Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

With the release of 2009′s Night Is The new Day, Katatonia obviously had a few songs left over. With the release of their newest Ep, The Longest Year, Katatonia bring new light to a few songs already on Night Is The New Day. With a remix of Day And Then The Shade and Idle Blood, comes a new song called Sold Heart.

Sold Heart is another one of those melancholy tunes that Katatonia seems to do so well. Sometimes it’s difficult to even consider this band to be heavy metal. With the progressiveness without the hard and heavy disruptiveness, Katatonia brings great musical talent to the table, yet they seem to hold back the weight of their prior albums. Still they have what it takes to make great music, whilst keeping things interesting enough to draw your attention to their sound. Like Opeth‘s Damnation, Katatonia have found a way to bring elegance to a genre that is normally reserved for aggression and the distinct abrasiveness that we expect. Read the rest of this entry »

Not of your traditional metal sound or band for that matter, Comparative Anatomy take two bass guitars, electronically programmed drums and sound-bytes from animals and make a sound all their own. Made up of two living and one inanimate band member, Comparative Anatomy is Sir Puffers Rabbinald the Third, and Ron Chickenbaby on two separate distorted bass guitars,  and On The Box, their “drummer” of sorts who is really nothing more than a stuffed teddy-bear (But don’t let them hear you call him that). Read the rest of this entry »

Grindcore, real grindcore that is, is for people like myself with short attention spans and occasional disregard for comprehensible lyrics. Earache Records in the past few years has been really mixing it up in their metal portfolio, signing bands that really don’t relate all that much to each other. One thing the UK label always prides themselves on and have always been fond of is grindcore.

Earache has been the host to some legendary British grincore bands such as Napalm Death, Carcass and Extreme Noise Terror. Napalm death just released a killer album in 2009 and Earache has been re-releasing the Carcass collection too. Lately they have been going international with grind by releasing Houston Texas’ Insect Warfare‘s Word Extermination and now Singapor’s Wormrot. Read the rest of this entry »

It usually takes a really good book for me to read from cover to cover in two weeks. I normally don’t make a lot of time for myself when it comes to reading, so when a really good book grips me, I always seem to find little slivers of time that turn in to hours of reading pleasure. I Am Ozzy was one of those books that was really hard to put down.

The book starts out where most autobiographies do. Right from the get-go Ozzy is telling us of his poverty ridden childhood at 14 Lodge Road in Aston, United Kingdom. From growing up in a house with no indoor toilet to going to school and being harassed by certain teachers, Ozzy life doesn’t seem too far from the ordinary person that may have grown up in post-war Great Britain. He had good parents that provided the best they could while he tried to find his purpose in life. He makes it quite obvious that he was never cut out for typical labor and a professional occupation was pretty much out of the question due to his dyslexia and learning curve. Ozzy even spent some time in prison when he couldn’t pay a fine for a burglary. Read the rest of this entry »

Cormac McCarthy writes some really crazy stuff. Look at No Country For Old Men. Chances are you saw the movie but didn’t read the book. Imagine reading that story on paper. Though the movie was pretty good, I imagine the book was even better. They almost always are.

I read The Road last year and I stayed up very late many nights because it was very hard to put down. The movie on the other hand, well, not so much. Again you get the basic idea that this is a post-apocalyptic movie, but it seems so rushed you miss a lot of the little things that the book has to offer. The movie, especially if you didn’t read the book, will leave you with many questions and a bit of confusion.

The barren land that is in the movie would probably best describe the way a real post apocalyptic Earth would be. Populations decimated, a sunless sky, contaminated water and shortage of food supplies. On top of that you have the people of little moral value, cannibalizing and hording people for their food supply. Read the rest of this entry »

Light This City first released The Hero Cycle in 2003 on a label that I can’t find absolutely anything on. Perhaps that’s why it’s being re-released on Prosthetic. Anyway, The Hero Cycle was the first of 4 albums to be released by this band with a rather short lived career. THC, to shorten things up is a tight album. The riffs and drums sound good and the production is very nice too. However, there is something that makes me hate it.

The core members of Light This City are Ben Murray on Drums and Laura Nichol singing. The line up changed over the years, for reason unknown to me, but they have always seemed to recruit really good guitar players with a lot of melody. You can see this throughout Remains Of The Gods right on through to Stormchaser, their post-disbanding release. If you like the instrumentation on the last three albums but never got to hear The Hero Cycle, you will probably still enjoy that here as well. What you may not like is the vocals. Read the rest of this entry »

It’s amazing, after 30 years Overkill still have it. Ironbound shows that these guys can still keep it fresh and generous in the amount of heavy and thrashiness at the same time. A lot of bands lose one or the other over the years. Guitarists Dave Linsk and Derek Tailer brings the chops while Blitz still has the lungs to rip through 10 killer tracks with ease. If you liked Immortalis, you’ll love Ironbound. Bottom line. I don’t feel that I have to explain anything more.

In Starve For The Devil, you will find that Jim Malone has shed some of the over-technical guitar work to make room for more of a death-thrash sound that just may turn off some fans. At the same time it doesn’t take away from the sheer wizardry of song writing that is Jim Malone. You’ll find a common theme in most of the songs to be that of self-destruction and, um, the devil. Along with an entirely different line-up than We Are The Nightmare and return of co-founding member, Mike Van Dyne, Starve For The Devil is instantly my first favorite of 2010.

Rating: 4.5/5

For a much more in depth review, check out Number Of The Blog’s review of Starve For The Devil. (It’s Saturday and I’m a lazy bastard!)

Fear Factory’s Mechanize kind of revisits the days of Demanufacture, the last Fear Factory album that I actually enjoyed. Mechanize is a monstrously heavy album and it’s nice to hear Dino back in the mix of things. Along with Gene Hoglan’s drum mastery, it makes for a pretty good listen, though the machine gun riffs and drumming can get slightly redundant at times.

The problem I have with this album is that I’m over Fear Factory. Loved them years ago, but these days I don’t find the sound nearly as interesting as I did before, so that makes it tough to review. Still, that doesn’t take away from the fact that this album is well put together but it won’t be on any year end lists of mine.

If you really like the Fear Factory of old, then you might like this. If you never liked Fear Factory to begin with, then you probably still won’t.

3/5

Dynahead: Antigen Review

It’s not often that I get a chance to review a band that I have never heard of. Okay, let me rephrase that. It’s not often that I get to review a band that I’ve never heard of and truly and genuinely enjoy every second of it. Some times it’s a lot of fun and other times it’s a nightmare. This time it’s a fun nightmare. It’s fun because this band is simply amazing but it’s a nightmare for me to try to find the words to explain exactly why and how.

Whenever a person from a band I’ve never heard before sends me an email asking to review an album, I always try to get an idea of what they sound like by visiting their myspace and hearing a track or two to see if it’s worth my time to hear the entire album as opposed to listening to and writing a review of an entire album that I don’t like. I didn’t get 30 seconds in to Layers Of Days on DynaHead’s Myspace before I knew I had to hear more. Read the rest of this entry »