Another week, another serviceable yet disappointing follow-up from an Australian supergroup… Emerging from the ashes of Australian grind legends Blood Duster, Fuck I’m Dead and The Day Everything Became Nothing (the latter two aren’t technically split up, but still), King swiftly silenced any skepticism over their change in direction with their…
Cattle Decapitation’s transformation from novelty goregrind act into one of the premier progressive/technical death metal bands of the modern era has been one of the most surprising and rewarding events in modern extreme metal. Now (at least) three records into a career-defining hot streak that’s rivaled by few if any…
Brutal death metal is a 50/50 proposition for me most of the time. There are several bands in death metal’s nastiest of branches (Wormed, Devourment, Disentomb, Aborted, and Defeated Sanity, for example) that push the boundaries of what the most authoritative sounds in death metal can and should be. However,…
From an area of music defined by extremes of seemingly totally accidental shifts in high-tension, high-impact sounds, The Sound That Ends Creation never caves in from pressure to slow down or change moods. It’s without a doubt someone completely removed from even relatively safe but abrasive metal would find the…
Meshiaak’s debut album, Alliance of Thieves (2016), is one of the best thrash metal albums to ever come out of Australia. A supergroup of sorts, featuring current and ex-members of 4Arm and Terramaze, the Melbourne outfit perfectly blended groove and melody to deliver a record that simultaneously exceeded the bounds…
The prospect of revivalism, as we’ve discussed on the site many, many times before, is a double-edged sword. With every attempt to recreate the magic of older bands or scenes that have fallen by the wayside comes the possibility that the alchemy falters; any time eyes are turned firmly backwards,…
While I don’t want to hold it against any particular artist, some subgenres have a tendency to sound a bit stale over time. In order to fit into some kind of description, you have to walk down a fairly narrow and rigid path that doesn’t allow for any kind of…
At its core, black metal is about the passionate expression of emotions. When you peel away the layers of aesthetic, mythology, pretense, and history, you find a genre that’s dedicated to the deep, honest, and sometimes harsh world of emotional extremity. Make no mistake, those layers are not incidental to…
There are few places in the United States that have experienced a more significant explosion in both the quantity and quality of metal music being produced than in Colorado. Over the past several years, bands like Khemmis, Dreadnought, Necropanther, Of Feather and Bone, Primitive Man, In the Company of Serpents,…
Norma Jean have been putting out awesome singles for the better part of 2019. Beginning with the awesome Polar Similar b-side “Children of the Dead” all the way back in January, followed by a steady stream of outstanding singles since mid-July, the band have been busy putting their competitors to…
