✦✦✦✧ After seven years away, JFAC treat us with this powerhouse album, a followup to 2014’s Sun Eater. The band continue to hone their punishing brand of techdeath, flirting with a more experimental approach to their songwriting. The riffs on here: sheer madness. Shout out to the always great Navene Koperweis filling in on drums this time around (but everyone turns in epic performances here). See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Al-Pal ushers in 2024 with what is allegedly Ministry’s penultimate album. What that means is more guitar-forward industrial, with a shiny new production patina and not-at-all-novel spoken word samples, acting as a backdrop for anything that a left-leaning American might rail against these days (toxic masculinity, white nationalism, climate change, MAGA, you name it). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ So, when I said that Ihsahn is my favorite Norwegian composer since Edvard Grieg, I didn’t mean that he had to go quite so orchestral with the music. The lush arrangements here often work, but when they don’t work, they sound as awkward as Michael Kamen and the SF Symphony’s contributions to Metalica (ie, conspicuous and ill-fitting). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ At last, brutal death metal for Gen-Z metalheads! Almost all songs under 3 minutes long! No dynamics, just grossness! See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Folks, this album is maybe everything I ever wanted from Priest. It’s anthemic, shreddy, speedy, gritty, and even more energetic than 2018’s Firepower. Andy Sneap’s production is top-tier, of course, but that only serves to showcase how great the whole band sound. Only time will tell if tracks like "The Serpent And The King" and "Trial By Fire" will take places aside "Painkiller" and "Breaking The Law"; regardless, this album is a must-listen. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ More prog metal perfection, although I can’t help but feel like this one has been sanded a bit too smooth. Still, for a five-track, 26-minute half album, this is a remarkably unrushed and hauntingly mature release. New vocalist Daniel RodrÃguez Flys definitely fits in nicely here with the rest of the band. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This album gives me chills, y’all. And not just because the band obviously took to heart my critique of their promising yet flawed 2019 debut, fixing or improving upon everything on it. Seriously, aside from the already-stellar shredding or vocals, Vitriol have improved their scores for every one of my criteria, resulting in a new benchmark for modern techdeath. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Continuing their exploration of kitchen-sink post-deathcore, EE sacrifice cohesion for a cavalcade of endlessly tasty bits. This turns out to be a winsome choice, and a recipe for a grower of a record. As was also the case of its predecessor, the album is possibly 15 minutes too long for my attention span, but so what? See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This album marks a subtle pivot for the band, emerging from CoViD as a djentier yet still proggy version of themselves (less Textures, more TesseracT). The music still tends to groove, it shreds when it needs to, and is remarkably listenable for an album that has three longform pieces (counting the 22-minute four-part title track). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Man, Saxon just don’t give up! Their twenty-fourth studio album is guaranteed to get your fists pumping, my olds. Also, I’m a sucker for historically-themed midtempo metal, and this album that in spades, from the Battle Of Hastings to aliens in Roswell NM). Who needs to stray from the formula when you’ve got The Goods? See the rest here
This work by Metalligentsia is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.