that as a loose interpretation of what the band actually do with this album; the one universal thing you can say about it is that it’s unpredictable. I wouldn’t call it innovation, so much as avid remixing, but I give ’em plenty of props for keeping me guessing, and keeping me entertained throughout. See the rest here
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