★★★☆ This album is pure meat-and-potatoes HOF. And while at times it can sound more like a collection of the band’s B-sides than music to stand up with the rest of their body of work, it never fails to deliver on the promise of any High On Fire album: snarly sludgey mosh fodder. See the rest here
★★★☆ The good news: this is shoegazey sludgey post-metal at its finest, with nary a misstep. Listenable, evocative, internally consistent… this is a well-crafted album. The not-so-good news: by dint of the genre, there’s not much on here to take away once the music stops (although the second half of the album comes closest to delivering memorable moments). See the rest here
★★★☆ On paper, there should be nothing remarkable about this album. It’s extreme noisecore, produced by Kurt Ballou, with no real standout performances throughout. But in a strange way, that chimaeralike quality is the album’s greatest strength; without the distraction of distinctions, the resulting impact is more pure and devastating. See the rest here
★★★☆ Waldo is in the finest form of his career, acting as a strong counterpoint to the musical meanderings of the rest of the band behind him. The metal here is solidly lo-fi, but also diverse in its tastes, careening from obvious Pig Destroyer influences to classic thrash to plodding moshfests. See the rest here
★★★☆ While perhaps not as bold a transition as the ones we heard going into the band’s last two albums, this is nevertheless a fully-realized and utterly different take on prog metal, more “Coal” than “Bilateral” but with hints of both. Einar Solberg’s vocals take on more of a prominent role here, but the rest of the band are also tireless in their performances. See the rest here
★★★☆ 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
★★★☆ 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
★★★☆ 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
★★★☆ 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
★★★☆ 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
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