Category: First Listens

First impressions do count. Here are ours.

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Norma Jean — Polar Similar

✦✦✦✧ The first half of this album starts out sounding like Norma Jean doing a decent impersonation of Tool. Not that that’s a bad thing (especially when we’re untold years away from another album from Maynard & Co.); it’s just weird for the usually unbridled metalcore impresarios. But keep listening. The Toolisms fade quickly, the metalcore is still here throughout, and there is a pervasively broodingly quality to the music that builds to a satisfyingly lachrymose conclusion.

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Every Time I Die — Low Teens

✦✦✦✧ Here’s a grungier, even nastier (if you can believe it) ETID album. Less overly metal, but just as twisted and angry. There are palpable traces of QOTSA and Clutch all over the Converge-ish core of the band’s music. There’s also an almost Beatles-esque listenability in the melodies that surprised me… and ETID surprising me just shows that they’ve still got it.

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Anciients — Voice Of The Void

✦✦✦✧ This sophomore effort from Anciients feels like a strong document of a band in transition. This album is more of a grower than their debut “Heart Of Oak,” but it’s got all the same meat on the bone as its predecessor. But their homages to Mastodon and Baroness are more subtle this time around, as the band’s witches’ brew has taken on new flavors; some are additional nods to bands like Tool and Kylesa, and some are clear signs of the band zeroing in on their own voice.

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Korn — The Serenity Of Suffering

✦✧✧✧ Korn’s interesting rough edges have by now been repeatedly bleached away into anonymized oblivion… except for Jonathan Davis’s trademark vocals of course. (If I didn’t know any better, I’d swear this was a solo album.) Worse, any semblance of real angst has long abandoned the band, only to have been replaced with well-honed but generic volume.

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Wo Fat — Midnight Cometh

✦✦✧✧ The gravitational pull of Wo Fat’s sludge on this album is apparently so immense that apparently the band stoned themselves into self-inflicted dispassion. It gets the job done, but there’s an uncharacteristic so-what familiarity that’s hard to shake. I can definitely imagining hearing this on the P.A. in between sets at a concert; if that’s the aim of the band, they knocked it out of the park.

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Periphery — Periphery III: Select Difficulty

✦✦✦✧ The first two tracks? Super strong shred. Exactly what I want from Periphery. And then the band revert to their personal blend of emo cleans and GIT-type noodling. The emo stuff sounds pretty, but lacks the emotional resonance of a similar move from TesseracT. The ship gets righted in the back half of the album, though; there’s more heaviness, and the band’s melodic side comes back in a more tempered form.

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Giraffe Tongue Orchestra — Broken Lines

✦✦✦✧ This is one of those cases wherein the supergroup is very recognizably a sum of its constituents (you can very clearly strong echoes  of DEP, Alice In Chains, The Mars Volta, and Mastodon on the track “No-One Is Innocent” in particular). But there’s novelty here too, a perverse cohesion that melds into something unlike anything presaged by the bandmember’s other bands.

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Meshuggah — The Violent Sleep Of Reason

✦✦✦✦ This is the culmination and perfection of Meshuggah’s explorations from their previous albums “Koloss,” “Obzen,” and “Catch Thirty-Three.” But more than ever in the band’s career, this material feels designed from the ground up to live for performance in front of a crowd, not Meshuggah’s prior standard of careful curation in the confines of a studio.

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Sumac — What One Becomes

✦✦✦✧ On their sophomore effort, Sumac retreads their ponderous tonal territory, but one-up themselves by allowing more room for exploration, if you can believe it. There’s just a hint of thoughtfulness here, which serves to rein in Aaron Turner’s self-indulgent tendencies only slightly but to great effect. Whereas the songs on their debut “The Deal” sprinkled heavy passages across a bleak but sometimes forgettable landscape, “What One Becomes” puts more stock in the in-betweens.

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