“Enter Seven Spires, a Boston-based act I blindly picked as a personal punching bag after going soft from weeks of reviewing great material. Featuring Adrienne Cowan of Light and Shade (a band we largely panned last year), their debut Solveig, armed with the most excruciatingly mediocre cover art of the year, is doomed to fail… right?” Books, covers, judgments, etc.
“Death/doom is a deceptively mercurial beast, possessed of a tangential tendency to meander in directions that range from the darkly romantic to the downright bludgeoning. Detroit’s Temple of Void are plainly with the latter and dole out the kind of stomach churning Asphyxiation that had me at hello.” Skull and void.
“Venomous Maximus try their darndest to move past the “occult” label and appeal more generally to the metal masses. Like their records before it, No Warning is an attempt to appease fans of both the sinister and the catchy. In other words, they seem to be striving for ownership of the same plot of land Ghost lay claim to. Stealing the ghost.
“The 90’s, for Townsend, certainly look hectic on paper: whilst touring the world with Steve Vai and The Wildhearts in the early nineties, jamming with Jason Newsted, dealing with corporate buffoons Roadrunner Records, recording the punk-opera Punky Brüster – Cooked on Phonics, formulating industrial destruction under the guise of Strapping Young Lad, coping with the harmful effects of hallucinogenic use and mental illness, Townsend was creating snippets of music that would feature on Ocean Machine.” Fluid dynamics.
“Tchornobog is Soroka’s attempt at infiltrating the extreme metal sect occupied by the likes of Portal and Abyssal; a brew of cavernous, cacophonous death metal, dripping with fringe-style elements that blur genre lines.” Gesundheit!
“The Midnight Ghost Train understand that they’ll find it difficult to survive in the avalanche of stoner-doom bands in existence these days, so they’ve taken a step back, dressed themselves in a morose southern armor, and decorated their largely hard-rock vehicle with funk, country, blues, stoner and sludge.” Watch for falling rock.
“There is something surprisingly comforting, dare I say nostalgic, in Nexul’s punishing full-length début Paradigm of Chaos. Perhaps it’s the wistfulness attached to the band’s raw, hissy black/death metal approach and over-the-top Luciferian imagery. Their music today appears as an echo of a homicidal time and place which the genre occupied during its infancy. As if a splinter of the heartfelt occult hatefulness of the early Norwegian black metal scene somehow made its way to El Paso, Texas.” Morbid tourist.
“The Cicada Tree finds the DIY experts on a major label, joining the Metal Blade juggernaut, and embracing their progressive tendencies more than ever before. Hints of their prominent influences, including nods to Pantera, Testament and Meshuggah, are still present, but as usual Byzantine discover innovative ways to transcend their influences into a crackling melting pot of creativity and powerhouse hooks.” Bitten by the prog bug.
“Ever since zombies killed his dog in 2007, Will Smith has been dealing with his grief in the healthy way: by gurgling, screaming, and howling his way across New York’s underground metal scene. Many will be familiar with his work in Buckshot Facelift and Artificial Brain, and his talents are just as well displayed in Afterbirth.” Rage therapy.
“If you’ve followed the band’s thirty year career at all, you may think you have an idea of what you’re in for; but Howling demonstrates a disregard for convention as flagrant as my indifference for sentence length.” Run-on with the pack.
