★★★☆ The Soilwork-meet-Kings-X-meet-Lamb-Of-God stylings heard on the band’s last eponymous release are all here again. This time around, they’re even more alien, even more polished and convincing, and there’s even a strong aftertaste of Meshuggah on a few tracks. This album’ll get your head nodding for sure! See the rest here
★★★☆ For my money, this is one mean improvement over the last Oceano album. To get there, apparently the band traveled halfway between The Acacia Strain and Vildhjarta… and then tunneled straight down. With the right kind of thinking, you can hear this as an intellectual level-up. With a different kind of thinking, this is a suitable soundtrack for breaking your hand on concrete. See the rest here
★★★☆ Impressive. Most impressive. This album bears more than a passing resemblance to The Faceless, Obscura, and other technodeath groups, which is the good news. The bad news is that, while it’s eminently replayable, it just misses the mark in terms of emotional resonance. Too many notes, perhaps? Still, I put this in my Don’t Miss bucket. See the rest here
★★★☆ Sure, Israel+Dutch extreme metal sounds like a gimmicky proposition on paper. But “Enki” is so self-assured and full-throated that you can’t help but dig it. See the rest here
★★★☆ Trascendent sludge that is utterly engrossing (and… dare I say, listenable?) from start to finish. Sure, the band give up some of their potential ferocity in exchange for cohesion and mood, but it feels like a good trade. This is now my favorite Ufomammut album to date. See the rest here
★★★☆ Easily the best album you’ll hear all year from a band featuring an Amott brother. As such, you’ll definitely hear the Arch Enemy imprint throughout, which is not a bad thing of course. This album may not revolutionize metal, but if you like your melodeath tinged with progressive elements and adorned with virtuosic shredding, this’ll be your jam. See the rest here
★★★☆ This is one of those doom mood-piece albums that need to be consumed all in one go; the brilliance comes out once this big slab of experimental sludge has had enough time to work its evil magic on you. At first blush, you might not see that coming, but push past your initial take and listen to the whole thing. See the rest here
★★★☆ Holy fuck is this heavy and dark and oh god the paaaiiiinnnnnnnn. See the rest here
★★★☆ This album rules! What a bizarre, unique, and hard to dismiss melange of metal… as much Glassjaw, CoC, King’s X, Entombed, and latter-era Pantera as it is a work of metalcore. But I fuckin’ dig it, because it’s got a freshness to the swagger. And most importantly, there’s an astonishing diversity to the tracks even while the band nail down a very specific sound. See the rest here
★★★☆ This was a surprise, considering that almost half of this band is Aaron Turner, the second-hardest working man in metal, and judging from his recent efforts, a confirmed audio sociopath. But rather than an assault of antisocial noise, this is a dirty yet progressive slab of musical rage. It’s somewhere between Isis (natch), Old Man Gloom (natch), and The Jesus Lizard (huh?) See the rest here
This work by Metalligentsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.