★★★☆ The debut album from this two-piece band from Phoenix is a surprisingly inspiring exploration of doomy wanderings. It’s interesting, listenable, and provocative… three words that don’t typically come to mind when listening to something so inherently sludgy. I am impressed! And I’m going to listen again right now. See the rest here
★★★☆ Too short for serious consideration, but what little is here is fantastic. This is The Haunted at their most metallic, a sound we haven’t heard from them in years. Very thrashy, and the last track sounds like something you might find on Slayer’s “Undisputed Attitude.” See the rest here
★★★☆ This little album rocks. While you can still here the sampler quality of this quiltwork EP in places, it’s still generally successful as a document of the band’s ambitions and directions, and manages to be cohesive enough to not be a total dysfunctional mess. It’s also both poppier and more metal at times that Periphery II (with standout tracks “directed” by the band’s rhythm section). See the rest here
★★★☆ A subtle, yet inexorable, exploration of sludge collages that are reminiscent of everything from Isis to The Ocean to Pixies to Dies Irae to Bill Laswell. The noise is literally another member of the band on this album. Honestly, I can’t really tell you exactly why it grabbed me from the first listen, but it definitely did. See the rest here
★★★☆ I think I love this. At first, I was ready to dismiss it as just another noisefest… but there’s a lot of depth to the album. Elements of all my favorite sounds: old Genesis, Isis, Don Caballero, even Fredrik Thordendal’s solo work. (And you can’t go wrong with the excellent cover of Larks’ Tongues In Aspic Part II.) See the rest here
★★★☆ This unholy mix of Mastodon, Opeth, and Baroness manages to surpass recent offerings from each of those seminal bands by not being as proggy or technical as any of them. Instead, we’re treated to a massive hofbrau slab of all of the above. Their swagger and unapologetic heft (not a single tune under 7 minutes, yo) yield a truly surprising and refreshing (if not wholly original) debut album from these mad Canadians. See the rest here
★★★☆ It’s easy and tempting to dismiss this album as nothing more than the lowest, sludgiest layer of The Ocean’s Pelagial… but Sky Burial repays the patient listener with a deft and nuanced exploration of heaviness. While it’s easy to tune out at times, the second half of the album has a few tasty surprises. See the rest here
★★★☆ “Murderlust” is an earnest and driving piece of modern thrash, which manages to innovate even as it holds fast to well-worn metal traditions. This album totally reminds me of The Haunted’s “The Dead Eye” with a dash of Entombed’s “Wolverine Blues.” (Admittedly, there are fans of either band who look down their noses at those two particular albums, but not this guy.) See the rest here
★★★☆ Don’t let the sophomoric title or cover art fool you. Instead of a bad COC knockoff, this is basically a Massachusetts metalcore supergroup (with ex-members of Shadows Fall and KSE), giving themselves free license to use metalcore as a base camp for all their frenetic, frantic excursions into many other metal genres. See the rest here
★★★☆ Definitely taking more than one page from the Black Dahlia Murder playbook, this melodic death metal manages to sound just different enough from the rest of the pack to feel interesting. This is a grower (and not an easy one at that), and not entirely as original as BDM. But IKE does have something going for it that BDM does not: easy accessibility to their latest fucking album online, that’s what. See the rest here
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