Halo is Amorphis’s 14th studio album and 2022 marks the 30th anniversary since The Karelian Isthmus first graced this world, and at this point, Amorphis sounds like no one but Amorphis. After 30 years of Amorphis, will they ever bow before the might of Angry Metal Guy’s Law of Diminishing Recordings?
“Snakes are as metal as skulls and demons, and nighttime is when all the fun, sketchy things happen. Ipso facto, Night Cobra is a spectacular name for a metal band. Especially for one throwing back so hard to the early 80s that they probably suffered slipped discs and Romulan back gout. On their Dawn of the Serpent debut, these Texas-based retro rockers deliver a mix of NWoBHM and early American power metal.” Snake bitten.
“Author and Punisher albums seem to alternate between anthemic and ambitious. Women & Children saw Tristan Shone’s transhumanist industrial drone-doom project spinning out singles with the force of a hundred pound steel drum, an approach echoed by 2018’s belligerent Beastland. But between them, the disturbing, experimental Melk en Honing took a slower, nastier pace, savoring the acrid stench of electrocuted machine-oil that the music produces. So does Krüller, Shone’s densest work yet.” Punishment and dystopian donuts.
“The most frightening album I ever bought was in 1984, a cassette called War and Pain, issued by the weirdly-named Voivod. Up here in Canada it came out on Banzai Records, a strange little upstart that licensed metal albums not otherwise available. Anyhow, back in the 80s my pals and I snapped up everything on that label, even when we had no clue who the band was. We were pretty lucky – Metallica, Exciter, Slayer, Venom, all sorts of great up-and-comers. And then this one. Pressing play on the tape deck resulted in some of the scariest, heaviest thrash-death-punk shit we’d ever heard. That was our introduction to Voivod.” War, pain, anarchy, progress.
“Time WAITs for no sponge. This apparently holds true for my unfortunate green friend to my left, the sands of time quite literally gushing out of his be-hourglassed noggin. The oddly disturbing artwork depicting this surreal injury translates to the weird and wacky, grungy prog-death stylings of Baltimore’s WAIT (short for We are in Transit). A supergroup of sorts, the trio pulls from the pool of live performers who jammed for acts ranging from Cynic to Defeated Sanity to Obscura, so it comes as no surprise to me that debut album The End of Noise promises to be a twisted and technical affair.” Difficult commute.
“I’m kind of obsessed with hammers. Write a song about hammers, and I’ll probably like it. Include “hammer” as part of your band name, and I’ll probably like your band. In a roleplaying game, make hammers a wieldable weapon, and, by god, I’m going to wield one (or two). I don’t know how to build shit, but I own a framing hammer and sleep with it next to my bed for personal protection. I use a twenty-pound sledge for my conditioning workouts, often while Asphyx’s “Deathhammer” plays in the background on repeat. Anyway, now you know why I felt so compelled to give Cleveland’s Hammr a swing.” Hammr time.
“Since AMG Industries Inc. resolutely refuses to pay me market value anything at all for my Indispensable Thoughts on Music™, I am forced to hold down a day job. In that day job, I am a lawyer. And lawyers love disclosures and disclaimers. So here’s one for you: I am an avowed Cult of Luna fanboy. My relationship with these Swedes goes all the way back to the moment I heard “The Watchtower” (from 2003’s The Beyond) on a sampler CD that came free with a magazine. I was blown away by the long-form, post-hardcore bombast.” Fanboy roadshow.
“Thorn, a one-man act from Arizona, used to dwell in the chunky sloth of death/doom with debut Crawling Worship, focusing heartily on concrete-thick slogs and hell-scraping gutturals. Amping the tempo while letting old habits die hard, sophomore effort Yawning Depths offers a beatdown not unlike sole member Brennen Westermeyer’s other brutal deathgrind project Fluids. Borrowing influences from post-metal and doom, it’s a shape-shifting experience that is as relentless as it is meditative.” Sleepy bulldozers.
“The fusion of death metal and doom metal is something I’ve never fully embraced as a purveyor of the heavy and hard-hitting. I mean, I should have, a long time ago—death metal is usually more extreme than I’m in the mood for and doom metal is great, if occasionally too un-speedy, so the blending should work. Sometimes it does—Rise to the Sky has certainly made a fan of me—but it just isn’t something I often seek out. When I first sampled The Final Sleep, a five-piece band from the United States of whom four are guitarists (yes, one of them is a bassist), I was drawn to the almost-progressive style of the vaguely doom-ish death metal on their sophomore release Vessels of Grief.” To sleep, perchance to scream.
“Not being an especially spiritual bloke, I only took a flyer on Mass Worship’s sophomore platter Portal Tombs because they were tagged “death metal” in our greasy promo sump. Well, the promo sump sits on a greasy throne of greasy lies! These Swedish sadists are NOT death metal, and it’s actually a challenge to explain what they are. I can tell you Portal Tombs is a ridiculously heavy slab of extreme metal designed to smother and obliterate all light and joy from this cursed world. Their style rumbles through death, black, sludge, doom and grind genres like a nuclear-powered killdozer, and the band is more than happy to beat you with any and all tools they come across during their bloody rampage.” Portals and tombs but no cake at all.
