avatar

NileWhat Should Not Be Unearthed

★★☆☆ Yep, this is a Nile album alright: disgusting, blisteringly fast, sloppily technical, and drummer George Kollias’s legs must be on crack. It’s also highly disjointed, even for Nile, and feels like a haphazard collection of miscellaneous riffs and moments. Sometimes, you luck out and get a harrowing moment of the abyss looking into you.

avatar

TesseracTPolaris

★★★☆ The band return to purvey their peculiar high-gloss brand of atmospheric djent, and once again I liken the sensation to being crushed by ten tons of craft paper: heavy as fuck, but somehow hollow. My biggest worry going into this listening experience was that, in losing vocalist Ashe O’Hara (replaced in vintage djent-musical-chairs fashion by former TesseracT and Skyharbor vocalist Daniel Tompkins), the band would take a step backward.

avatar

Scale The SummitV

★★★☆ This album chronicles the band taking a couple of half steps in jazzier, erratic directions. In other words, it’s slightly more BTBAM than their previous album. But it’s still guitarwankery at its finest, and I’m stoked that the band are venturing out into new territories while still repeatedly coming back to Shredsville.

avatar

BattlesLa Di Da Di

★★★☆ This is one fun and energetic album to listen to (although the metal in the music’s DNA is by now very hard to grok anymore). This feels very much like a sequel to the band’s previous album “Gloss Drop”, with more emphasis on Ableton-style electronics than ever before. As always, John Stanier’s drums nail down a fierce and infectious rhythm throughout, but Ian Williams and Dave Konopka alternate fluidly between atmospherics and grooves.

avatar

KralliceYgg Huur

★★☆☆ These guys make Gorguts sound formulaic by comparison. The opening track’s sludgy twelve-tone serialism establishes an atmosphere of unpredictable chaos that carries through the rest of the album, but aside from that, there’s not much cohesion to it. The band’s performances are admirable to say the very least, and they’re very good at whatever the hell it is they’re doing on here.

avatar

Iron MaidenThe Book Of Souls

★★☆☆ So much material, so much to critique. First: every once in a while, a talented band of ambitious musicians put out an album that captures the essence of a live performance, instead of a carefully manicured studio artifact. Unfortunately, this is a miscalculation for Maiden, especially since they seem to be going dogmatically for a mid-80s live aesthetic.

avatar

SlayerRepentless

★★☆☆ There’s nothing overtly wrong with this album that I can put my finger on… but this entire collection of songs nevertheless sounds ambivalent, pro forma, tired. There’s plenty of moments of utter heaviness throughout the album, but there’s also more than one buildup or breakdown that fails to pay off.

avatar

SoilworkThe Ride Majestic

★★★☆ A darker, and yet more expansive turn from the usually uber-predictable kings of melodeath. Everyone in the band is in top form, of course, with special props to Dick Verbeuren and Sylvain Coudret on drums and rhythm guitars, respectively. As for the songsmithing, the departures from their norm are generally very welcome, and at times remind me of Dream Theater, Gojira, and other proggy bands (each at their own darkest).

avatar

GhostMeliora

★★★☆ The first track is arguably the weakest song on this album. It’s a warmup, a tone setter. It’s also a good gatekeeper to the rest of the album: if you can’t stomach the first five minutes, you might miss all the really good parts of this deceptive shower. This is Ghost, returning to the form of their debut album: unabashedly fanboyish of the best parts of the 70s, joyously rockin’, and genuinely epic.