First Listens With Three-Star Ratings

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Inter Arma — Sulphur English

✦✦✦✧ Squeeeeeeze those invisible oranges! This is Inter Arma at their most inhospitable and devastating; and while album-over-album increases in heaviness should be no surprise by now to anyone who’s been paying attention to this band, it’s still utterly debilitating to hear their latest culminations firsthand. The band continue to be progressive in their own way, but this time around they all but abandon any pretense of melody, channeling their creativity instead into rhythm and rage.

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Dreadnought — Emergence

✦✦✦✧ While I’m enthusiastic about the idea of “prog doom” (“doom prog”?) on paper, this album is a tough one to get aboard, likely because the outcome of such a formulation is (by definition) shoegazey and moribund. Still, this album is probably the best prog doom implementation you can find. Props to vocalist/guitarist/flautist Kelly Schilling for girding the whole album with a sumptuous lushness, although really the whole band is committed to this layered enterprise.

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After The Burial — Evergreen

✦✦✦✧ Have I ever said “djentcore” before? Because that’s what this is… and I kinda dig it. The best track on the album is its opener, “Behold The Crown” (which might win for use of pinch harmonics alone, and boy do they make a meal of it here). However, there is an almost-great tinge to almost every aspect of the album, from songwriting to riffage to production.

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Warforged — I: Voice

✦✦✦✧ An intriguing debut album of progressive blackened death metal that is more surefooted than it has any right to be. Think latter-day Gorguts cross-pollinated with Fredrik Thordendal’s “Sol Niger Within.” It’s pervasively dark, ambitiously imaginative, and hugely atmospheric (in a way that feels more earned than you typically get from black metal bands these days).

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Flub — Flub

✦✦✦✧ This debut album from tech death supergroup Flub (featuring members of Alterbeast, Rivers Of Nihil, and Vale Of Pnath) manages to tick every box your expectations may already have, while still hewing far from their more traditional roots. There’s an added lightheartedness that works well enough. Is this the perfect union of technicality and accessibility?

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Moon Tooth — Crux

✦✦✦✧ Halfway between desert rock and prog metal, this reminds me as much of Good Tiger or Mutoid Man as it does Baroness or Mastodon. The band manage an interesting balancing act between heaviness and fun. They also feel a little too preoccupied with laying down chord progressions that defy prediction (which, as much as it pains me to admit, isn’t necessarily a good thing).

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East Of The Wall — NP-Complete

✦✦✦✧ Lovely prog metal (emphasis on the ‘prog’). This is kinda what I really want to hear when I imagine Scale The Summit paired with an appropriate singer. (But there’s also echoes of Don Cab, Torrential Downpour, and Glassjaw.) Special shout out to Chris Alfano for pulling off the hat-trick of laying down bass lines that are simultaneously jazzy, muscular, and unique….

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