✦✦✧✧ Far be it for me to accuse DevilDriver of being experimental, but this album (or rather, this first half of a double album) takes a lot of chances with the band’s formula. By and large, those gambles pay off handsomely, leading to the most brutal yet interesting album they’ve put out in a decade. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ I don’t remember Paradise Lost sounding quite so much like Type O Negative spent a holiday in Gothenburg. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album is 100% rethrash with solid performances. Fans of Powermad and Metal Church will definitely love this. The production is crisp, although hollow sounding (but I guess that makes sense as an improvement from vintage thrash). Still, I’d prefer more of an Overkill approach to the sound. At least you can hear the bass here! See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom doom… Doom doom doom doom doomy doomy doom doomy doom doom doom doom doom doom doom. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is a bit of a step down from predecessor “The Sin And The Sentence,” but there’s still plenty of the band’s metal-for-the-love-of-metal all over the album. There’s also a conspicuous accessibility in a lot of the material here that might excite the SiriusXM metal crowd, but doesn’t really do much for me. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Thrashy death metal from this long-lived band. Fast and blistering from the jump, but there’s something doggedly retro about this sound that fails to inspire true ferocity. Oh well; at least every song on this album is less than 4 minutes long. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Crowbar’s founder and frontman finally puts out a solo album, to… free himself of the shackles of accessibility? I kid, because this is actually a really interesting and cohesive album that’s more experimental and emotionally well-rounded than you might expected, coming from a sludge standardbearer. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Be careful what you wish for: Seminar IX does indeed have less noise-filler and more musical content, but the songs here are not as solid as the ones on Seminar IX. It also feels less like OMG and more like, well, Mutoid Man or Cave-In, frankly. I can respect the band’s commitment to underdeveloped song ideas; it’s just not for me. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Seemingly reusing the same template that they used for The Ape Of God, OMG released a pair of companion EPs last week. Seminar VIII (the first of the pair) is both surprisingly listenable and excruciatingly tedious, with winsome songs bookended unnecessarily by noise that doesn’t seem particularly connected to the music. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Fairly standard fare for this deathcore outfit. If you were already into them, you should be relieved to know that this is a marked improvement from their previous album. If you’re not already into them, I doubt this would sway you, though. See the rest here
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