✦✦✧✧ You know, I don’t hate this! Jamey Jasta’s voice is irritating as always, but the music behind it is more interesting this time around (or at least less repetitive) than on their previous album. Of course, this is notably faint praise, which only gets you so far; in my case, it got me as far as the first 5 tracks. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ I really should stop listening to Opeth. This album is even further removed from progressive metal, and much closer to what I’d expect from Leprous or Ghost. Or the more expositional tediums of Dream Theater. It’s really not until “Will O The Wisp,” fourteen minutes into the album, that the band revisits familiar musical territory. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ There’s nothing complicated or earthshattering here… just good, old-fashioned, material for a good sweaty slamdance. The band are tighter than ever, and even Cyco Miko’s vocals sound a little more polished (but only a little). The album ends illadvisedly with two back-to-back ballads; I’d skip them if I were you. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ The gravitational pull of Wo Fat’s sludge on this album is apparently so immense that apparently the band stoned themselves into self-inflicted dispassion. It gets the job done, but there’s an uncharacteristic so-what familiarity that’s hard to shake. I can definitely imagining hearing this on the P.A. in between sets at a concert; if that’s the aim of the band, they knocked it out of the park. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album is a vast improvement over the band’s previous album, “Lost Forever // Lost Together.” The excesses of that album have been reigned in, which alone is redemption enough. The production is also a notch better than last time, with the heavy parts really delivering. Admittedly, the cumulative effect can sound at times like a hybrid between TesseracT and Linkin Park. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ It’s melodeath, sounding like a fusion of… just about everything else. Very solidly okay metal. It’s not particularly imaginative or memorable, but it does what it says on the tin. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album starts off feeling like a less compelling, emotionally vacant synth demo cover of Chimp Scanner. The chiptune stuff is at least different than what I’m used to hearing in our genre (which works, from a metalcore-adjacent standpoint). That said, and I never thought I’d say this: knowing upfront how electronic this work is… just makes the drums’ “virtuosity” feel completely pointless. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This feels like the Microsoft Store of metal albums: internally consistent and well-done, but without much external validation or reason for existing. Props however for the unusual Phil Collins cover. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ In what I can only think of as an ill-advised move, Spylacopa’s third album find the band doubling down on their ambient shoegaze tendencies. At times, the music here bears a passing resemblance to Porcupine Tree at their more experimental. The tantalizing electronica motifs never really pay off, and only one song here (“Malice”) feels lackluster and unimaginative by comparison. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ For some reason, this reminds me of when Jonathan Davis of Korn had to hire that couple to write his lyrics because he’d run out of personal rage. There’s some good stuff on here, especially in the middle third of the album, but otherwise there’s a whole lot of pandering radio-friendly stoner bullshit to wade through. See the rest here
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