Bands showing off their musical intersectionality is one of my absolute favorite things to discover. Artists who blur the line between genres and sounds are just the most interesting ones to listen to. You question what you’re listening to a bit, so you’re listening more attentively to the record. You…
Change is inevitable and is always accompanied with some level of discomfort. Miles Davis said it best: “It’s not about standing still and becoming safe. If anybody wants to keep creating, they have to be about change.” Make Them Suffer are no stranger to the term and have gone through…
Some albums feel specifically designed to propel music forward. Like their very existence is intended to challenge listeners’ notions about what music is, what it can and/or should accomplish, and how we can expect to consume and enjoy it. Extreme metal, perhaps more than any other genre in any medium…
“The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!” The classic line from a beloved movie said by someone whose creativity was beyond comprehension. It’s as if Willy Wonka was constantly experiencing the world differently with heighted senses as though he knew the secret to tapping into the sixth sense. Music has this incredible…
Let me start this review by completely undermining my own opinion of this record: I am no expert on progressive metal. Only over the past couple of years have I begun to mine its incredible riches, but get past the most basic generalities in conversations with me about the music…
And so, we are faced once again with the idea of a band’s “career”. I spent my first few years with the blog grappling with this idea; what do we mean when we use it? Do we mean just the chronological order in which albums were released? Surely not; a…
Few things beat big sounds to me. An artist’s ability to fill your ears with a wall of sound gives the music a unique presence that’s wholly its own. All music has some kind of presence of course, but you can’t ignore it if it’s swallowing you whole. It’s the…
Touted as “strange and unorthodox”, Tithe are immediately at the mercy of such branding. The Portland trio do enlist the drive of grindcore, and frostbitten touches of blackened death, but really there’s nothing too out of leftfield on display. That doesn’t mean that when the band are firing on all…
Xibalba first made a name for themselves based on the sheer power of their particular blend of crushing hardcore and brutal death metal. Although few, if any, have matched the intensity of their output, the increasing crossover between the hardcore and death metal scenes, along with the (over-)saturation of the…
I think most ardent music consumers go through phases. Maybe you’ll be really into folk for a bit, move on to hip hop, something like that. I have that but at a micro level. I’ll be really into specific subgenres. I’ll listen to a bunch of stoner doom for a…
