✦✦✦✧ The latest from Gregor Mackintosh’s grindy sludgey deathrock side project is a fun, energetic, slab of evil: nasty, unvarnished, ponderous, and gloriously dark. The album goes from rockin’ to dirgelike and back again with entertaining aplomb. Also, it does not at all sound like it’s only 38 minutes. If you can say that, and not be bored, you must be listening to something good. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ While the music is most closely aligned with stoner metal, Elder are so dynamic and driven here that the usual narcolepsy associated with the genre is replaced with a tireless roving spirit. You can definitely hear it most compellingly on “Sonntag,” the stoniest of all stoner prog songs of 2017. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ SikTh manage to thread a very fine needle here, harnessing their djenty brand of prog (or proggier brand of djent) in service of a catchy accessibility that generally eludes the genre. Along the way, these veterans don’t return to form, so much as they call on old debts, incorporating elements from descendants such as Periphery, Protest The Hero, TesseracT, and many others. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ A funkier, nastier, but still rollicking followup to their 2015 debut, “War Moans” does not stray far from the territory that the band has already claimed: tone-rich bass, propulsive drums, and Steven Brodsky’s memorably eclectic guitars and vocals are all in full effect here. If anything is a progression here, it’s the slightly more expansive sonic soundscape (more obvious on the title track than anywhere else). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ DEP bassist Liam Wilson’s new supergroup (featuring members of The Faceless, Intensus, and John Zorn) go for a slightly-more-accessible-Gorguts sound with this, their debut album. Anyway, I’m assuming Wilson was the driving force of this band, as the resulting music is very firmly basscentric (never a complaint from Yours Truly). See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Griiiiiiiiiindcoorrrrrrrrreblech. (Halfway between AC, Carcass, and Converge. Tasty.) See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ So much swagger! The band have expanded their already unique sonic palette since 2014’s “Heavy Fruit” (although it’s still hard to avoid thinking about modern-era Alice In Chains). The result is more surefooted, more convincingly emotional, and at times far more metallic than anything they’ve done before. Also, holy crap: they’ve got a song called “Fritz The Dog“! See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Pleasing instrumental post-metal in the vein of Russian Circles or even Godspeed at their most sinister. They’re not pushing the envelope very hard here, but they are delivering solid and dramatic shoegaze. Nota bene: they’ve got two drummers, although not really using that dynamic to its fullest potential, if you ask me. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ Let me get this out of the way: when you say that Paul Masvidal does guest vocals on two of your tracks, you’re really only referring to Paul Masvidal’s vocoder.
That said, this is shockingly compelling and well-done modern prog metal from Andorra. Think equal parts Dream Theater, Protest The Hero, Cynic, and Periphery. See the rest here
✦✦✦✧ This is a surprisingly fun time. As Ice-T says himself on “Raining Blood/Postmortem”, this is equal parts Sabbath, Suicidal, and Slayer. This isn’t going to move the needle in terms of metal evolution or anything, but that’s not why you listen to Body Count. You listen because you want to hear a bunch of homies from the hood throwing down some earnest hardcore and speed metal. See the rest here
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