✦✦✧✧ This is an enjoyable warts-and-all throwback of an album, redolent of the 80s that were Lita’s playground, and full of entertaining cameos from times long gone (Cheap Trick! Billy Sheehan on bass! Dave Navarro on mandolin!). You get a real sense that this was worked on in a garage, and that’s a strength here. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album is for those Entombed fans for whom “Wolverine Blues” sounded too polished. Unfortunate, the unvarnished production is matched by a set of unfiltered, meandering compositions that are just tedious throughout the front half of the album. Things do improve in the back half, but by then the damage is done. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ KSE’s latest feels like an odd fusion of Meshuggah, pre-Black Album Metallica, and heaps of metalcore-by-the-numbers. And while I applaud the band for trying to be more progressive, their efforts manifest in largely arbitrary and distracting time signature changes. Still, if you already love KSE, you’re probably going to be just fine with all this. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Yep, this is definitely Voivod. I will also say: this is a really good length for a Voivod release; there’s enough Québécois madness on here to whet your whistle, but not so much to grow into tedium. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Y’all know that I’ve loved Prong from back in the day (Headbanger’s Ball, holla). But this album gets off to a boring start, and has a hard time shaking off that misstep (even though the riffs get better as the album unspools). Then we get to the twin surprises of the album: the bizarre metalcorish “Do Nothing” and the purposefully detuned “Belief System”. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ A lo-fi adventure in screechy hostility with a marred execution. You can definitely hear the Unsane pedigree in this supergroup, but in a decidedly retro way. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This feels like DT’s take on Pink Floyd – The Wall… but doesn’t work nearly as well. The band repeatedly make bad trades by subduing their collective virtuosity in exchange for limp and forgettable songwriting. Also, these songs have a bad habit of going from Shred to Meh’d and back again, undercutting any hope of momentum. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This isn’t the worst thing that Megadeth have done (that honor still stays with Super Collider). Also, the shredding here is satisfyingly sharp, and the production is crisp and heavy. I’ll remind you here that Chris Adler is playing drums on this, because otherwise you’d never know it from listening to the album. See the rest here
This is great for what it is. What it is not is metal. There’s maybe 30 seconds of metallish stuff on this EP, and the rest is instrumental jazz with a drummer who’s got double kick drums, more Satrianiesque than ever. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This album finds the star-crossed band aiming for Mastodon-style sludge… and just missing the mark slightly. The music lands in this uncanny valley where it’s too wanky to effectively grab you the way that great stoner metal usually does, and at the same time too often the music is also sleepier than you’d want from a fun shredfest. See the rest here
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