First Listens With Two-Star Ratings
Amon Amarth — Berserker
✦✦✧✧ This album is fifteen minutes longer than Amon Amarth usually give us; this is one of those times when less would likely have been more. There are some gems of Viking metal, and I could imagine slipping a couple of these tracks into my lifting playlist, but there’s an awful lot of Not on here as well.
Sunn O))) — Life Metal
Allegaeon — Apoptosis
✦✦✧✧ This is a very mixed bag for me. On the one hand, Allegaeon’s reputation for being an innovative and supertechnical prog death metal act continues with this album. On the other hand, it’s dogged by a persistent sense of detachment. I chalk it up to an underrepresentation of dynamics or variety, which is a weird thing to say in the middle of a super shreddy arpeggiostorm, but there it is.
Equipoise — Demiurgus
✦✦✧✧ Solid prog metal from the Cynic and Sadus school of neoclassical musicianship and sooooo much fretless bass (good to hear Hugo Doyon-Karout’s tireless perambulations all over the place). This is an interesting and promising debut; while it loses points for cookie monster vocals and overall anemic production values, it’s still an almost-great album.
Prion — Aberrant Calamity
✦✦✧✧ This is a more proggy kind of Floridian death metal (think old school Morbid Angel with just a hint of Pestilence or Malevolent Creation thrown in). Emphasis on Floridian: this band seem to have doubled down on a garage band ethic, albeit with some welcome bass in the mix; worse is the band’s disregard for the listener’s flow.
Mark Morton — Anesthetic
✦✦✧✧ There are a number of reasons to dislike this solo project from one of Lamb Of God’s guitarists. It’s fucking weird to start a 2019 album with a track sung by Chester Bennington (R.I.P.). It’s less weird to follow it up with vocalists from Papa Roach and Screaming Trees. But mostly, the album swings from metal to alt rock and back again, and the moves toward the latter rarely pay off for me.
Saor — Forgotten Paths
A Novelist — Folie
✦✦✧✧ This is somewhere between doom and death metal, but not fully either. This album somehow manages to sound familiar yet totally unique. But it’s also somewhat uneven when it comes to the songwriting; another editorial pass or two would have propelled this album to three stars, I’d wager. But do listen to it, and tell me what you think.
