Record reviews
Steel Assassin is a mighty obscure act by anyone’s reckoning. They were knocking around all throughout the 80s and 90s but could never get a proper album released. Then, quite out of the blue, they released War of the Eight Saints in 2007 and totally blew me away with their ballsy, aggressive take on American power metal and NWOBHM. It was one of the best albums of that year, but didn’t bring them as much attention as it deserved.
Hey, Havok is back! I know everybody thinks we review far too much retro thrash (or was it Mexican murder ballads?), but Havok is at the top of the movement and excels at what they do.
By my extensive calculations and careful application of Steel Druhm’s Theory of Genre Longevity (Pat. Pending), retro thrash is in the fourteenth minute of its fame window.
Furyon sounds rather huggable and bad for asthma-prone people, but this rising UK band have concocted a decent debut full-length album here, which will make those asthma-prone people catch their fleeting breaths.
Just in time to wash away the bitter taste of Six Feet Under, comes this ridiculously sick death metal masterstroke by Blood Mortized. Taking the vicious old school Swedish death sound from their Bestial EP and improving on it in every way, The Key to a Black Heart is exactly what you want from the style and death metal in general.
Let’s just be brootally honest for a moment, shall we? Six Feet Under is the worst “big” band in the entire death metal genre. Most of their releases are either below average or simply godawful, and after a seventeen year run, they can only boast two semi-good albums of original material. They’ve spewed platter after platter of groove-based, chuggy, simplistic death that only fellow neanderthal deathers Jungle Rot could fully appreciate (though they probably look down on them a bit too).
Eccentric. That little word can apply to avant-garde, cutting edge music just as easily as your crazy uncle Barnaby. You know, the one that collects cats and built the time machine out of used exercise equipment and urinal cakes.
The Gothenburg brand of melodic death may be in its twilight years of relevance, but man, when a band truly nails the sound and style, it’s as glorious as watching stars explode overhead and guzzling craft beers as you get balls deep in a Roman orgy.
Happy Metal Guy waxes poetic about metal’s worst excesses and.. what? Likes them!? THAT’S IT! YOU’RE FUCKING FIRED!
As a life-long doom fan, you’re almost required to love long-suffering underdogs like Saint Vitus. They’ve toiled away for decades with the bare minimum of notoriety, despite the fact some of their music is so fucking good!
