Search

Reviews

Home

Year of No Light – Consolamentum

Eden Kupermintz
Reviews
As much as Year of No Light are rated in underground circles, they are still underrated. Their name deserves to be up there with bands like ISIS or The Ocean in the annals of post-metal and doom. Consolamentum, twenty years into their career, is one of the best things they’ve made and one of the best things made in the genre, period. Holy fuck.

Azure – Of Brine and Angel’s Beaks

Eden Kupermintz
Reviews
The same band we've come to love (and boy, do I love Azure) is still there, their optimistic, hopeful, powerful heart still beating underneath the added musical layers. And that's what makes all of those additions work; in other works, they'd come off as extraneous or forced, the mark of a band trying too hard to be something they're not. But here, the extra tones, the contrasts, the counterpoints, and the overall structure of the album work so well because they are in constant communication with Azure's style and their artistic direction.

Cerebral Rot – Excretion of Mortality

Jimmy Rowe
Reviews
Truth be told, Cerebral Rot have found themselves in a bit of a sophomore slump with Excretion of Mortality. Even at faster paces, the songs feel robbed of urgency, and the whole affair just feels labored. Those aching for a slab of pungent death metal will surely have a good time regardless, and the music is every bit as disgusting as one would hope based on the grotesque cover art.

Noctambulist – The Barren Form

Jimmy Rowe
Reviews
Denver's Noctambulist imbues the spacious and introspective corners of the death metal with black metal and psychedelic influences that are idiosyncratic and specific to themselves. FFO: Ulcerate, WAKE, and Portal

VOLA – Witness

Eden Kupermintz
Reviews
What a lovely phrase “return to form” is and how lovely it is to speak it in the same sentence as VOLA. Don’t get me wrong, Applause of a Distant Crowd was a good album, even if it did take me a while to fully... Read More...

STÖNER – Stoners Rule

Pete Williams
Reviews
It’s once again summer time, friends. To me, summer is usually a little odd in that it feels very strange to listen to metal of any kind. Metal always feels like a fall and winter thing. You know what I mean. ... Read More...

Gojira – Fortitude

Joshua Bulleid
Reviews
In many ways, Fortitude would have made for a more logical step between L’Enfant Sauvage and Magma. There are moments when it feels like the culmination of everything Gojira have done before, but just as many, if not more, where they feel like they’re rehashing ideas they’ve expressed more effectively in the past, or else are held back by what came immediately before; existing in the shadow of Magma’s template, rather than naturally pushing forward.