Cabrio - Devotion and Hate

It's a'ight

To be completely honest with you, I have a nasty habit of treating Latin America as something of a meme when it comes to heavy metal.  I recognize the unfairness considering Brazil is an undisputed metal hotspot, with Sepultura and Sarcofago helping lay the groundwork for extreme metal in general (not to mention Vulcano and Krisiun), and of course we can't forget their strong power metal scene with Angra and Hibria.  Mexico gave the world The Chasm, and even the hellhole of Colombia is technically responsible for Inquisition (even though the vast majority of their music was released after Dagon moved to the US), et cetera et cetera.  I dunno, I think the inherent Engrish goofiness of Sarcofago rubbed off on a lot of bands in the region and the whole place became known for ALKOHOLIC HELLTHRASH 666!!!! type nonsense.  At least that's what happened in my own mind.

So it was with much trepidation that I decided to give Chilean thrashers, Cabrio, a listen.  My prejudices are pretty well ingrained at this point, so I can say with confidence that Devotion and Hate has done a lot to dispel the stereotypes in my mind.  Don't get me wrong, this is hellish thrash metal to the bone, but it puts forth a distinctly South American attitude while thankfully completely eschewing that idiotic SMOKE BEER!!! aesthetic I've always hated.  Cabrio plays a style that's very heavily rooted in the more American style of thrash that Exodus helped make popular with a hefty dose of the very metal-leaning hardcore of Hatebreed, but there's a raw edge to it that keeps it just rough and nasty enough to stand out.  I think it's the vocals that make the music impossible to fully divorce from their geographic origins.  Andres has a rather thick accent to his ferocious (yet clear) hardcore bark that stands out to my cornbread ass, so every shout of TWAHNNY THAHSSIN TAHNS immediately transports me to the southern hemisphere.

But taking all of that away, the music itself is vicious and entertaining.  Devotion and Hate is pounding thrash metal that never truly breaks out into a completely frantic pace, but there's a very heavy skippiness to the riffs that ensures the mighty weight of the band never gives way to dull grooves or fast-for-the-sake-of-it thrash.  The band's only real downfall is that the songwriting itself tends to rest on its laurels and doesn't always grab your attention.  There are great tracks here, like the monstrously heavy "Twenty Thousand Tons", the venom-spewing ferocity of "Seed of Deception", or the tempo-shifting maelstrom of "Dios Sin Fe", but most of the rest of the album just kinda unremarkably fades into the white noise.  What's here is indeed good, but it doesn't have a whole lot of lasting impact.  It's a flaw that's both major and minor, because when it is on, it's vicious and biting the whole way through.  Unfortunately, at some point you're gonna have to turn it off and listen to something else, and when that happens it might be tough to remember to revisit it.


RATING: 70%

Corrosive - Nourished by Blood

Murder in the every row

Corrosive is most well known for stealing the band name I came up with when I was 12.  But beyond that, they really don't seem to be all that well known at all, releasing a mere three albums across twenty four years, amassing zero reviews on MA.  This is a fucking shame because, if Nourished by Blood is anything to go by, Corrosive is the true heir to the crown Vomitory dropped on their way out of the scene.

So yeah, these Germans rip shit to shreds with alarming regularity on this album.  The wall of sound production creates an explosive element to the already ruinous music, with the nonstop percussionary salvo decimating eardrums at every turn.  This congeals with an absolute whirlwind of tremolo devastation that ultimately creates a monstrous blast of destructive death metal that pretty much instantly hooked me.  Those two sentences pretty much sum up the entire album, because while this is superb in execution, there really isn't any real innovation or anything to cement it as a future classic.  It plays into the tropes of the blast obsessed legends out of Europe like the aforementioned Vomitory, Unleashed, and Vader, but that's not really a problem considering all three of those bands completely fucking smoke.  The lone misstep is probably the weird and gloomy "God Gives" near the end, with an ill-fitting whispered outro and muddy acoustic guitars.  I get what it was going for, but the churning atmosphere doesn't really work.  The band's strength very clearly lies in the other ten tracks (excluding the intro) where they just put the pedal to the floor and mow down a crowd with the head-slicing wall from Caligula. 

There's very little to say about Nourished by Blood really, but I'd say the shallow, one-dimensional approach works extremely well here since they show up with one purpose and execute it nearly flawlessly.  The odd "God Gives", the groovy "War is My Inspiration", and the weird cover of the Ghostbusters theme song are the only thematic breaks from single-minded aural warfare, and even then only two of those three don't really work.  I'm sorry, the Ghostbusters theme is already perfect and adding blasts and growls to it while keeping the main melody intact in its original major key only makes me think of the fucking terrible Crazy Chocobo song from Final Fantasy XIII-2.  For those of you that aren't hopeless dorks, be fucking glad you don't know what that is.


RATING: 81%

Lost in Pain - Gold Hunters

*yawn*

Well I've got a new pin in my Metal Globe it seems.  According to MA, Luxembourg has had a grand total of 86 metal bands throughout history, only 38 of which are currently active.  So it's pretty cool to know that roughly 1% of the country's metal fans are all in Lost in Pain.

Lost in Pain is some sort of Schrodinger's Metal Band, existing as both the nebulous blend of trad/thrash metal that Metallica made their trademark in the mid 80s and as the heavier, more meaty modern thrash of post-The Gathering Testament (a band who themselves have always been massively influenced by Metallica, of course), and whichever one they sound more like depends on which influence you're looking for.  It's like one of those optical illusions that looks like either a duck or a rabbit depending on which way you look at it.  Gold Hunters sounds like either Metallica or Testament depending on which way your ears are shifted.

That's not to say they're a total clone band of the two though.  Nah, they do indeed sound like their own band, but the songs themselves don't really stand out a whole lot.  There are moments here and there, sure, like the breakdown at the end of "A Word" or the pounding bass intro of "Rebellious Protestors", but for the most part this is just kind of a blur of white noise.  For a band that focuses more on riffs and intensity than melody or atmosphere, they kinda drop the ball by not really having all that many great riffs or intense moments.  It's nice that the album is short and doesn't really get an opportunity to truly become boring, but apart from a few cool groovy moments or totally punishing double bass sections, this just kinda fades like Mr. Meeseeks the instant it's over and does what it sets out to do.  I kinda struggle with what exactly to call this, because it's very "modern" in every sense of the word but doesn't really sound like what you'd consider "modern metal" to be.  The opening title track focuses on a very Lamb of God style main riff before transitioning to a fairly pleasant and radio friendly chorus that's reminiscent of Trivium, but it never really sounds like the more metalcore aspects of either of those bands either, instead touching on their 80s thrash influences without ever being an 80s thrash throwback itself.  The closest we ever truly get is the closer, "The Great Illusion", which is basically their "Dyer's Eve".

So yeah, despite what I've said, if pressed for a definitive answer, I'd say this errs more on the modern Testament side than anything else.  And that's fine, Testament has had a few great tracks since their resurgence, but Gold Hunters doesn't really do anything exciting on its own.  The gruff vocals and massive production sound great but they aren't utilized in an exciting way.  The sound is here, the aggression is here, but the songwriting and staying power is lacking.


RATING: 50%

Thronehammer - Usurper of the Oaken Throne

OUCH MY SKULL

I really expected to hate Thronehammer right out of the gate here.  It's well known that I don't like albums that are excruciatingly fucking long, and Usurper of the Oaken Throne sits at an offensive 78 minutes long, with the first three songs alone taking up almost 50 of those minutes.  It's also slow doom metal, which almost guarantees it'll be dull and repetitive the whole time and it'll make those 78 minutes feel like six hours.  I groaned as I loaded this one up for the first time.

As you can probably expect, this absolutely shattered my expectations.

Thronehammer is an international project, with the instrumentalists based out of Germany and the vocalist out of the UK, and while it is indeed slow, repetitive doom metal, it's presented in such a punishing, crushing way that I just felt my spine snap under the pressure the first time I heard this.  All three members are at the top of their games here, cranking out absolutely devastating riffs with powerful vocals carrying the listener through this gorgeous torture.  It's just dirge after dirge after dirge with no end in sight, riffs will repeat a hundred times in a row but it still feels like an almost Monolithe style bludgeoning where the lengthy runtimes are still dozens of different ideas at once.  It doesn't even feel really thin on riffs and ideas despite so few of them actually being on display.  It's just hypnotic and devastating and I love it.

Against my usual instincts, I'd even say that the best songs are the longest ones.  "Behind the Wall of Frost" and "Warhorn" take up nearly forty minutes on their own, but they're both the biggest and most oppressively destructive songs on display.  The pace never picks up at any point throughout Usurper of the Oaken Throne, but it doesn't really need to.  There are subtle synths in the background of the former track that help it sound even more massive than it already does, and the main riff repeats a trillion times but it's so simplistically cataclysmic that it never gets boring.  The latter track is similar in that regard, though it more overtly shifts through different moods and themes, but the monolithic pace and pounding riffs never let up.  This is metal that min/maxed for total demolition.  It's all heaviness and no speed (apart from the mid-paced climax of "Warhorn"), and for this type of glacial oppression that's exactly what I want.  It's not quite funeral doom, despite how much I'm playing up the overwhelming heaviness, but it's damn close to being equally as heavy as Tyranny.

That's really all there is to Thronehammer, just massive riffs with enough weight to shatter an elephant's spine delivered at a pace that would be torturous if the riffs themselves weren't so effective.  Between this and Smoulder, I'd say doom is having an incredibly strong 2019.  The only real flaw of the album is that it isn't as strong in the second half, but that's something that all lengthy albums face so I'm willing to consider that a me problem and figure I'd like it equally as much if the tracks were randomized.


RATING: 90%

Hellripper - Black Arts & Alchemy

In league with the entire Ars Goetia

Hellripper is a good example of how to do a clone band correctly.  On the surface, James McBain's one-man project of pure devastation is commonly known as "The Midnight of Scotland", and that isn't wrong, but instead of sounding like a hollow shell of that American monolith of throwback viciousness, Black Arts & Alchemy is every bit as wild and frenzied as any other band in the current scene. 

This kid knows what he's doing, because Hellripper is the exact kind of beer-and-hash-soaked demonry that bands like Midnight and Whipstriker have been making popular in recent years.  This kind of Venom-cum-Motorhead-cum-Onyourface is just a god damned blast and I'm cool with bands aping this sound as shamelessly as possible for the foreseeable future.  There's very little here beyond the surface flash of high octane 70s Motorhead put through the filter of virgin sacrifice and bloody sodomy and fuck that's all I want it to be.  This is primo caveman metal, with no greater goal beyond simply rocking the fuck out as hard as possible and breaking as many faces as possible on your way through.  These riffs sound like a Harley doing a burnout on your face, what the fuck else do you want?

There isn't much to dig into considering that, even beyond being very simple black/speed metal in the vein of early Venom, it's only a four track EP.  "All Hail the Goat" starts off sounding like a biker bar on fire and it never slows down from there.  All four tracks sound pretty much the same but they all fucking rock so who cares?  It's fast, high octane metalpunk with the speed and energy of early 80s German speed metal and it sounds exactly like how you're imagining it to sound.  My only regret is that the digital promo doesn't include the fifth track, a CD-only bonus track cover of Running Wild's "Iron Heads".  If you don't know why that will inevitably being the banger of the fucking century then I don't even want to know you.

For what it's worth, the first five times I tried to listen to this, I'd get about halfway through the first track before iTunes would crash.  Black Arts & Alchemy is so vicious that it kills technology.


RATING: 93%

Entrapment - Imminent Violent Death

Suck dis member

Well if nothing else, this is the best fuckin' album cover I'm going to see all year.

Entrapment hails from the Netherlands, and they carry some of the Dutch trademarks of Asphyx/Van Drunen, but one look at their band logo should tell you where their hearts truly lie.  Yeah, these guys are Swedeath to the bone, doing everything they can to replicate that famous Sunlight Studios sound and loading their fourth album, Imminent Violent Death with loads of d-beats and hoarse shouting, but at the end of the day there's really not much to say about these guys other than "They're a Dismember clone".

Now let's gone one thing straight: Dismember absolutely fucking rules.  I'd go so far as to put Like an Everflowing Stream right at the very apex of the Swedeath hierarchy in general, above even seminal classics like Left Hand Path and Dark Recollections.  So if there's any band you're going to rip off, Dismember is a damn good choice.  I don't think innovation is a necessity in metal, per se.  I think bands that just play by the rules can absolutely fucking smoke.  Hell, Demonical is another band that just jerks off Dismember a whole bunch and they've been one of the most consistently entertaining bands in the style throughout the decade.

So where does that leave Entrapment?  Well, a couple of notches below bands like Demonical and Smothered.  There's nothing inherently wrong with this album, it's just another drop in the bucket and doesn't do a whole lot to stand out.  There aren't any bad tracks here, just no great ones.  The closest thing there is is probably "Morbid Habitation" simply because it's the fastest and most manic, with vocals being delivered at a Corpsegrinderesque pace.  "Process of Dehumanization" and "Sacrilegious Congregation" are based around some ferocious, violent riffage, while "Sanctifying Putrescent" is just pure fucking speed the whole time, and there are some nice dips in tempo on tracks like "Incantation of the Grotesque" to keep things from getting to stale, but ultimately this is pretty cookie cutter Swedeath we've all heard a million times before. 

It's hard to say more about it because that's basically all there is here.  It's razor sharp riffs with pummeling ferocity but it's pretty unremarkable on the whole.  There's nothing wrong with paying homage to your heroes, but Imminent Violent Death is just really average Dismember worship and that's the long and short of it.


RATING: 69%

Battle Beast - No More Hollywood Endings

This would've died in The Eclipse

I know I just recently reviewed Battle Beast's self titled sophomore album, and I stand by my assertion that they were damn great pop metal with enough bite to really stick with you despite their bread and butter being cheesy 80s dorkery.  I didn't really touch on it in too much depth there, but it's worth noting that throughout their first three albums, guitarist Anton Kabanen was the sole songwriter and lyricist.  Literally no other members wrote anything if I understand correctly, they were more or less just following his lead.  And then, for reasons that I don't think were ever really made public, he was unceremoniously booted from his own band, and the rest of the guys decided to truck on without the only guy who seemed to know what he was doing.  Maybe he was a control freak and they actually wanted to contribute, I have no idea.  I just know that Bringer of Pain was very obviously a huge step down from the previous three albums that made me fall in love with this stupid band.  Battle Beast was always formulaic, but that one really just felt like the band plugging in components into the slots where they were "supposed" to fit based on what Anton had done up until that point.  There were still some solid songs here and there (the title track is the lone fast metal song and it was good, and I'll stick up for "Familiar Hell" all damn day based on how infectiously catchy it was) but it was a clear step down.

However, I'm willing to give them time to adjust and find their own footing.  They were scrambling trying to do it on their own for the first time, surely they just needed an album to adjust.

Yeah that didn't happen.

No More Hollywood Endings, the band's fifth album, fourth with Noora on vocals, and second without Anton doing all the work, is an absolute fucking travesty.  If you thought the last album was on autopilot, this one is the part where the plane gets struck by lightning and plunges into a mountainside.  This is the sound of a band that is so clearly not trying that it's almost heartbreaking.  Or... well, maybe they are trying, but they're not aiming for the same targets they used to.

It's fine for a band to evolve of course, but you really can't be shocked to discover that an old fan like me thinks this is a fucking embarrassment.  This is pure, unabashed, shameless, cheap, idiotic, cynical corsetcore from start to finish.  All of that attitude and swagger they used to carry in addition to the inoffensive pop is completely washed away, replaced with nothing except weak non-riffs, drums that might as well be Preset #1 on a cheap keyboard, and lame vocals.  Every single song here, with a whopping two exceptions, sounds like that one shitty band that Anette Olzon formed after she was kicked out of Nightwish.  Everything is played at the same tempo, with the same chugging 80s glam riffs, with the same focus-tested vocal melodies, everything is just tailor made specifically to rack up huge hits on Youtube thanks to a thumbnail that invariably features Noora's cleavage (side note, I wrote that sentence based on years of Nuclear Blast and Napalm's lesser bands hitting huge numbers for that exact reason, but decided to double check before making that claim here since Battle Beast never really played up the sexuality despite having a female singer but hey whaddaya know the video for Eden is advertised with the exact shot I was imagining). 

It's really clear now that Battle Beast doesn't really want to be a metal band anymore and are aiming for genuine mainstream success, but before that happens they're going to need to change their name or something, because there is neither battle nor beast here.  The pop elements are no longer mere elements, they are the entire base of the songs now, with whatever metal remains being tertiary bits like a guitar solo here or a curse word there, but this is pretty nakedly just 80s pop/glam with nothing else behind it.  It's a shameless and unimaginative throwback played with zero conviction or adrenaline, it's just tracing old pictures and coloring inside the lines.  Bringer of Pain had this same problem at times, but at least the fucking hooks were good and tracks like "Straight Through the Heart", "King for a Day", and "Familiar Hell" still held on to some of that Billy Idol styled rebellious attitude to help give it an edge.  This time?  Absolutely fucking not.  There are a whopping two songs that are actually alright, and I'd seriously consider giving this hollow piece of shit a zero if it wasn't for them.  "Piece of Me" is the one time they got the glam right, sounding like a slightly more raucous than average party tune that calls to mind something like Guns n' Roses, and "The Golden Horde" is the lone power metal track, with some actual god damned adrenaline and a tempo above a standard 120bpm.  It may not truly convey Batu Khan's ferocity within the Mongol Empire but it sounds like fuckin' Slayer compared to shit like the title track and "The Hero".  The whole thing is just loaded with feckless nonsense that sounds like it's taking a real shot for radio airplay but forgot to actually be good in the process.  I guess "World on Fire" isn't the worst thing either, it at least sounds like a Battle Beast song, albeit a shitty pop one that would've been the worst one on any of the Anton albums.

I've saved the worst for last though, and that is, without even a moment's hesitation, "Endless Summer".  I genuinely don't know what the fuck they were thinking with this one.  People keep calling this one "80s pop" but I'm gonna have to call bullshit on even that.  Pop in the 80s is generally remembered (at least by me) as bombastic and silly.  Prince and Madonna were larger than life superheroes where every new release was a big event.  "Endless Summer"?  No, this sounds like fucking One Direction and I'm not even exaggerating with that.  It's the kind of gormless pedantry that a Disney tween or somebody who places 4th on American Idol goes on to make.  This kind of wispy, breezy, smiley shitheap has no fucking place even on an album as doinky and inoffensive as this.  It's some sort of midpoint between modern country music and a weak pop ballad that hovers around the bottom of the Hot 100 for a week before everybody realizes it sucks and forgets about it.  It was hate-on-first-listen and it is by a cosmic longshot the worst fucking song the band has ever written.  Even for Finland, this is fucking embarrassing garbage.

There isn't even a Berserk song this time!  Unless "Bent and Broken" is meant to be the scene with Griffith and Casca in the camp after The Band of the Hawk broke him out of the dungeon and directly preceding The Eclipse.  And if that's the case it's even worse than the previous worst Berserk song, "Touch in the Night".  Fuck this whole album.

I don't know who this album is supposed to appeal to, because it certainly isn't Battle Beast fans.  I know that because I am a Battle Beast fan who has a higher tolerance for pop than most metalheads, and even I can't stomach this weak bullshit.  This is so many steps backwards that the band is now miles and miles and miles behind where they started.  They're not even in the same country anymore.  Even the good moments are too little too late, and completely ineffectual in the face of the crushing monolith of boring corsetcore pop nonsense that the rest of the album embodies.  I have nothing good to say about this.  I can't even recommend the good songs in good faith because the rest of the album is so fucking bad.  At the time of writing this, the first track has around 20,000 plays on Spotify, and the last song has barely 9,000.  Over half of the people who started this album couldn't bring themselves to finish it.  It's so fucking bad, I'm in awe.


RATING: 4%

DRAINING THE DREGS: VOL II

I genuinely didn't plan on doing another one of these so soon after the first one, but I'm starting to feel overwhelmed again and struggling to find a whole lot to say for each release so fuck it, time for another flush.

Archaic Decapitator - The Apothecary 
I've always struggled to write for short releases and this is no different, but I actually like this EP quite a bit.  It could pretty easily be described as "melodic death metal" and left at that, but I think they tackle the style from an ever so slightly different direction and it's a pretty fun listen as a result.  There's a lot of atmosphere involved here, particularly from frequent twinkly keyboards in the background, which in many contexts would make this sound non-threatening, but considering the music itself is generally based quite heavily in blast beats and high speed riffs, it instead sounds more like a cosmic bludgeoning.  It has the more Gothenburg styled moments here and there like the midpaced title track, but a good helping of this is based in the more American style of direct aggression like Black Dahlia and Arsis.  It's good stuff.
RATING: GOOD STUFF

Kremlin - Decimation of the Elites
Remember Backstabber from the last feature?  Well Kremlin here is a pretty similar band in that they're also a death metal band with a lyrical focus on conspiracy theories, but even beyond the music not being as fun and engaging as Backstabber, Kremlin falters a bit in their gimmick coming off much more straight.  Backstabber felt more like they were playing up the goofy chemtrails and Alex Jones shit for shock value, not unlike GWAR not really being pro baby rape or something.  Kremlin on the other hand feels much more genuine in their lyrical insanity, which is a little unnerving when they're growling about weird shit that I've actually seen destroy minds like the 13 Satanic Bloodlines, Ickeian lizard people, and... flat earth for some reason?  It'd be easier to swallow if the music was excellent, but despite including members from great bands like Outre-Tombe and Infernal Majesty, it's just really average death metal with a terrible thunky drum sound. 
RATING: BELOW AVERAGE

Mortanius - Till Death Do Us Part
I was going to include this duo on the last feature, but decided I could probably get enough material for a full review.  Upon a few more listens, I just really can't.  This is pretty standard prog/power for the most part, but they strike an annoying balance of incredibly proficient instrumentals, bloated and confusing songwriting, and really dorky, mousey vocals.  Imagine a band with the chops of Symphony X, the vision of Savatage, the longwinded songwriting quirks of Dream Theater, and the vocals of a nine year old.  The frequent harmonies in the background call to mind Virgin Steele as well, but this is definitely less than the sum of its parts.  I really wish I could just get past how corny and doinky the vocals are but I just can't, they're really bad and definitely holding back what could definitely be an exciting power metal album.  They're so soft and wimpy that I remember thinking to myself that it sounds like a really young George Michael wandered into the studio during recording, so imagine just how hard I started laughing when I realized the last song was literally a Wham! cover.  Holy shit get outta here you nerds.
RATING: WOULD BE GOOD IF THE VOCALS WEREN'T AWFUL

Critical Extravasation - Morbid Existence
I'm gonna be honest with you, the only reason I didn't give this one a full review is because the promo was missing the last track for some reason.  Maybe I could just pretend to not notice and review it in full anyway, but considering the fact that this is only four tracks long, one of which being a cover, I didn't feel comfortable really going into detail with only two original songs to work with.  Maybe I should've though, because this isn't particularly deep stuff anyway.  It's old school death/thrash along the lines of early Pestilence or Sepultura, and the Morgoth cover fits like a glove as well.  So if you (like me) are a fan of that style then you'll likely love this despite how shallow it is.  It doesn't need to be complex, it just needs to be mean, and these Russian kids are super fucking mean, so unsurprisingly this is awesome.
RATING: GREAT

Hath - Of Rot and Ruin
Man I've listened to this like ten fucking times and I still don't remember anything from it.  Which is a shame because whenever it's on I think to myself "God damn this rules", but as soon as it finished I forget if I liked it at all.  So yeah, Hath plays some bloody raw death metal with an understated technical edge, with enough mid-fi dissonance to help it stand apart from most of their Willowtip brethren, but they haven't really mastered songwriting with any real staying power.  Throughout all of my listens, the only song I can ever really remember standing out is "Worlds Within", and even then I can't really tell you why.  I'm listening to it right now and it doesn't immediately stand out more than the rest of the album.  Maybe it's the stronger black metal influence, I dunno.  It's a good album but I never want to listen to it.
RATING: GOOD BUT FORGETTABLE

Hedonihil - I
This is similar to Hath because it's also good, ravaging death metal, but it's completely lacking in staying power and despite half a dozen spins I can never recall anything from it.  It's a bit more polished than its sister album up there and as such tends to pack a slight bit more punch (since it's still not mega clean like an Andy Sneap production or something).  The most notable thing about Hedonihil is that they're sort of a Monkey's Paw twisting of a wish I had voiced around the time I started taking promos seriously again.  I had thought "Man I don't like how I was immediately swamped in Swallow the Sun knockoffs, I wish I'd get more stuff I'd listen to on my own like death metal or something".  And so the universe heard me, and three members of Swallow the Sun decided to do a death metal side project.  Lucky me.  At least it doesn't sound anything like their main band, this is very much savage death metal to the bone, it just doesn't stick at all.
RATING: GOODER BUT FORGETTABLER

Oculum Dei - Dreams of Desire and Torment
I wish I hated this almost entirely because the band pic is so fucking hilarious.  Seriously go over to MA and check it out, it's the exact kind of unaware dorkery that makes black metal such an easy target to outside listeners.  There's even a fourth member there despite everywhere I look stating the band is a three piece.  Who is that fourth guy?  Why is he here??  So many questions!  Either way, this is solid black metal with very few tricks or out of left field ideas.  It starts off as very basic blast happy BM in the vein of Marduk or something, and gets a little more atmospheric and creepy as it goes on, and "A Cold Winter's Plight" really stands out as an excellent song for drastically dialing back the black metal tropes, instead focusing on tom-heavy crushing grooves.  I can't get enough of this one particular song, but I'm glad it's relegated to just one off kilter track instead of a full album of this kind of stuff, because I think it works better as a weird experiment than a basis for an entire record.  These guys could have a bright future, even if they look like they desperately need swirlies.
RATING: QUITE GOOD

Calico Jack - Calico Jack
I don't even know what the fuck is happening on this one.  It's well known that Running Wild is one of my favorite bands, but it's also well known that I resent how much the "pirate metal" gimmick stuck to them since only a third of their songs are pirate themed anyway, and every other band that tries to take hold of the gimmick falls immediately into the stupid "yo ho ho" shtick that they always so deftly avoided.  Calico Jack is no exception, but it's just a really awkward album.  The guitar tone is simultaneously really cheap and really heavy, sounding like somebody playing deep death metal on a practice amp, but the music itself is supposed to be jaunty folk metal.  That's a weird approach because the folk elements are so thoroughly drowned out by the heavy guitars and deep growls, you almost forget there's a fiddle player on here.  Something like "Grog Jolly Grog" is clearly meant to be a Skyclad styled bouncy folk metal song, but it sounds like some weird thudding mush of noise.  The fact that it's 70 fucking minutes long certainly doesn't help either, owing almost entirely to the ill advised title track stretching 18 minutes.  There isn't one good riff, one good melody, one good hook, there's nothing I like here.  Pirate themed bands have an abysmal batting average outside of the godfathers of the trope being one of the greatest metal bands to ever exist, and Calico Jack does absolutely nothing to help.
RATING: QUITE BAD 

Eugenic Death - Under the Knife 
This looks much worse than it actually is.  I opted into this one expecting terrible rethrash ten years past its sell-by date, but what I got instead was some extremely vicious thrash that doesn't immediately date itself.  I have some beef with the vocals though, but I can't quite put my finger on who it is they remind me of.  They're really deep and gruff, but they clash a bit with the high speed insanity on display.  Think something like Krisiun's first album or Arch Enemy's original singer fronting a very decent Slayer clone.  There's not much to say about this, it basically just hinges on whether you like thrash or not, because Eugenic Death doesn't transcend any stigmas or break any boundaries, but they're good at what they do.  Special shout out to the weird interlude "Hara Shiva", which is basically just a weird Indian style guitar noodle with female vocals repeating a mantra over and over again.  It probably goes on for too long but it's a nice break and adds a bit of character to what could've easily been a really samey album.  Overall it's a nice thrashy bite, and I dig it for what it is, even if I know damn well that it's nothing truly special.
RATING: DECENT 

Sludgehammer - Antechamber 
Well credit where credit is due, Sludgehammer definitely has the best band name in this roundup without a doubt.  Musically this is a tough one to really pin down, because it kind of hits several targets when it comes to modern metal.  I'd say they're primarily some sort of groove/death metal, but I know that's going to make you think of Six Feet Under and I promise you they sound nothing like Barnes's terminal embarrassment and they're much better than that.  They utilize an extremely heavy guitar tone and the death metal blasting sections are absolutely pummeling, but they break it up really frequently with more overt Lamb of God/early Mastodon style grooves.  Some of the fast gallops recall newer Testament, the clean vocals that pop up often aren't particularly smooth so they keep things appropriately gritty instead of suddenly cooing sweetly over the heavy songs like As I Lay Dying is so prone to doing, etc.  Maybe they sound like Slipknot if they were less outwardly insane but obviously rooted in metal instead of the dastardly nu-variant?  I dunno, I struggle to pin these guys down, but they're definitely modern, definitely groovy, and definitely heavy.
RATING: DECENT

Inferi - The End of an Era | Rebirth 
Everywhere I go lately, Inferi seems to pop up.  It's a good thing too because I think they're pretty damn great.  This here is a rerecording of their second album from 2009, featuring their new and current vocalist, Stevie Bosier, who you may remember as the best part of Equipoise simply because he wasn't a spotlight-hogging showoff who wouldn't shut the fuck up.  Luckily he's great here too, and a much better fit for a band like Inferi since they jam pack every song with so many riffs and hooks.  They're a very cohesive unit and as a result they produce the exact kind of Neuraxis-styled tech death that I adore.  This is kind of a pointless rerecording since they only have four albums anyway and this particular one is barely ten years old, but they've really been picking up steam lately and usually seem to spend four years between each album so maybe this is their way of introducing all of their new fans to their old songs while conveniently keeping their release schedule somewhat prolific, but either way it's a great record and I didn't know the original anyway so apparently it was a good idea after all.
RATING: KINDA POINTLESS BUT EXCELLENT ANYWAY 

A Day in Venice - III
And let's finish off today with a totally random one that showed up completely out of left field.  If the project name wasn't a giveaway already, this isn't even slightly metal, which obviously isn't a problem, but it was certainly a surprise to find in my inbox.  This is some sort of waify mellow alternative stuff, with very little of the driving energy I'm so used to.  Instead this is very soft and emotional, and as such it makes for a pleasant cooldown experience after hours and hours of blast beats and screeches.  The two songs that stand out in any real way to me are "Her Body Rocks" for being a more upbeat indie rock song the likes of Foster the People showcased in their secondary hits a few years ago, and "Temple of the Dog" for being the lone dark track, grooving along on a nice pulsing thud that pretty much instantly hooked itself into my memory.  Frankly I could probably talk about this one a lot, but I'm putting it here because it's so outside of my wheelhouse that I don't really feel comfortable giving it a full critical appraisal.  For what it's worth, I almost never read the press kits attached to the downloads beyond a cursory skim, but after giving this one listen, I remember thinking to myself "Huh, this reminds me of some mix of Radiohead and Sigur Ros, maybe with some of the softer Anathema stuff thrown in", and wouldn't you fucking know it those are the exact three bands mentioned in the FFO: section.  I'm a fucking genius.
RATING: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


Well that's all for today.  I've got some real life stuff going on the next few days and my sister in law is currently squeezing out my nephew as I type this so I should probably log the fuck off and go meet him or something.  So hopefully this tides y'all over for a few days before I get back to my usual schedule.  Happy listening, kids!

Dire Peril - The Extraterrestrial Compendium

Alien wins by TKO

Mega riffy power metal is in kind of a dead ball era right now.  The heyday of Persuader has long passed, and so Dire Peril is a welcome addition to the growing cabal of bands bringing their fastest and meanest to a genre so commonly derided for being flowery and wimpy.  This is a two-man collaboration between the guitarist/songwriter of Helion Prime and vocalist of Judicator, two bands that have made waves in the scene in recent years that, for whatever reason, I just completely neglected to ever really give a chance.  So before truly giving this album an attentive listen, I dedicated myself to checking out the two associated bands' discographies, and I can sum them up in one sentence.  Helion Prime is a very standard power metal band with a great debut and followup single followed by a very uninteresting sophomore, and Judicator had a bit of a shaky start with their first few albums doing very little for me, but really coming into their own on their latest two, with The Last Emperor just straight up being the true bearer of the torch dropped by Blind Guardian in the early 00s, which was subsequently picked up and dropped again by Persuader a few years ago.

So enter Dire Peril, a band created by the minds behind one decent band and one great one, and what they've produced sounds like a very logical combination of the two bands with a huge splash of Iced Earth as well.  In fact, I'd go so far as to say that Iced Earth is the largest influence here on the whole, with the Schaffer-approved triplet gallops at insanely high speeds making up a good portion of the better riffs on The Extraterrestrial Compendium.  I suppose you could say then that logically this sounds more like Demons and Wizards and I guess you wouldn't exactly be wrong, but they're not the one that pops into my head right away.

The problem is that... well, anybody who has heard Iced Earth before knows that they're the kings of stretching a few great ideas out to marathon lengths since they fill each album up with one great idea and try to milk it as long as possible.  Dire Peril isn't immune to this tendency, because this album is way too long.  There is no reason this should break 65 minutes like it does, you could shave four or five songs off of this and it'd be an almost infinitely more enjoyable experience.  This is actually a great representative for my claim that modern power metal can routinely pump out great songs but consistently fails to deliver fully great albums, because the best songs here are incredibly good.  "Hunter Culture" is an incredible opener just oozing adrenaline and attitude, tracks like "Roughnecks", "Enemy Mine", and "Total Recall" aren't too far behind, "Heart of the Furyan" is a little bit less explosive but it still great, and "The Visitor" is an excellent power ballad.  But beyond that?  Ehhhh, there's not much to really recommend.  They could have completely done away with uninteresting non-songs like "Queen of the Galaxy" or "Always Right Here", and some of the longer songs like "Blood on the Ice" and "Journey Beyond the Stars" could have been shaved down measurably to take out some of the more meandering passages.  The remaining songs are summed up best as "inoffensive and decent".  There's just so much content on here and only a third of it is really worth preserving in its finalized state.  With some edits some other songs could've been better and some are just fundamentally boring, and that's a shame because, like I said, the good songs are fantastic and they feel wasted on an album that surrounds them with uninteresting blandness.

"Wasted potential" is a great phrase for The Extraterrestrial Compendium because an entire album full of tracks like "Hunter Culture" and "Roughnecks" could easily piss on the rest of the scene from a great height, but Ashcraft seems either hesitant or incapable of just going all out the whole time.  He isn't nearly as good at writing catchy hooks as he needs to be for as much mid-paced vocal driven material on this album, no matter how great of a singer Yelland is.  This really didn't need to be twelve tracks long and could've have worked much better with a more succinct eight.  All of the parts are here, they just aren't put together particularly well.  I'll leave it with a positive score because the good parts are super good, but there's a shitload of room for improvement here.


RATING: 57%

Smoulder - Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring

Rizky Business

Promos almost always come with a press kit, which usually gives a little background about the band/release in order to drum up hype (other sites much more professional than I will paraphrase or copy paste these paragraphs, for example), and I'm gonna be real with you, I was sold on Smoulder from six words in their little blurb: "mixed and mastered by Arthur Rizk."

That's it, right there.  Album of the Year material already.

All of the other info didn't matter.  Oh the band is half based in Toronto and half in Chicago, that's cool I guess.  Sarah does reviews on Banger TV? Oh yeah I've seen the one where she tried to convince me that The Forest Seasons was good.  Arthur Rizk is behind the knobs?  Oh slap my ass and call me Barbara sign me the fuck up.  Rizk is the Scott Burns of our generation.  Just like how Burns was the first guy to really figure out how to produce death metal (a huge reason why Florida was such a mecca of death metal in the early 90s, considering that's where Morrisound Studios (where he worked) was located), Rizk seems to be the Wayne Gretzky of understanding how to reach a retro wall of sound with updated quality and a massive low end, constantly churning out metal that sounds like how 1984 would've sounded if current technology was available.  The amount of stellar releases over the last few years that have achieved a sound akin to standing in a packed house while a band cranks out at max volume all thanks to him is astounding.  An extremely short list of bands he's helped sound their best in recent years include Eternal Champion, Power Trip, Sumerlands, Pissgrave, Tomb Mold, Scorched, Gatekeeper, Uada, Outer Heaven, Crypt Sermon, Homewrecker, Inquisition, and Mammoth Grinder.  This dude just fucking gets it.  Everything he touches sounds immaculate without being sterilized like Andy Sneap or Neil Kernon, he's the premier metal producer right now and nobody can touch him.

So it's no surprise that Smoulder's debut, Times of Obscene Evil and Wild Daring, sounds like fucking Krakatoa.  This is probably most similar to Eternal Champion or Crypt Sermon out of the bands mentioned above, blending pulpy sword and sorcery high fantasy with sweeping epic doom, which is a combination that we have known for years is a perfect match for heavy metal.  These riffs are fucking mountainous, the drums sound like an avalanche, everything about this just sounds monumental.

They say that a chain can only be as strong as its weakest link, but I would argue that that's a bad analogy since Smoulder is proof that the stronger links can merely leak excess steel and as a result temper the weak link.  Yeah, Sarah isn't all that great of a vocalist in technical terms, but the music around her is so fucking strong that it doesn't really matter.  Her voice is lacking in both range and power, but with Shawn's monstrous riffing and Kevin's powerful drumming being the true carrying force of the music, it doesn't really want for any command.  From the pummeling barabarism of "Ilian of Garathorm", to the high speed whirlwind of "Bastard Steel", everything is proactive and destructive.  It's hard to play epic doom without drawing comparisons to Candlemass, and Smoulder is no exception here, which is great because they absolutely nail that sweeping, spiritual atmosphere that the Swedes commanded so deftly in their prime years, and they also take their lesson that rules are for fucking squares and confidently break from the dogmatic ethos of the genre, and are thus unafraid pick up the pace and infuse old school speed metal when the music calls for it. 

Another huge element that works to the band's benefit is the fact that they're clearly skilled at self editing.  It can be tempting, especially with low tempos and massive atmospheres, to stretch albums to nearly marathon length, but Times of Obscene Evil is very succinct, with only six songs clocking in at roughly 37 minutes, it doesn't overstay its welcome.  As a result there's nothing that can really be considered filler, every idea has a purpose and every riff has a target that it aims for and hits easily.  Only "Shadowy Sisterhood" kinda falls flat and doesn't do anything particularly memorable, but the sweeping atmosphere coupled with powerful riffage keeps the best tracks like "Ilian of Garathorm", "Black God's Kiss", and "The Sword Woman" at the top of the heap of modern doom.  I can't get enough of this album, everything about it just soars over the battlefield and drops fucking bombs on it.

So at the end of the day, Smoulder plays some of the most exciting and evocative epic doom of the modern era on their own, and the skilled hand of Rizk behind the controls only boosts them to an even higher plane of badassery.  At the end of the day I think that's the word I've been looking for all along, "badass".  Smoulder is fucking badass and nothing is holding them back from conquering the fucking world.  The pounding toms and savage riffs are so fucking primitive and barbaric, the songwriting is savage and weighty, the atmosphere is epic and eldritch, just damn near every single element of the music on Times of Obscene Evil hits bullseye and this is going to easily contend for the top spot for Album of the Year this year unless something else truly magical storms out of the gates and hogties this.  But with how muscular and brutish this is, I'm skeptical that anything can truly dominate this.


RATING: 92%