★★☆☆ 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
★★☆☆ I’ve gotta tell you: this album starts out strong. The production is top-notch, and when the band cut loose, they’re heavy as fuck. And then they go and get all experimental. Some of the experiments pay off (the Rush-like “Criminal Conversations”, featuring In This Moment’s Maria Brink is the album’s high water mark), and some don’t (“Want It All”, “Revolución”). See the rest here
★★☆☆ Musically, this feels like Opeth playing Ghost covers. Which isn’t necessarily a band thing, in small doses; a full album’s worth overstays its welcome a wee bit. The real problem here lays in the gross grindy vocals, which are at best vaguely ignorable. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is a very serviceable 35 minutes of grindcore. Solid riffs, good darkness. The songs do tend to belabor their respective points, which is a weird thing to say for such a short album. See the rest here
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