✦✦✧✧ Dave Grohl is awesome, and this album is not. It’s the audio equivalent of Kylie Jenner wearing a Slayer t-shirt. Then again, I refuse to go along with the Tenacious D thing, so maybe it’s just me. (Then again again, this album really only exists as a prop for Dave’s horror flick “Studio 666,” so let’s relax.) See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ The only thing new about this album from Swedish extreme metal war historians Sabaton is that this suite of songs literally tells different specific stories from the First World War. I guess they just never got around to talking about the Christmas armistice in Bastogne until now. Hate on them all you want, but I think that’s actually kinda dope. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ If you need some background music for a movie or a TV show in which the camera movies through a goth club, and for whatever reason you can’t use any of the other Stabbing Westward albums out there, this one will do quite nicely. (I really dig that cover art, though.) See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Did you know that, before he joined Periphery, Mark Holcomb had started a metalcore band named Haunted Shores? And that, rather than formally ending that group, it morphed into a side project between him and Misha Mansoor? Don’t be minimized by this instrumental shredfest’s small footprint; 37 minutes tends to stretch when it’s almost completely filled with 16th and 32nd notes. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Really good rethrash from Bay Area veterans. Five tracks, 25 minutes. Perfect. Who needs innovation when you’ve got this ferocious pit?! See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Solidly good Scorps here. Always great to hear Klaus Meine’s singing and Mssrs. Jab and Schenker shredding. I can imagine hearing this at a bar and subconsciously enjoying it, even if I can’t imagine ever putting this on the jukebox in the first place. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is a six-piece nu metal band from New Delhi. That is to say, it sounds a lot like Limp Bizkit learned what a sitar is. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Both Z&A and The Armed pull from the same fount when they’re at their best: an uncanny and narrow intersection of ear-candy accessibility and undiluted acrimony. Ironically, the more this music hews to sounding overtly spiritual, the more boring it sounds. Fortunately, there are plenty of more subtle and intriguing tracks on the album (“Erase,” “Feed The Machine”, “Götterdämmerung”). See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ It’s a bold choice to start your album with a pair of clean, not-well-tuned guitars. And yet, it’s just one of many examples on this album where these progenitors of the NY death metal scene expertly feed and feed off of your expectations. Even less modern-sounding than earlier albums, Acts Of God nevertheless deliver a potent, ineffable air of melancholic aggression, at times bordering on o.g. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Successfully moody, but fairly boring neo-industrial. It’s more Front Line Assembly than I remember A&P ever being in the past. A small step down from Tristan Shone’s recent work. See the rest here
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