“The reigning kings of techno/industrial/party death are back once again to pump up the volume and rock your boots n’ pants, boots n’ pants. On their 13th full length, Monument, Crematory sees some major line up changes but the kraut rockers pick right up where 2014s Antiserum left off. That means more poppy techno-death tailor-made for metallized strip clubs and sketchy back alley discos.” Boots n’ pants and boots n’ pants….
“Desaster is fuckin’ coconuts. There, I said it and I stand by it. The reigning overlords of overkill are back for an eighth album full of lunatic blackened speed/thrash loaded with nods to the deep roots of metal and NWoBHM. They’ve always been unhinged, unpredictable and at times almost a parody of metal itself, but they’ve churned out some righteously amusing and trve moments of molten goodness over their leather and spike studded career.” Feel the foam!
“Whenever I’m given a new band to check out for review, I do as much thorough investigating as humanly possible. So when a band is labeled as “doom rock,” which is the case with today’s subject of scrutiny, Portugal’s Sinistro, I get a bit antsy, as it’s usually just a cover-up for gothic silliness. Add to the fact that the band members only go by one letter each (save for frontwoman Patricia Andrade), and it doesn’t bode very well from the start. Can you judge an album by the band members’ tired monikers?
“Ihsahn is always in motion. Following a storied career in one of the premier black metal bands of all time, he’s released five full-length albums. Nearly all of those records have been critically acclaimed, but only one has been critically acclaimed by me. While I enjoyed The Adversary, Ihsahn’s post-Emperor zenith was angL. Starting with After, however, Ihsahn started to lose me. What made his earlier material so good—riffs, riffs, more riffs, and slick composition (also riffs)—began to be replaced by increasingly abstract compositions. And when songs like “Scarab” started getting replaced with tracks like “M,” I stopped enjoying new Ihsahn albums. Yet Arktis. marks the next phase for Ihsahn, having finally left the Nihilists behind him.” Praise Zarathustra!
“Being a metal reviewer is fun. I get to discover new gems I probably wouldn’t have otherwise heard, I get to think of creative ways to make fun of bad albums, and I get to work with an amazing and talented group of fellow writers whose reviews and recommendations provide an abundance of new, quality metal to check out. But like all jobs, this one has a dark side.” Here comes the bittersweets….
“I have an admission to make, and it’s not an easy one. Until the past few weeks, I had never heard of Italy’s Novembre. Yes, as Angry Metal Guy’s resident doom meister who worships at the altar of the Peaceville Three, considers Funeral’s From These Wounds a desert-island album, and champions any band that possesses The Riff of Sorrow, I had neglected to check out one of Italy’s heralded progressive exports.” Please publicly shame this man.
By now, you’ll have learned about/salivated over the prospect of Gorguts’ new EP, Pleiades’ Dust, which looms on my horizon like a shining oasis of pretense. If you’re unlucky enough not to have the privileges of an AMG staffer and still have to wait to listen to it, then boy do I have good news for you. The Obscuran prog death trend is still picking up steam and kicking up dust, now most pertinently in the form of New York two-piece Geryon. The side project of Krallice’s Nicholas McMaster and Lev Weinstein, Geryon are a band I’ve overlooked, but The Wound and the Bow struck me immediately.
“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?
No stranger to lengthy recordings, Finland’s Swallow the Sun announced their next project will be a mammoth multi-album interpretation of French poet Marcel Proust’s magnum opus, Remembrance of Things Past (also known as In Search of Lost Time).
What’s this? Record(s) o’ the Month posted on the last day of March? This can’t last!
