“While I love the scorched-earth pummeling of bands like Revenge and Bestial Warlust, I’ll be the first to admit the genre isn’t exactly known for its variety and memorability. To me the style needs some musicality to balance out the brutality, otherwise, I’d just be blasting Tetragrammacide all day and sending my entire paycheck to Hells Headbangers. Fortunately, this was something New Zealand quartet Heresiarch understood pretty well.” Tuneful war.
“What do you get when you cross a werewolf with a goat? If you guessed “39 minutes of barbaric blackened death metal,” congratulations and welcome to a world where the only thing more bestial than the music is the sexual activity it describes.” Animal husbandry.
“In terms of sound, little has changed in the Origin camp since Antithesis. The excessive hyper-blasting, the tandem bass and lead guitar sweeps and taps, the switch to chunkier riffs before going back into hyper-technicality; it’s all here in fine enough form. Of course it’s more restrained than Brain Drill (really, what isn’t?), but Origin still traffics in very clinical chaos.” Legacy of br00tality.
“Hailing from the windy city, Broken Hope are known for dealing in what could be referred to as second-tier Suffocation or Deicide-inspired death metal, with some healthy Napalm Death grindcore influence.” Hope is never lost, just a bit broken.
“Heavy metal, despite primarily being a possession of what we proudly call the underground, is not impervious to the revisionist proclivity of plucking from the past with genres like re-thrash, Even Newer Wave of British Heavy Metal, occult rock, and currently on the chopping block, retro-Swedish death. 2014’s EP, Interstellar Knowledge of the Purple Entity was my introduction proper to Skelethal and it just about made me turn my Fruit of the Looms into a fudge factory. At just 21 minutes, it was a perfect little window to the days of yore when Entombed and particularly Carnage were all.” The Play Doh Fudge Factory is not as fun as it sounds.
“Sometimes, when that flight of masochistic fancy hits, we here at AMG like to play a little game lovingly referred to as Promo Roulette – not unlike Russian Roulette, but with every chamber loaded with disaster and disappointment. The powers that be randomly assign a project, comfortable in the knowledge that the first, last and only rule of said gamble is: the house always wins. On occasion, however, it is possible to steal a non-fatal cranial grazing and happen upon something worthwhile. So when the relative quality of Akatharta’s debut, Spiritus Immundus, rebounded off my ferrous hide and into my lap, I was pleasantly surprised.” You got lucky, Beuller!
“Some 20 years ago, several prominent NOLA scene members activated Goatwhore and a new beast and underground supergroup was born, most notably featuring Acid Bath/Crowbar axeslinger Sammy Duet and Soilent Green frontman Ben Falgoust. It took a while before Goatwhore perfected their blasphemous style of sludgy, death-infused black metal, striking pay-dirt with the back-to-back punch of 2006’s A Haunting Curse and 2009’s Carving Out the Eyes of God. Since then they’ve been treading water with a couple of solid but less engaging albums, lacking the staying power of their best work.” Goats are excellent swimmers.
“Of all the metal sub-genres to come to prominence in the last decade or so, perhaps the most frustrating is the so-called “caverncore” style. We’ve heard it time and again: murky guitars, gurgly vocals, and an unabashed love for Incantation in both sound and artwork. While it’s proven a successful sonic palette for bands like Cruciamentum and Dead Congregation (not to mention the recent Cemetery Urn album), many of these groups simply mire themselves in a riff-less murk that makes even Alestorm seem appealing.” When the crevice calls.
“Despite the myriad of line-up changes and a couple of sub-par albums, Dying Fetus have kept on trucking, paring themselves down to a lean and destructive trio and bouncing back to top form with 2012’s Reign Supreme. Now, some five years in the making they return with their eighth full-length release. So how does Wrong One to Fuck With stack up in the Fetus canon?” Load the Fetus cannon!
“A strange analogue runs alongside my taste in traditional Swedish death — namely, my love for the classic horror fiction circulated by American publisher EC Comics in the mid 50’s. If you’re unaware of their pulp pressings, first of all: be ashamed, and second: do yourself a favor and Google the morbid pencil-work of Graham Ingels and scare yourself up some culture. The dark yet direct content of that material emphasized familiar characteristics I would soon come to recognize in the Stockholm death metal scene, infamous for its D.I.Y. brand of incipient malcontent, braced by a dirge of funeral winds and sci-fi malice aforethought.” Hello and goodbye again.
