★★★☆ This album is rooted in atmospheric black metal, but also evokes The Ocean, Opeth, even some 80s goth. The doom+bluegrass+folk+goth fusion here is seamless, and in a surprise twist the resultant sound comes across as more heartfelt and upbeat than one would expect. More importantly, this album is eminently listenable. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is another brickwalled slab of noise, short-ish and intense as you’d expect from Enabler. You’ve got a handful of standout tracks that feel like fresh territory, and you’ve got a number of tracks here that feel painfully and regrettably rote by now.
All of that said, I actually listened to this album twice. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ The best thing I can say about this album is that it sounds just like Def Leppard. To be fair, the band do try a few new tricks throughout the album (most notably, more groove), and they’re by and large interesting and laudable. And the band’s performances are all as excellent as you’d expect them to be. See the rest here
★★☆☆ DYK take a definitive step closer to djenty metalcore. The brutals are even more brutal than last time, and that’s the good news. The bad news (and this is indeed news to me) is that apparently you can’t really pull off the clean singing metalcore thing with a detuned 8-string sound, at all. See the rest here
★★★★ A stunning debut for a group of ex-members from The Safety Fire, The Faceless, Architects, and TesseracT. The first surprise is that the resulting sound doesn’t sound like a mishmash of styles culled from those other bands, or really even a mishmash at all. To be fair, you can hear elements of those bands in the music, but you’re more likely to be reminded of Tool, The Mars Volta, and Glassjaw. See the rest here
★★★☆ Not only is the best Periphery release of 2015 (which is saying something, considering this is technically only half of the band, working under a different name), but this is the best djentish instrumental EP since Chimp Spanner’s 2012 release All Roads Lead Here. With some editing and more of a story to tell, this could have been a four-star album. See the rest here
★★☆☆ It’s not horrible, actually. Sounds more like a collection of Tesla or Alice In Chains B-sides. If you can get past the voice in your head asking why this was made in the first place, you might enjoy this platter of hard rock. At least, until the band succumb a bit too much to their cheesy inclinations on latter-half track “My Old Man.” See the rest here
★★☆☆ As technodeath bands go, Rivers Of Nihil definitely have the performance chops on lock. The songwriting however continues to be a tepid soup of riffs and screeches. It’s heavier than their debut album, to be sure, and I like that. I just have a hard time recalling anything I’d just heard, mere moments after hearing it. See the rest here
★☆☆☆ The vast majority of what you’ll hear on this album sounds like Sevendust lost a bet, and made a covers album of the worst nu-metal B-sides they could find. More tragically, if you were to remove all that offal, you’d find a handful of genuinely interesting riffs and metal moments. See the rest here
★★☆☆ While not quite as mechanical sounding as their last album, “Soul Sphere” is still solidly entrenched in the style of djentcore. It sure is loud and shinily produced, but hard to really care one way or another about. See the rest here
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