First Listens With Two-Star Ratings

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Pain Of Salvation — In The Passing Light Of Day

✦✦✧✧ A classic case of an album in need of a proper editor. This is a weird mix of metalcore, avant-garde, prog metal, Queensrÿche-ish sensibilities, and bad poetry. Of the album’s 71 minutes, at least 15 minutes may have been better left unreleased. The stuff that works here is quite commendable, and skews toward Daniel Gildenlöw’s and the rest of the band’s experimental natures; the stuff that doesn’t work tends to fail on the ground of emotional resonance.

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Artificial Brain — Infrared Horizon

✦✦✧✧ This is not an easy album to listen to, even with the by-now-familiar technodeath caveats and Gorguts comparisons that this inevitably invites. For one thing, the production is even less polished than that of the preceding “Labyrinth Constellation,” if you can imagine that. At the same time, it’s oddly more… obvious?…

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Mors Principium Est — Embers Of A Dying World

✦✦✧✧ Pseudo-orchestral, pseudo-electronic melodeath that, despite the overly long adjectives, hardly nudge the envelope in any meaningful way. Did DT’s “Atoma” leave you wanting more last year? Fortunately for you, this album will certainly dull the edge of your want. Unfortunately for MPE, it does so without leaving much of a lasting differentiable impression.

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Pallbearer — Heartless

✦✦✧✧ Not quite as compelling or driven as their previous brand of doom metal, this album shows the band seeming to be more content wallowing in the moments they’re creating. Compared to the delicate tightrope act of “Foundations Of Burden,” here the band bring in their ambitious arms, and are tripped up a bit by their own gravity, like a spinning top turning a bit too slowly to keep itself upright.

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