“Oh math, how I hate you. Next to physics (which ruined my day with its so-called “gravity” as I scaled my childhood tree fort and refuses me the privilege to smoothly glide around corners in my front-wheel-drive Pontiac Vibe), math straight-up pisses me off. You’re probably asking yourself, what does Dr. Grier’s Rant of the Day have to do with Continuum’s debut release?” You may or may not get an answer to that over all this loudness. Sweet Fallujah!
“Say what you will about Arizona’s Job for a Cowboy, but the divisive modern death metal unit certainly inspires fierce debate between metalheads on either side of the fence. I haven’t found much reason to form a strong opinion for the band one way or another, aside from their preposterous choice of moniker, and frankly I’ve been fairly nonplussed about their career thus far. Of course, for many they got off on the wrong foot from the beginning with the dreaded deathcore tag hanging heavily over their 2005 debut Doom EP.” God, I hate this band name so damn much.
“It was only a matter of time before a high-profile tech-death / djent mashup appeared on the scene. If you were hanging from your 8th string with bated breath for this moment, it has finally arrived: A mere year after their inception, Pennsylvania upstarts Rivers of Nihil are crashing the gates via Metal Blade. Their debut, The Conscious Seed of Light, is slightly baffling. On one hand, it’s easy to dismiss the album as an aural collage of the t-shirts in the band’s collective closet. At times, it plays out like a modern metal Power Point presentation: Bass-lick dropouts, open string chughammers, and spiraling-into-spaaaaaace shreddery all pop up within the first handful of minutes. The trope-aping is achingly obvious. That other hand, though? It itches to wipe away the clouds of cynicism.” Tech-death meets djent? How did this take so long, and now that it’s here, is it any good? Complicated questions indeed and here’s our man Jordan Campbell with some answers.
I’ve been waiting for a long time to get to Abysmal Dawn’s new disc Leveling the Plane of Existence. Having had a 2010 that was sadly devoid of mind-blowing technical death metal (excepting Hour of Penance’s Paradogma), I was really looking forward to a slab of technical death metal mastery that is being sold by Relapse as the savior of American death metal. While I wouldn’t go that far, Abysmal Dawn does offer up some solid technical death metal that is well-played, well-written and full of enough novel ideas and good riffs to make the record enjoyable. And the band has a unique, melodic voice that separates it from the pack.
