✦✦✦✦ Wow. PTH have created their most accessible release to date, and yet don’t lose a shred of their intricacy, stylistic omnivorousness, or overall focus on musicianship. Most impressively, there’s a new emotionality and (dare I say it) maturity to what everyone in the band is contributing to the music. And even though it’s a whopping 52 minutes long, the pacing doesn’t suffer for it, and it’s a captivating listen from start to finish. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ Once again, Destrage grace us with a wildly inventive collection of progressive metalcore songs. And yet, this EP is even more accessible and refined, for all its unpredictable craziness. It reminds of the best of Dillinger, Meshuggah, and Leprous: well-balanced, enthralling, energetic, and inhuman (even for all its listenability). A must-listen for sure, and the band’s best album. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This is Devin Townsend at his most devy. More than ever, he imbues all of his music here with metal, but in oblique and non-ostentatious ways. Put another way, this album of progressive rock, electronica, choral music, and soundscapes just happens to treat the panoply of metal subgenres as source motifs. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This is the biggest level-jump for the band since The Parallax. The album starts out on very familiar territory, with a track that sounds like it could easily fit on either of the band’s last two albums. And then the second track starts, and all of a sudden we have a new sound for BTBAM: heavier, more anthemic, but also less beholden to old prog rock tropes. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ Equal parts Extol (this is Ole Børud’s new band after all), Cynic, Extol, Torrential Downpour, The Darkness, early Meshuggah, and Yes after “Union.” I shit you not: you’ve likely never heard any metal like this before. This is a Must Listen, and perhaps The Stunning Debut of 2017. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This album is batshit insane. I’d never even heard of this dude until two weeks ago. Then I popped on the first track, and after about a minute, I was all, “Is that… James Labrie?!” Then I checked out the personnel listing on this album. Eleven vocalists! I’m not entirely sure how this blatantly disjointed approach to guest musicianship avoids devolving into a modern prog version of Spinal Tap’s “Break Like The Wind”. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This is the culmination and perfection of Meshuggah’s explorations from their previous albums “Koloss,” “Obzen,” and “Catch Thirty-Three.” But more than ever in the band’s career, this material feels designed from the ground up to live for performance in front of a crowd, not Meshuggah’s prior standard of careful curation in the confines of a studio. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This is more like it! The album reaffirms the role of its predecessor, Das Seelenbrechen, as a lateral digression, and is more of an logical and spiritual successor to Eremita… but Arktis blows it away in its scope, ambition, and effectiveness. I could mention the handful of notable guest musicians on this record, but the real star here is the varied approaches to songwriting. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This followup to the 2011 prog masterclass “Dualism” finds the band doubling down on their Meshuggahness. This results in ridiculous heaviness when the band want to wield it, and next-level time signature/syncopation madness. The danger here is that their penchant for slippery rhythm goes so far as to make some sections virtually headbang-proof, the cleverness-for-clever’s-sake coming at the cost of effective emotional delivery. See the rest here
✦✦✦✦ This is a hard-hitting technodeath triumph, and sets a high bar for any other progressive metal in 2016. Unlike recent examples from other technodeath staples, this album does a better job in offering a (relatively) diverse musical palette, at times evoking Death, BTBAM, The Faceless, and Gorguts. Every song feels substantial without being overlong (even the 15-minute closer “Weltseele”). See the rest here
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