Paganizer — Land Of Weeping Souls
✦✦✧✧ This is what vintage Swedish Death Metal is all about: rawness and blast beats and “blech”s and nasty tone. This is also something you’ve definitely heard before. See the rest here
First Listens With Two-Star Ratings
River Black — River Black
✦✦✧✧ This mostly-Burnt-By-The-Sun not-a-supergroup (also featuring ex-members of Municipal Waste and Revocation) is some nasty business. It’s first and foremost a tour of various kinds of aggression and swagger (evocative at times of Norma Jean, Entombed, and Sepultura at their punkiest). This, the band’s eponymous debut, is a weighty chunk of red meat without any filler. See the rest here
Prong — Zero Days
✦✦✧✧ This is a wildly off-balanced album. Track after track, you’re not sure if you’re listening to a Prong deep cut, a latter-era King’s X single, a particularly aggressive Linkin Park track, the title track of the next Tremonti album, etc. But despite the odds, this makes for an oddly compelling listen. See the rest here
Decrepit Birth — Axis Mundi
✦✦✧✧ Neoclassical technodeath with an almost self-conscious fixation on deconstructing the form. This reminds me of Disincarnate’s debut, in the context of the early-to-mid-90s status quo. It is both unfortunate and telling that this Decrepit Birth album reminds me of something from 24 years ago; while there’s definite progress with great listenability on here, I’m left with the feeling that this album belongs to a different decade. See the rest here
Pathology — Pathology
✦✦✧✧ The good: this is good old-fashioned death metal, with tasty riffs that are sure to please and make you sneer and nod your head. The bad: you’ve definitely heard a lot of this before, except for the vocals, which are particularly disposable here, to the point of distraction. Nevertheless, the second half of the album is worth getting to, as its tunes are more memorable, its riffs more lethal. See the rest here
Tombs — The Grand Annihilation
✦✦✧✧ What starts as a moody, cocksure study in sludgy decay… slips sideways into a tendency toward gothiness. By the midpoint of the album, their transformation to a Deafheaven-inspired Type O Negative sound is complete. See the rest here
Broken Hope — Mutilated And Assimilated
✦✦✧✧ Very familiar cookiemonster death metal, cut from the same cloth as Cannibal Corpse. If that’s the sort of thing you like, you’ll like this sort of thing. See the rest here
Municipal Waste — Slime And Punishment
✦✦✧✧ No muss, no fuss, just well-executed, energetic crossover thrash. I love that the longest song on here is under 3 minutes long. I love that I’m reminded of S.O.D. and D.R.I. I love that you can hear bass! I just wish that this album offered as much innovation as it did adoration of the old. See the rest here
Nickelback — Feed the Machine
✦✦✧✧ I was going to say that this isn’t half bad, but that’s the problem: it’s exactly half bad. The riffs are tasty and groovy (if forgettable), and speak to Chad Kroeger’s metal tendencies. But his vocals and lyrics are just so schmaltzy. And then there are the unforgivably saccharin intentional hits; “Song On Fire,” “After The Rain,” and their ilk constitute the kind of music I’d hear while driving quickly through some place I wouldn’t want to linger. See the rest here
Dying Fetus — Wrong One to Fuck With
✦✦✧✧ Blisteringly technical technodeath that verges on the ridiculously inhuman. It’s fun to listen to the band’s perambulations, although I defy anyone (outside the band themselves) to hum a single riff from memory. But good lord, fellas, this is a long and busy album. I appreciate the price-performance of these 54 minutes, but it’s too much! See the rest here
