Coal Chamber — Rivals
★☆☆☆ There’s nothing technically bad about this album, but it feels like a big slab of so-what. None of it is memorable — not the guitars, nor the drums, nor the vocals, nor the songwriting. See the rest here
Category: First Listens
Entrails — Obliteration
★★☆☆ This is like a more punk, more grind version of Entombed. It’s dirty as all get out, and some of the riffs approach neoclassical status. But there’s also a plodding that comes across as tiredness, and it plagues almost every song past the opening track. See the rest here
Faith No More — Sol Invictus
★★★☆ Not a lot of surprises here (but that’s not really what we want from an FNM album); there’s a little more room here for atmosphere and dynamics, but otherwise this feels like a proper spiritual successor to “Album Of The Year.” The songs range from exceptional (“Cone Of Shame”) to regrettable (“Motherfucker”), but on the whole, this is an entertaining album. See the rest here
Veil Of Maya — Matriarch
★★★☆ A meaty, albeit nu-metalish and slickly overproduced, post-djent bouillabaisse (with definite nods to Periphery, Chimp Spanner, et al). But what it lacks in originality per se, this album more than makes up for with a doubled-down commitment to all the tropes that make this microgenre so great: feminine subject matter, pseudorandom switching between clean singing and incoherent screaming, and above all, spasmodic aggression. See the rest here
Mare Infinitum — Alien Monolith God
★☆☆☆ I kinda fell asleep there for a bit. I mean, I get that this is doomy as fuck, but the plodding is just so unwavering that it’s easy to feel your mind wander. See the rest here
Shining — IX: Everyone, Everything, Everywhere, Ends
★★★☆ This is such a compelling tour of audio aggression that at times hard to even call it black metal. The thrashing is crisp, the doom pervasive, and every track is epic in its own way. See the rest here
Sigh — Graveward
☆☆☆☆ This is like King Diamond mixed with the soundtrack for Transformers: The Movie. I mean the 80s one. This is fucking horrible. Sure, there’s blistering leads, but so what. See the rest here
Torche — Restarter
★★☆☆ This is okay. I guess. 60-bpm sludge all the way. Whatever. See the rest here
Psycroptic — Psycroptic
★★★☆ High-octane thrashy technical death from Tasmania that feels really fresh for the most part (although a few songs do feel very familiar indeed). This reminds me of a punkier Sylosis or a sped-up Gojira (and I say that with headbanging respect). See the rest here
Minsk — The Crash And The Draw
★★★☆ A deft, disturbing, and thoroughly captivating 75 minutes of doomy post metal, cut of the same cloth as Indian, Isis, and The Ocean at their most plodding. There’s not a dull moment here, which is saying something; while it’s a long work by any objective measure, it generally doesn’t feel overlong, Still, this is Minsk’s best work so far. See the rest here
