Exmortus — Ride Forth
✦✦✦✧ This is glorious neoclassical speed metal, and a paean to cokehead Vikings everywhere. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
Drowning Pool — Hellelujah
✦✧✧✧ It’s not that the songs on this album are bad per se, but what you’ve got is 48 less-than-inspiring minutes of a hybrid of latter-day Alice In Chains, Godsmack, and Nickelback. Jason Suecof produced this, and you can definitely hear a bit of Trivium’s DNA in this, but the music here flirts with metal without truly committing to it. See the rest here
UXO — UXO
✦✦✧✧ A lo-fi adventure in screechy hostility with a marred execution. You can definitely hear the Unsane pedigree in this supergroup, but in a decidedly retro way. See the rest here
Toothgrinder — Noctural Masquerade
✦✦✦✧ This is a pleasantly unusual and self-assured album that claims metalcore roots, but this music is as likely to remind you of Periphery or Symphony X or American Head Charge as it will of Killswitch Engage. In particular, the band do a masterful job of melding melodic sensibilities with wall-of-noise mayhem. See the rest here
Dream Theater — The Astonishing
✦✦✧✧ This feels like DT’s take on Pink Floyd – The Wall… but doesn’t work nearly as well. The band repeatedly make bad trades by subduing their collective virtuosity in exchange for limp and forgettable songwriting. Also, these songs have a bad habit of going from Shred to Meh’d and back again, undercutting any hope of momentum. See the rest here
Megadeth — Dystopia
✦✦✧✧ This isn’t the worst thing that Megadeth have done (that honor still stays with Super Collider). Also, the shredding here is satisfyingly sharp, and the production is crisp and heavy. I’ll remind you here that Chris Adler is playing drums on this, because otherwise you’d never know it from listening to the album. See the rest here
Agoraphobic Nosebleed — Arc
✦✦✦✧ This is as tasty and heavy a slab of noise as you’d expect from the grindcore supergroup helmed by Scott Hull. It’s also a bit of a curveball, if you’re expecting just another helping of Pig Destroyer, as this is decidedly more sludgey than that. But it’s just as earnest and convincing in this form, due in no small part to Katherine Katz’s gutwrenching vocals. See the rest here
Kamelot — Haven
★★★☆ Sure, power metal may not be the most admired genre in the business, but given that… this album is pretty much flawless. It feels like a more energetic Soilwork, cross-bred with some Symphony X for good measure. Everything you’d look for is here in spades: tasty guitar work, pounding drums, a healthy bottom line, lush keys and strings, and very strong vocals (which is surprisingly rare in this field). See the rest here
Turnstile — Nonstop Feeling
★★★☆ Prong meets Sick Of It All meets Slayer meets 311 meets Helmet. And yet it works! The album’s twelve tracks (27 minutes total!) each hold surprises for the listener, and every twist and turn feels surprising and fresh and youthful and fun. You do get the sense that this is an early record, to be supplanted in the near future with bigger and better; likely, the band’s embrace of nostalgic production values contributes in no small part to this feeling. See the rest here
Intervals — The Shape Of Colour
This is great for what it is. What it is not is metal. There’s maybe 30 seconds of metallish stuff on this EP, and the rest is instrumental jazz with a drummer who’s got double kick drums, more Satrianiesque than ever. See the rest here
