“Now, don’t get me wrong, being the child of the thrash era, I love when a song turns on end and a chugging lick crescendos into a neck-snapping attack. But, I also miss the days when a band could write a thrash classic that wasn’t waiting around for that mid-song savagery. War Curse also remember those good ol’ days. That’s why they gave us Eradication.” War Curse (and Pepperidge Farms remember).
“What a long strange trip its been for Saint Vitus. One of American’s oldest doom bands, they’ve been grinding away since the late 70s. Contemporaries of Pentagram and Trouble, they’ve always stood apart, doing their own thing while maintaining an enigmatic outsider status. They’ve released some important albums over their long career, like their self-titled debut, Born Too Late and V, but after 1995’s Die Healing opus, the band called it quits, with a few sporadic reformations occurring since.” Half-life.
“Some people spend their weekend running errands, and I’m no different. This weekend, as I write this review, I’ll be running a fool’s errand and disagreeing with the genre tag of a “deathcore” album. Genre fans and detractors will have the same reaction: “who cares, it’s all about the chugs anyway.” You chug water for different reasons than you chug beer (unless it’s Coors Light, which is both). The Rack chugs and Eternal Nightmare chugs. Disma chugs and Carnifex chugs. All of this is to say, Eye of the Destroyer’s second LP is beatdown, not deathcore.” Advanced pigeonholing.
“During the Great N00b Off, I told myself that, should I one day be given unchaperoned access to the promo bin, I absolutely would not choose a band purely on the basis of its name. I would do my research and make an informed decision. So, following my first foray into the promo bin sans Steel Druhm, take a bow John, the Void, a band I chose purely for its name.” What’s in a name?
“There’s so much music out there that it’s easy for good bands to get lost in the shuffle. Enter Ares Kingdom. Formed in 1996 by guitarist Chuck Keller and drummer Mike Miller shortly before the breakup of their famed blackened death metal band Order From Chaos, the Kansas City group soon added vocalist and bassist Alex Blume (Blasphemic Cruelty) to their ranks to become the ultimate death-thrash power trio. Their 2006 debut Return to Dust and 2010’s Incendiary are two of my favorite albums the genre has ever produced, with the latter still reigning as one of my favorite records of this decade. The band’s frantic and melodic riffing, dynamic songwriting, and empowering lyrics about warfare and history have always reminded me of a death-ier Destroyer 666, which is about the highest compliment that can be given by a slobbering D666 fanboy like myself.” Gods of War (metal).
“There are a lot of factors that come into play when a person decides to pick up new music to listen to, but the band name is really the most important one. Take Monasterium, for example. The word, discontinued in today’s vernacular, could refer to either a monastery or a monk’s cell within a monastery in Medieval-era English. And, really, that’s all I needed to know before grabbing Church of Bones, the band’s sophomore effort, from the Promo Bin and letting it take over my week.” Monastic metal.
“Ov all the cruel ironies in this angry metal world, black metal’s oversaturated state, at this point presumably mere days from breaching mainstream radio status, is likely the one that yanks my unicorn the most. That the brave new musical world discovered by such wanderers as Burzum, Mayhem, and Bathory would be further explored and defiled in time was never a question, yet the rampant proliferation of new obsidian acts we find ourselves plagued with is less akin to expansion than to… well, frankly, a fucking plague.” Semi-cold.
“Though everything SME has released is solid, III brought with it a new vocalist and direction. Building atmospheres now reign supreme over the band’s early days of traditional black metal. The result, as I mentioned in my III review, was something spontaneous, borrowing from a variety of black and death metal influences. Though III concluded the trilogy, there’s still loads of fun to be had on Hologram Temple.” Diversity stings.
“’The first draft of almost everything you produce is shit. And the second draft is usually also shit. But you never wind up with anything worthwhile without producing those early drafts.’ A wise supervisor once told me these words, and she was right. Whether a terrified n00b trying to avoid the perils of the AMG Skull Pit, or attempting a complicated academic research paper, the early stages of anything worthwhile are often about finding your identity and your voice. That process can be messy and unglamorous, but it’s how anything great gets made.” Revise, Mutherf_ _ _ _ _!
“I slink out of the Double R Diner booth I’m seated in and saunter over to where Audrey Horne is swaying in the center of the restaurant. Eyes closed, head back, fingers loosely splayed out, I join her in an unhurried groovy dance and lose myself to the music. I watch as a wash of color on the back of my eyelids slowly morphs with the ebb and flow of the music. The soundtrack to our dance, however, is strangely not Angelo Badalamenti’s jazz instrumental but “Muted Shifting of Space,” the hypnotic opening track on BIG|BRAVE’s new fourth full-length album A Gaze Among Them.” Stranger, louder things.
