✦✧✧✧ 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. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ As much as I love DEP, I can’t help but feel like they took all their learnings from their last album, the most excellent “One Of Us Is The Killer,” and turned their collective backs on that wisdom. “Dissociation” is DEP’s most self-indulgent album in a long time; whether that’s a good thing depends on the listener. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ 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. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ 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. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ 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. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ 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. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ 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. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Barely metal at times, but a very good prog offering nonetheless. It’s a great fusion of 80s and current sounds, at times sounding as much like latter-era Yes or UK as Porcupine Tree or Leprous. It’s an unlikely combination of sources, which I first heard on their previous EP, but this time it totally works without sounding too much like a gimmick. See the rest here
✦✧✧✧ Look, I’m not gonna lie: there are a handful of tasty riffs in here. But there’s just so much hair-oriented swaggering going on, and the rest of the musicianship feels so lazy, that album is generally hard to sit through. Also, there’s gonna be two of these? Ugh. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ While not entirely groundbreaking, this culmination of Cult Of Luna’s post-metal instrumentals and Julie Christmas’ melodic meanderings is undeniably fresh, winsome, and emotive. The music feels like a synthier fusion of Isis and The Ocean, and the vocals are as entrancing as they are dynamic. This one is a must-listen, and a shoe-in for Arsie competition. See the rest here
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