“I felt awful foolish choosing Skindred’s promo when no one else did. My brain was adequately pummeled by single “Gimme That Boom,” complete with its curb-stomping riffs, plodding drums, and Benji Webbe’s formidable vocals and memorable one-liners, providing a perfect soundtrack for the NFL intro to Thursday Night Football. While grooving, I kinda forgot about the fact that the Welsh quartet was a force to be reckoned with in the late 2000s and early 2010s.” Skin in the game.
“As I’ve said before, Morbid Angel changed my life. I listened to thrash and heavy metal in my impressionable years, but never clicked with anything more extreme. Then one day over winter break in high school, I stumbled upon the music video for “Where the Slime Live.” Life was never the same. The criminally underrated Domination opened the doors to old-school death metal and shoved me through them headfirst.” Angel of brutality.
![Wormrot – Hiss [Things You Might Have Missed 2022]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/12/Wormrot-Hiss-01-2048x2048.jpg.webp)
“Time—Hiss took even more time than Voices. For 21 tracks that span 33 minutes, six years? Well, unlike Wormrotߵs last outing, Hiss, in the spirit of the full-color rendering that garnishes the cover, is lush, which is not a word we often associate with the furious and grinding arts.” What’s that noise??
“Heartwork, the fourth album by Liverpool’s Carcass, was an anomaly in 1993 for several reasons. Sure, the signs existed on 1991’s Necroticism – Descanting the Insalubrious that the Brits were growing more proficient at their instruments, and were slowly leaving their goregrind roots behind them. But while Necroticism kept one foot in their murky, surgically grotesque past, Heartwork, saw Carcass eschewing gory lyrics and guitarist Bill Steer’s growls entirely, trimming the fat considerably, and saw them streamline their attack with incredible lead guitar work, hooks galore, and a simplified verse/chorus/verse approach, angering their diehard fanbase.” Still working.
“Formed in 1990 by prolific bass-slinging band whore Dan Lilker (Anthrax, Nuclear Assault, Blurring, Venomous Concept, S.O.D. & many others), New York’s Brutal Truth threw their hats into the grind ring and captured lightning in a bottle with their phenomenal 1992 debut, Extreme Conditions Demand Extreme Responses; a dead-set grind classic, now certified as an olde motherfucker. There’s something special about Brutal Truth’s underappreciated debut that sets it apart from pretty much any other grind album I’ve experienced.” The ugly truth.
“Few bands in extreme metal history are as respected and revered as Liverpool’s legendary Carcass. The trailblazing innovators and genre pioneers began their career in humble fashion as a scraggly trio of youths hell-bent on creating the most disgusting and reviled music the world had ever experienced.” Carcass nostalgia.
“Let’s go ahead and acknowledge this up front: of all the big-name old school death metal bands, Morbid Angel has arguably fared the worst. Sure, they had a few stumbles over the years – 1995’s Domination had some serious clunkers, and 2003’s Heretic was supposedly singlehandedly responsible for getting the group dropped from Earache – but the real deathblow came in 2011, with a little record called Illud Divinum Insanus.” Are you still morbid?
“Arizona thrashers Vektor hold a special place in my cold black heart, as their previous album Outer Isolation was one of my very first reviews for this esteemed website. Crazy to think that that was five years ago, and crazier still is that Vektor has not released any new music in that half-decade — practically an eternity in today’s climate of short attention spans and equally short tour/record/tour cycles. Fortunately, Vektor has finally rewarded their fans’ patience with a lengthy, almost impossibly dense record called Terminal Redux.”
“1996. Yours truly graduated high school and landed a job at what would end up being GameStop. At the Electronics Boutique I was working at (Rockingham Park, Salem, New Hampshire), I would sometimes be visited by a lanky, long-haired dude wearing various different black metal shirts. One shirt was of a band called December Wolves, and I told him that was an interesting name for a band. He smiled and said, “Thanks, man. I’m the bass player. Check us out sometime.” Yep, that’s my story of how I met Brian Izzi (now best known as the guitarist for crusty grinders Trap Them) and got wind of December Wolves.” Tales of wind and wolves shall trap them all.
“Evile has always occupied a strange space in the re-thrash movement. They seem to be one of the big wigs in the scene, yet I hear far less buzz about them than many other retro acts. They are also one of the few bands to eschew the common Slayer, Exodus and Testament mimicking in favor of a much more traditional Metallica influence. Their sound generally exists in the phantom zone between the Master of Puppets and And Justice for All eras and the later works of long overlooked Wargasm.” That combo sounds like a can’t miss, right? When you’re talking about skull tank music, you can never be too sure, so you better find out where Steel Druhm stands on the Skull.
