★★☆☆ While not quite as mechanical sounding as their last album, “Soul Sphere” is still solidly entrenched in the style of djentcore. It sure is loud and shinily produced, but hard to really care one way or another about. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This album is a bit better than the band’s first attempt with vocalist Todd LaTorre, in two key areas: production and ambition. Everyone is in top form performance-wise, with the big prize going to LaTorre; he manages to both sound exactly like Geoff Tate when he wants to, and to self-assuredly avoid that trick when he doesn’t. See the rest here
★★☆☆ The band continue to show off their knack for creating catchy, meaty metalrock tunes. A few tracks here are slightly djentier than anything on Cold Day Memory or Black Out The Sun, and it works. However, it’s hard to imagine anything from this album becoming a band classic; at best, a couple of tunes rise to the level of reminding me of “Decay.” See the rest here
★★☆☆ Yep, this is a Nile album alright: disgusting, blisteringly fast, sloppily technical, and drummer George Kollias’s legs must be on crack. It’s also highly disjointed, even for Nile, and feels like a haphazard collection of miscellaneous riffs and moments. Sometimes, you luck out and get a harrowing moment of the abyss looking into you. See the rest here
★★☆☆ SFTP get a lot of shit for sounding like little more than RATM v2 (and not undeservedly). That said, their latest album has them drawing less from that source, and instead introducing more of a vintage Mudvayne sound. I wouldn’t have thought of Rage and Mudvayne as promising wellsprings for a modern band, but you know what? See the rest here
★★☆☆ These guys make Gorguts sound formulaic by comparison. The opening track’s sludgy twelve-tone serialism establishes an atmosphere of unpredictable chaos that carries through the rest of the album, but aside from that, there’s not much cohesion to it. The band’s performances are admirable to say the very least, and they’re very good at whatever the hell it is they’re doing on here. See the rest here
★★☆☆ So much material, so much to critique. First: every once in a while, a talented band of ambitious musicians put out an album that captures the essence of a live performance, instead of a carefully manicured studio artifact. Unfortunately, this is a miscalculation for Maiden, especially since they seem to be going dogmatically for a mid-80s live aesthetic. See the rest here
★★☆☆ There’s nothing overtly wrong with this album that I can put my finger on… but this entire collection of songs nevertheless sounds ambivalent, pro forma, tired. There’s plenty of moments of utter heaviness throughout the album, but there’s also more than one buildup or breakdown that fails to pay off. See the rest here
★★☆☆ Enslaved continue making themselves comfortable in the micro-niche between classis black metal tropes and Opeth/Ihsahn-style intricacy. In fact, they wind up sounding a little too comfortable. The songs all go on a minute too long, in part because the extremes — the most energetic and the most subdued — are anything but. See the rest here
★★☆☆ The band’s sophomore album is a big improvement over their messy, gimmicky debut. The stink of derivativeness, while not entirely gone, is much less noticeable. What you have here instead is a cleaner slab of unsubtle aggression, clearly inspired by Meshuggah, Machine Head, and Slipknot. The vocals are screamier than before (which is a good thing), and the interesting riffage get downright nasty at times. See the rest here
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