✦✦✧✧ On this album, the guitarist from Creed leads us on a deeper study into the question, “Who exactly is this album for?” The divide between metal-as-fuck music and radio-friendly vocals is wider than ever. Also, for some reason, when the metal lets up a bit, the experience is noticeably worse (as opposed to being some of the best parts of the predecessor “Cauterize”). See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ The band’s third album finds them slightly farther afield from their signature progdeath sound and into trancier territory. While laudable in their ambition, and not completely surprising given the band’s trajectory up to now, their choices make it harder for the listener to build up a head of steam, as the heavy parts are isolated islands awash in a sea of atmospherics and tonalities. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is a marked improvement over the band’s last album, “Savage Gold.” It’s more mature, and the band are more self-assured in their exploration of black metal (laced with metalcore elements). And it’s heavy, thanks to a delightfully prominent bass. Worth a listen? Sure. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Deftones continue their descent into becoming a post-metal Team Sleep/††† soundscape band. Very boring, by all measures (even the usually stellar Abe Cunningham lets his drums fade back on this album). The closest you’ll get to satisfaction on here is the track “Doomed User,” but otherwise the best thing I can see is that is probably a great album with which to test stadium sound systems. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This is an enjoyable warts-and-all throwback of an album, redolent of the 80s that were Lita’s playground, and full of entertaining cameos from times long gone (Cheap Trick! Billy Sheehan on bass! Dave Navarro on mandolin!). You get a real sense that this was worked on in a garage, and that’s a strength here. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ This album is for those Entombed fans for whom “Wolverine Blues” sounded too polished. Unfortunate, the unvarnished production is matched by a set of unfiltered, meandering compositions that are just tedious throughout the front half of the album. Things do improve in the back half, but by then the damage is done. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ KSE’s latest feels like an odd fusion of Meshuggah, pre-Black Album Metallica, and heaps of metalcore-by-the-numbers. And while I applaud the band for trying to be more progressive, their efforts manifest in largely arbitrary and distracting time signature changes. Still, if you already love KSE, you’re probably going to be just fine with all this. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Yep, this is definitely Voivod. I will also say: this is a really good length for a Voivod release; there’s enough Québécois madness on here to whet your whistle, but not so much to grow into tedium. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ Y’all know that I’ve loved Prong from back in the day (Headbanger’s Ball, holla). But this album gets off to a boring start, and has a hard time shaking off that misstep (even though the riffs get better as the album unspools). Then we get to the twin surprises of the album: the bizarre metalcorish “Do Nothing” and the purposefully detuned “Belief System”. See the rest here
✦✦✧✧ A lo-fi adventure in screechy hostility with a marred execution. You can definitely hear the Unsane pedigree in this supergroup, but in a decidedly retro way. See the rest here
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