★★☆☆ The antisocial aggression is predictably front-and-center on this album, but this time around it’s filtered through the clear aesthetics of producer Steve Albini. The end result is The Jesus Lizard pushed to self-parody, a proudly noisome half-hour with ridiculous vocals that are unfortunately impossible to ignore. See the rest here
★★☆☆ I give this band props for keeping “On Lonely Towers” interesting, in an Opeth-meets-Alestorm kind of rollicking way. But my god, the clean vocals are so jarring and distracting. Unfortunately, they’re the clearest part of the mix. Also, the songs tend to feel overlong and belabored. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is like a more punk, more grind version of Entombed. It’s dirty as all get out, and some of the riffs approach neoclassical status. But there’s also a plodding that comes across as tiredness, and it plagues almost every song past the opening track. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is okay. I guess. 60-bpm sludge all the way. Whatever. See the rest here
★★☆☆ A masterfully performed collection of technical death metal tunes, marred by wildly uneven pacing, and by how blatantly derivative it is throughout the whole album (lifting whole-cloth from Meshuggah, BTBAM, Intronaut, The Faceless, and a bevy of others). See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is a mixed bag of an album. On the one hand, the band’s production has never sounded so good. On the other hand, I can’t think of a time when they sounded more impotent. The net result is not unlike what you might get if XTC put out a Nirvana covers album. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is a relatively uplifting dirge-suite, and as cocksure as anything GYBE have ever done. The problem is that there’s just not that much “there” there; of the album’s four tracks, two are atonal noisescapes. As a King Crimson-style calling card of a teaser release, this would be dandy, but as a standalone affair it leaves me wanting more. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This album comes from an alternate reality wherein 70s prog rock blossomed forty years later than it did here. The resulting hodgepodge has as much in common with Camel, Bill Laswell, and Barber’s Adagio For Strings as it does with Emperor. It’s a fascinating listen, marred by a difficult production aesthetic and an over-reliance on the glacial crescendo. See the rest here
★★☆☆ This is a meaty blend of Ballou-esque sludge and SOIA/Biohazard-inspired urban thug-gression. There is something inescapably retro about the whole album, but it’s interesting and evocative in spite of that flavor. Sometimes the groove of the band is a little too… groovy for my tastes. That, and a handful of awkward and sloppy moments, hamstring the whole effort just enough to rob the band of a three-star first rating. See the rest here
★★☆☆ It takes this album a few tracks to find its feet, by eventually finds its voice as a pounding screamfest, somewhere between Kyuss and Converge, yet somehow without the real moxie of either. See the rest here
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