Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Iron Maiden is a band that has a long legacy of being the be-all, end-all band when it comes to heavy metal. Whenever you hear of a new Maiden album you get the a feeling you did when you were a teenager. No, not that feeling. The feeling of angst. You want it and you want it now! Does The Final Frontier deliver the goods?

Yet another highly anticipated album from a band that is always highly anticipated. Iron Maiden’s The Final Frontier is an album that I have been excited about for a few months now and it’s finally here. While the band will never be able to make epic albums like they once did long ago, they continue to make solid Iron Maiden albums.

Since the return of Bruce Dickinson, the band has released 4 albums. I didn’t even bother with the Blaze Bailey albums during that time because I knew it just wouldn’t work for me. I did check out those two albums later on and unfortunately I was right. When Brave New World came out, I was even hesitant then. It had been 8 years since the last record and it was a new era of music. I didn’t get around to A Brave New World for a little while but I was very pleased when I did. The following two albums didn’t do much for me, though they were solid albums. They just didn’t have the catch factor that most Maiden albums have. The booming choruses and such. The Final Frontier is a step back in to that realm. Read the rest of this entry »

Kataklysm‘s 2008 release, Prevail, was easily one of my favorite albums of that year. So much that I named it as my favorite album of the year. Looking back I really don’t know what I was thinking with all the great albums that came out that year. While it was a great album, I don’t know to this day what made me choose it as my top pick of that year. It was the first full Kataklysm album I heard, only hearing a few songs from compilations before that. After that I bought 2006′s In The Arms Of Devastation, another great release by this band. Sadly, I have yet delve into the rest of Kataklysm’s back catalog. Read the rest of this entry »

Decrepit Birth mix an incredible amount of melody and feeling into their music. The notes that drag out after a beautiful lead are the ones that are most memorable and make it easy to recognize a DB song. Polarity does for Diminishing Between Worlds what Diminishing does for …And Time Begins. Polarity improves on Decrepit Birth’s sound and takes it a step further.

The production on Polarity is top notch and a huge step up from Diminishing. As usual Bill Robinson’s vocals are still a bit low in the mix, but it seems that they layered them enough to give it a little more depth this time around. Matt Sotelo’s leads and solos are nothing short of what I expected out of Matt. The incredibly melodic signature that he has rings out vividly through each song. What I don’t like about the album is the double kick, because at times it seems a little too machined, if you know what I mean.

Unlike most melodic death metal bands, Decrepit Birth are different in the aspect that they can slow down the guitar rhythms, yet keep the overall rhythm of the song up-tempo while mixing in very spacious and almost surrounding sounding melodic leads. It’s what makes Decrepit Birth different from all the other melo-death bands. Well that and the hell of a showman that Bill Robinson is on stage.

The lyrical content is as usual deep and not your typical gore, violence or Satanic driven lyrics. Overall the album is great and if you’re already a Decrepit Birth fan then you will probably love it. Polarity is an album full of ferocity and feeling. Decrepit Birth knows exactly what works for them and where their sound belongs in a genre full of redundancy. There hasn’t been a death metal band like this since Chuck Schuldiner’s Death.

It’s almost hard to believe that the punk movement happened over 30 years ago. I was still barely just born but it was happening. Hippies were seeing their era slowly dying as the Viet Nam war came to an end and the youth of that time were in revolt. This was a whole new revolution. It wasn’t a revolution of hugs, drugs and flower power. It was a revolution with aggression. Rock and roll would breed a heavier, angrier sub-genre. Punk was the new wave of controversial music and amongst a sea of half-ass bands was a “band with no name” Read the rest of this entry »

I hate trying to write a review from a stream, but this is one of those times that I have no other choice as that’s all I was provided. The Sword‘s third album, Warp Riders comes out on August 14th on Kemado records, but I have had the pleasure of sampling or rather streaming the album for review ahead of time.

Early into recording, the band said that this time around was going to be very different and it had a lot of fans worried. What was exactly “Different”? Was it going to go all totally mainstream rock with a more radio friendly sound? Were they going to experiment with other instruments or something? Whenever you tell fans that your next album will be different every thought that goes through their mind is a worried on. We don’t like bands to try to fix something that’s not broken. As a Sword fan, I assure you, there is nothing to worry about.

From Age Of Winters to Gods Of The Earth we saw improvements in production a bit but overall it was just another great ‘Sword record. Nothing overdone or too fancy. With the first single that was released first via iTunes and then made available for free download was Tres Brujas, which translates to Three Witches. The Sword writing songs about witches? No Way! So there is no big change in the basic theme of the band. Still going for a medieval and mythical folklore theme to their songs. Well, most of them anyway. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s been busy as busy gets for me lately and I haven’t had a chance to do reviews like I like to. Okay, I hate doing reviews. However, I have found that there are a bunch of amazing bands out there right now that deserve a good push with their new albums. You may or may not have heard of any of them, but the ones I’m listing are all well worth a listen. So these are not really reviews but a pretty much a long list of shit you should listen to. Here goes…

• Grand Magus – Hammer Of The North: Sounds like some viking or black metal right? Wrong, but it still slays. Grand Magus have been around awhile. The Swedish band plays metal with a classic feel to it and their singer has a very Halford tone to him, thus making great music. If you dig Judas Priest and or classic sounding heavy metal in general, there is no reason you shouldn’t like this. It’s nothing super original but it just has a killer sound to it. The Number Of The Blog did a review of it, which turned out to be more of a short story that had little to do with the album, but was enough to spark my interest and he made a great point.
• Angelus Apatrida – Clockwork: Again, a band that’s not pushing for originality, but this Spanish thrash band still knows how to keep it interesting enough. You can read a review I did of it HERE.
• Misery Index – Heirs To Thievery: Deathgrind is a genre that I don’t have a lot of in my collection. The little that I do have,  tend to really dig, like Malebolgia. Misery Index is a band that I have just recently got in to. Their latest album, Heirs To Thievery is a great place to start for anyone that is new to the band. Also check out the recent Blogcast over at The Number Of The Blog where Myself and two other writers for TNOTB talked with Jason Netherton, the singer and bass player from Misery Index. The Number Of The Blog will also have some goodies going up for contest soon.
• Korzus – Discipline Of Hate: What Exodus’ Exhibit B should have sounded like. These Brazilian badasses have been around for awhile too.
• Nachtmysium – Addicts: Black Meddle Pt. II: Like the first Nachtmystium Black Meddle album, this takes the typicla black metal sound that people seem to love and mix it with some psychedelic rocks aspects and experimental stuff. It’s mush more interesting that most black metal, in my opinion.
• Nevermore – The Obsidian Conspiracy: Nevermore has better albums. That’s all.
• The Ocean – Heliocentric: The Ocean re-released Fluxion a year or two ago and at the time I really didn’t give it a chance. Enter Heliocentric. After hearing a lot of rave about the album, I checked it out. Turns out I love this band. So I dug deeper and if you like Heliocentric, you should dig deeper too. Progressive metal at it’s best.
• Void Of Silence – The Grave Of Civilization: Holy shit, this band likes to write long songs. No matter, the songs are pretty good. Check out their Myspace to get a feel for their sound. Check out their Last.fm page. Their myspace is giving me malware warnings.It’s kind of a progressive doom metal.
• Watain – Lawless Darkness: Again, I’m not a big Black Metal fan and there are only a handful of bands that I can tolerate and enjoy. I have found that Watain is one of them and Lawless Darkness is a damn fine black Metal album.
• 1349 – Demonoir: Another one of those tollerable BM bands that I can listen to. 1349 made another good album, but ruined it with the retarded ambient tracks in between the regular songs.
• Anacrisus – Hindsight (Suffering Hour and Reason re-recorded): I’m not sure why Anacrusis felt the need to re-record two albums that were already amazing to begin with, but they did a good job and I can listen to either version and enjoy it. It;s not like they re-recorded with a new vocalist like Exodus decided to do with their classic album, Bonded By Blood. You can download all of Anacrusis’ first 4 albums HERE, free and legal.
• Grave – Burial Grounds: These death metal Swedes have been around for a long time. There is a reason for that. They do what they do with a passion and they do it well. Burial Grounds is another relentlessly heavy death metal album that deserves more spins that I have given it since I got it.
• Harmaja – Lento: This is Finnish acoutsic guitar rock and it’s pretty damn cool. I can’t understand what they are saying, but I can feel the music and it makes me feel like making babies.

That about does it for now. These are just some of the bands I’ve listened to in the past few months and haven’t got around to giving a mention.

About this time, back in 2007, I was contacted by Prosthetic Records to do reviews and promote a few different bands on their roster. The stand-out band that I really liked was Yakuza. Their jazz-infused prog-metal style had my attention from the get go and I have yet to lose interest. I reviewed Transmutations and I was very impressed how the tempo changes, vocal variety and the saxophone made everything stand out from just about anything else that was on the metal scene at that time. I had to hear more.

I reached back in to their collection and listened to their first two albums, which didn’t impress me as much as Transmutations and the album previous to that, Samsara. I think it had a lot to do with the production value of Samsara and Transmutations. Way Of The Dead and Amount to nothing sounded very jumbled with what Yakuza was trying to accomplish. I would love to hear them remaster those albums and try to clean them up a bit so that everything mixes better. Read the rest of this entry »

White Chapel – A New Era Of Corruption Review

Sometimes we as metal fans are greatly influenced by our peers. Sadly this can lead us to believe that a band is not as listenable as they truly are. Some of us older metal fans and even some younger have become metal elitist bastards. I don’t consider myself one, but I know I have a little tiny bit in me. I’m usually pretty open minded when it comes to music, unless it truly sucks. I’m not a deathcore fan by any means. I despise 99% of it. When I first heard Whitechapel I thought I really liked them. I saw the video for ‘This Is Exile’ and the sound was pretty cool to me. Later on I finally bought the actual album, but when I listed to it I wasn’t really impress. I put it down and didn’t listen to it again. I then started to hear people talk trash about Whitechapel and soon after I was a ‘hater’, if you will. They were deathcore and I’m supposed to hate deathcore. The only prolbem I really have with deathcore is the breakdowns, over-chugging riffs and a lot of the fans/scene kids. When I was tasked to weigh my opinion on A New Era Of Corruption I really didn’t want to listen to it and I never planned on doing a review. Read the rest of this entry »

Review: Danzig – Deth Read Sabaoth

When I first heard that a new Danzig album was going to be released back in 2009, my first thoughts were that I was going to be disaapointed as I had been with every Danzig album since Danzig 5. Granted, Danzig 7 and 8 (Circle Of Snakes) were not as bad as 5 and 6:66, they still lacked something that I really missed; that old Danzig sound. Let me first give you a history of my Danzig fanhood.

A friend of mine got me in to the rest of Danzig’s music in the late 90′s. Before that I was only listening to Danzig’s first album that I still owned on cassette tape. I liked every song on it but at the time I was in a musical phase where Danzig was low priority. It just wasn’t the type of music I wanted to hear at the time; so I thought. Enter The Misfits. I attended a Misfits concert in 1996, that woke a demon in me that will never sleep. I saw the Misfits perform with then singer, Michael Graves. Even though he wasn’t the original singer (whom we all know is Glenn Danzig),  they played the classics and I just had to hear more. I borrowed every Misfits and Danzig CD my friend had and listened to them religiously and soon after started buying up everything ‘Danzig’ I could find. From Misfits to Samhain to all of Danzig’s albums and Black Aria. I was addicted. Read the rest of this entry »

Holy Shit! Violator released a new album on the [May] 8th and I totally missed it. Actually it’s an Ep, but it has 7 songs on it so that’s close enough to being an album for me. Annihilation Process was released on Kill Again Records.

There isn’t a whole lot I can say about this album besides that it’s more great old school inspired thrash metal. Like Chemical Assault, Annihilation Process brings the rapid fire riffs, gang vocals and everything else that was and still is awesome about the old thrash sound of the 80′s. A great follow up to Chemical Assault. Check out a few of the tracks below [after the fold] and listen to more on Violator’s Myspace. Read the rest of this entry »