★★☆☆ No-nonsense punkthrashrock. As odd as that phrase seems, it’s the best description I’ve got for this album. Once it starts, the ride don’t quit. It’s a bit simplistic and without a huge amount of variety, but it’s excellently executed for what it is. Also, it’s got a good beat, and I can bug out to it. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is some excellently moody doomish metal, but it’s ponderous in length, and after a while I kinda tuned out. I could tell now and then that interesting stuff was happening, but those gems are surrounded by a whole lot of interchangeable plodding. I rate this 2 out of 4 grunts. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is another brickwalled slab of noise, short-ish and intense as you’d expect from Enabler. You’ve got a handful of standout tracks that feel like fresh territory, and you’ve got a number of tracks here that feel painfully and regrettably rote by now.
All of that said, I actually listened to this album twice. See the rest here
★★☆☆ DYK take a definitive step closer to djenty metalcore. The brutals are even more brutal than last time, and that’s the good news. The bad news (and this is indeed news to me) is that apparently you can’t really pull off the clean singing metalcore thing with a detuned 8-string sound, at all. See the rest here
★★☆☆ It’s not horrible, actually. Sounds more like a collection of Tesla or Alice In Chains B-sides. If you can get past the voice in your head asking why this was made in the first place, you might enjoy this platter of hard rock. At least, until the band succumb a bit too much to their cheesy inclinations on latter-half track “My Old Man.” See the rest here
★★☆☆ As technodeath bands go, Rivers Of Nihil definitely have the performance chops on lock. The songwriting however continues to be a tepid soup of riffs and screeches. It’s heavier than their debut album, to be sure, and I like that. I just have a hard time recalling anything I’d just heard, mere moments after hearing it. See the rest here
★★☆☆ While not quite as mechanical sounding as their last album, “Soul Sphere” is still solidly entrenched in the style of djentcore. It sure is loud and shinily produced, but hard to really care one way or another about. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This album is a bit better than the band’s first attempt with vocalist Todd LaTorre, in two key areas: production and ambition. Everyone is in top form performance-wise, with the big prize going to LaTorre; he manages to both sound exactly like Geoff Tate when he wants to, and to self-assuredly avoid that trick when he doesn’t. See the rest here
★★☆☆ The band continue to show off their knack for creating catchy, meaty metalrock tunes. A few tracks here are slightly djentier than anything on Cold Day Memory or Black Out The Sun, and it works. However, it’s hard to imagine anything from this album becoming a band classic; at best, a couple of tunes rise to the level of reminding me of “Decay.” See the rest here
★★☆☆ Yep, this is a Nile album alright: disgusting, blisteringly fast, sloppily technical, and drummer George Kollias’s legs must be on crack. It’s also highly disjointed, even for Nile, and feels like a haphazard collection of miscellaneous riffs and moments. Sometimes, you luck out and get a harrowing moment of the abyss looking into you. See the rest here
This work by Metalligentsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.