✦✦✧✧ This album is a vast improvement over the band’s previous album, “Lost Forever // Lost Together.” The excesses of that album have been reigned in, which alone is redemption enough. The production is also a notch better than last time, with the heavy parts really delivering. Admittedly, the cumulative effect can sound at times like a hybrid between TesseracT and Linkin Park. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ It’s melodeath, sounding like a fusion of… just about everything else. Very solidly okay metal. It’s not particularly imaginative or memorable, but it does what it says on the tin. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album starts off feeling like a less compelling, emotionally vacant synth demo cover of Chimp Scanner. The chiptune stuff is at least different than what I’m used to hearing in our genre (which works, from a metalcore-adjacent standpoint). That said, and I never thought I’d say this: knowing upfront how electronic this work is… just makes the drums’ “virtuosity” feel completely pointless. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This feels like the Microsoft Store of metal albums: internally consistent and well-done, but without much external validation or reason for existing. Props however for the unusual Phil Collins cover. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ In what I can only think of as an ill-advised move, Spylacopa’s third album find the band doubling down on their ambient shoegaze tendencies. At times, the music here bears a passing resemblance to Porcupine Tree at their more experimental. The tantalizing electronica motifs never really pay off, and only one song here (“Malice”) feels lackluster and unimaginative by comparison. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ For some reason, this reminds me of when Jonathan Davis of Korn had to hire that couple to write his lyrics because he’d run out of personal rage. There’s some good stuff on here, especially in the middle third of the album, but otherwise there’s a whole lot of pandering radio-friendly stoner bullshit to wade through. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ On this album, the guitarist from Creed leads us on a deeper study into the question, “Who exactly is this album for?” The divide between metal-as-fuck music and radio-friendly vocals is wider than ever. Also, for some reason, when the metal lets up a bit, the experience is noticeably worse (as opposed to being some of the best parts of the predecessor “Cauterize”). See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ The band’s third album finds them slightly farther afield from their signature progdeath sound and into trancier territory. While laudable in their ambition, and not completely surprising given the band’s trajectory up to now, their choices make it harder for the listener to build up a head of steam, as the heavy parts are isolated islands awash in a sea of atmospherics and tonalities. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is a marked improvement over the band’s last album, “Savage Gold.” It’s more mature, and the band are more self-assured in their exploration of black metal (laced with metalcore elements). And it’s heavy, thanks to a delightfully prominent bass. Worth a listen? Sure. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Deftones continue their descent into becoming a post-metal Team Sleep/††† soundscape band. Very boring, by all measures (even the usually stellar Abe Cunningham lets his drums fade back on this album). The closest you’ll get to satisfaction on here is the track “Doomed User,” but otherwise the best thing I can see is that is probably a great album with which to test stadium sound systems. See the rest here
This work by Metalligentsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.