★★★★ This is the prog metal masterpiece that I always knew Intronaut had in them. On this album, the band have managed to showcase all of their strengths: tight performances, complicated rhythms, dynamic moods, and tips of the hat to worthy progenitors like King Crimson and Tool. There’s not a lot on here that will come across as unfamiliar to Intronaut fans, and that’s great news. See the rest here
★★★★ A stunning debut for a group of ex-members from The Safety Fire, The Faceless, Architects, and TesseracT. The first surprise is that the resulting sound doesn’t sound like a mishmash of styles culled from those other bands, or really even a mishmash at all. To be fair, you can hear elements of those bands in the music, but you’re more likely to be reminded of Tool, The Mars Volta, and Glassjaw. See the rest here
★★★★ This is a challenging album, for both band and audience. This is still very recognizably BTBAM, but the music here also expands on the band’s bailiwick in virtually every direction. Indeed, in addition to sly tips of the hat to the band’s previous best works, there are also noticeable borrowings from many other prog metal standard bearers — Opeth, Dream Theater, Porcupine Tree, and Leprous leap immediately to mind — as well as a healthy reverence to classic rock, power metal, and musical theater at large. See the rest here
★★★★ This is the most emotionally complete prog metal album of the year. As was the case with the band’s debut album, Soen continue to wear their Tool and APC influences on their sleeves with this followup. But the overall sound is more nuanced now, more fleshed out and dynamic. (You’d be forgiven for thinking that this was a lost Opeth album, in fact.) See the rest here
★★★★ Is this another shameless reunion grab? Perhaps. But this latest helping of that sweet, sweet Gothenburg melodeath is certainly satisfying and it goes down so smooth. At times, it’s reminiscent of Opeth, of The Haunted, of a few bands that have come and gone since the last time At The Gates put out an album. See the rest here
★★★★ I have not a single bad thing to say about this “one-song EP.” It’s a peerless exploration of sludge, doom, and progressive music, somewhere between Isis, Sleep, Don Caballero, Pink Floyd, mid-70s King Crimson, and Meshuggah’s “Catch Thirty-three.” Do not pass up the chance to hear it for yourself. See the rest here
★★★★ Holy fuck. I was all set to give this album two stars as I started to listen to it, but then I gave it a fresh re-listen. It has all the fury of the band’s eponymous predecessor, and the sound is unmistakably Revocation, and at the same time the album sounds like a whole other band altogether. See the rest here
★★★★ This is everything you’d want to meloprog metal, and consummately tasteful from start to finish. Imagine Symphony X by way of Soilwork. Bombastic at all the right moments, the sweetest of leads, and muscular right when you need a good punch in the gut, too. See the rest here
★★★★ For a band who made their bones with a solid reputation for technical death metal, this album is more firmly grounded in an ethereal territory that sounds more like Cynic than anything else. What makes that notion remarkable is just how successfully and frequently that intricacy is mated with shredding and screams. See the rest here
★★★★ This energetically technical metal album has it all. Euro-style synth intros, faultless musicianship, a lower-than-thou tuning, tasty solos, not to mention a whirlwind tour of virtually every metal subgenre of relevance today. It’s hard to imagine someone being underwhelmed. Yet, they manage to consistently sound fresh and novel and interesting, even as they sprinkle their music with nods to Gojira, The Faceless, Attack! See the rest here
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