White Widows Pact — True Will
★★★☆ This is music designed to be heard at painful volume in a smoky beer-stained bar, a winning blend of grindcore and sludge. It sounds like Carcass and Entombed had a nasty baby. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
Intronaut — The Direction Of Last Things
★★★★ This is the prog metal masterpiece that I always knew Intronaut had in them. On this album, the band have managed to showcase all of their strengths: tight performances, complicated rhythms, dynamic moods, and tips of the hat to worthy progenitors like King Crimson and Tool. There’s not a lot on here that will come across as unfamiliar to Intronaut fans, and that’s great news. See the rest here
Panopticon — Autumn Eternal
★★★☆ 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
Enabler — Fail To Feel Safe
★★☆☆ 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
Def Leppard — Def Leppard
★☆☆☆ 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
Devil You Know — They Bleed Red
★★☆☆ 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
Good Tiger — A Head Full Of Moonlight
★★★★ 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
Haunted Shores — Viscera
★★★☆ 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
Ugly Kid Joe — Uglier Than They Used Ta Be
★★☆☆ 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
Rivers Of Nihil — Monarchy
★★☆☆ 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
