“Album length is an ongoing discussion here at Angry Metal Guy, with one side arguing for more material and the option to listen in parts or mix tracks into playlists, and the correct side arguing for self-editing, trimming the fat and creating a cohesive listening experience.” Revise, revisit, remove.
“It seems misogynistic violence is on trend in metalcore. Feed Her to the Sharks led the aquatic way with Zombies Ate My Girlfriend chomping in its wake, both exacting satisfying chugs and saccharine melodies unto the metal public in a reasonable throwback to the All That Remains– or Bullet For My Valentine-dominated scene from the mid-’00s. Now Shark Infested Daughters steps up to invoke unpleasant images of ravaged women with their debut, These Tides, Our Tombs.” Please don’t feed the freakin’ sharks!
“Every metal-head has their watershed moment; whether that’s Master of Puppets, Symbolic or actually Watershed, that magic album taps you on the shoulder and says “young poser, let me show you the way to trveness.” Chariots of the Gods bills itself as melodic metal with In Flames as its top influence, I’m feeling cautious yet optimistic.” Get ready to chug.
“It’s not every day that you see C.S. Lewis’ name in a metal review. But a Lewis cameo is inevitable when reviewing a band called Narnia. If you’ve never heard the band before, I bet you’re picturing seven full-album concepts based on Lewis’ Narnia saga. Well, put those thoughts away because they’re wrong. This Swedish power-metal outfit does indeed have seven records, but not a single one of them is a front-to-back concept. There are the occasional Narnia-influence songs but, for the most part, the band uses Lewis’ folklore as an instrument to spread the word of God; and not in a subtle way.” I think you’ve been lion!
“I’ve commented before on the excellence of select album covers and continue to keep an eye out for the very best of the bunch, often discovering new music simply on the merits of a killer Bandcamp icon. After all, if you’re an independent band with little in the way of PR, it pays to invest in a jacket that gets a listener’s proverbial foot in the door. Such seems to be the strategy of Tardive Dyskinesia, who know that even if you have a poor memory for names, at least you’ll remember this face.” Face-palm.
“You would figure that an album dedicated to a broken relationship would be excellent fodder for a metal band, yes? Israel’s Ferium is tackling that most touchy of subjects with their second full-length, Behind the Black Eyes. That poor, poor dude on the front cover…” Sad songs stab so much.
“King Goat hails from the mid-sized English city Brighton, the embodied karmic inverse of the Great Storm of 1703. Conduit, the band’s debut album, is a self-released album that they call “progressive doom metal.” The record consists of 5 long songs, is 42 minutes long and marks the band’s first release since two EPs from 2013. Most readers here are aware that I am not an epic consumer of doom metal, but Conduit spoke to me immediately. This band of Britons have crafted an album which successfully blends dark atmosphere, soaring vocals, ponderous builds, and an epic feel that compels a listener forward.” Candlemass-core no more!
“There are many types of melodeath; the moody, acoustic-tinged odes of ’90s Dark Tranquillity, the thrashier Gothenburg style favored by early In Flames and At The Gates (and the thousands of other bands that ape them), as well as the poppier sound of Soilwork clones that seemed to crawl out of the woodwork in the late 2000s (hey, look, In Flames again!).” Kronos loves to classify and identify things. It’s what he does.
![Slugdge – Dim and Slimeridden Kingdoms [Things You Might Have Missed 2015]](https://www.angrymetalguy.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/12/Slugdge_Dim-and-Slimeridden-Kingdoms-768x768.jpg)
“Slugdge aren’t in the business of repeating themselves or narrowing their artistic scope. As such Dim and Slimeridden Kingdoms stands on its own as another weird, tripped-out journey into the strange headspace that Slugdge occupy.”
You can’t spell Slugdge without…sludge?
“If Luc Lemay wrote a deathgrind album, the early demos would sound something like Okazaki Fragments. Earlier this year, the Calgary-based extreme metal outfit’s debut Abandoned blindsided me like a drive-by at Tim Horton’s by mixing rabid grindcore with the avant-garde tendencies of Gorguts and Pyrrhon in search of an ever more deformed and disgusting style of death metal. They found it.” Colour Kronos impressed.
