“The San Francisco music scene is nothing if not creative. With oddball acts like Hammers of Misfortune, Vhöl and Slough Feg calling the area home, creativity is in abundant supply. Worm Ouroboros is yet another off-kilter act providing local color to the Bay Area, lesser known but no less interesting. The brain-trust of Lorraine Rath and Jessica Way, the band’s unique blend of dark ambient goth-rock, doom and neo-folk is as interesting as it is offbeat.” Bay Area goth-waves are rising.
“I still remember the first time I really sat down with a Tom Waits album. When that day came, the album was The Black Rider. And, as one would expect, I thought it was the most-metal, non-metal album I’d ever heard. After that, and still to this day, ole Tom gets more than a few spins per month in the Grier household. Waits gets so much love here that he even has a portrait in the living room and a neat stack of vinyl in the corner. I mean, how can you hate Tom Waits?” Tom Waits for no man.
The world became a much darker place in 2009 when UK doom upstarts Warning disbanded after only two albums. When word got out that guitarist and vocalist Patrick Walker would form a new project called 40 Watt Sun with fellow Warning bandmate Christian Leitch, doomsters the world over panted with anticipation. What many people hoped would be a continuation of the morose path constructed by Warning’s farewell album, 2006’s criminally underrated Watching from a Distance, instead were met with softer, but no less intense, waters with The Inside Room. Five years and several label woes later, the band returns with their self-released second album, Wider than the Sky.” Watch the skies (from a distance).
“One of the best aspects of writing for Angry Metal Guy Inc. Ltd. Turbo Hyper-Fighting Edition, besides the scenic view of the cemetery right outside the window of my broom closet/office, is the chance to review something challenging and different. Texas one-man black metal act Goatcraft definitely fits the bill as both. Yes, we review a crap-ton of one-man (or woman) black metal here, but I don’t recall us ever reviewing an album that’s strictly piano.” One man, one keyboard…all blackness.
“Just like death and taxes, you can count on Svart Records to artfully bestow the weird and the wonderful. Ark of Contempt and Anger’s promo blurb begins by saying that ‘Sink have once again created an oddly compelling and strangely enchanting album that is truly in a league of its own.’ Add to that, Sink promises rich and complex compositions woven with enigmatic lyrics, and I’ll admit I had a hard time resisting this.” Plus there’s a cute dog on the cover!
“We here at Angry Metal Guy Industries try our damnedest to approach each album with an open mind and our full, undivided attention. We also give many, many listens to each album, grasping at as many straws as we can to formulate a 600-word review, and trying to relay our experience with said album in a way that’s both entertaining and informative. Sometimes, though, after so many listens, an album can be so thick with atmospherics and density that approaching it can feel hopelessly impossible.” But we at AMG never say”impossible.” Instead we say “I’m possible!”
“Call me Diabolus. Some years ago – never mind how long precisely – I granted the privateers in Alestorm a Letter of Marque and they went on to capture The Good Ship TYMHM and raise the Jolly Roger high over the AMG Staff’s Top Ten Lists. It is a way I have of driving off the spleen and regulating circulation. Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul, I simply drink away the accursed rain. Alas, my initial deed could not go unaddressed forever; I was ordered to write about The Dread Crew of Oddwood’s Lawful Evil.” Keel haul em’ all.
“Infernal Machine is a seven-part journey, creating the soundtrack to Joe Haldeman’s 1974 novel The Forever War. The story, loosely depicts Haldeman’s military service during the Vietnam War, with the account chronicled as a space opera where the military fails to see its soldiers as any more than complex and valuable machines. This seems a large musical undertaking, especially in light that Ridley Scott has had the film idea “in production” since back in 2008….” An odd prog band bringing to life a weird novel? What could go wrong?
“Steven Wilson is one of music’s best producers and, as I ranted and raved last year, quickly becoming one of progressive music’s best songwriters, as well. Hand. Cannot. Erase. was, as I’ve just recently written again, a triumph. However, like all triumphs—yes, all of them—part of honing in on the “triumphant” is knowing when to edit. That doesn’t always mean that what was cut was bad, of course, and 4½ is Steven Wilson and his trusty (and ridiculously talented) backing band knocking out 37 minutes of excellent leftovers.” Yeah, I guess you should probably just expect a lovefest.
“Every now and then, amidst the non-stop barrage of mediocre death and black metal we review here at AMG, we get something that’s a little bit out of the ordinary.” And since we’re all such elitist snobs, we like that.
