When I write reviews, I’m trying to achieve a few personal goals. First, I like writing reviews for bands I like and/or respect. Second, I want to help smaller bands reach a wider audience. Third, I’m always secretly hoping I found the next big thing. I just want the satisfaction…
As we deepen our exploration of different genres, expectations form alongside our opinions. This allows us to better curate and analyze music within a constant, torrential downpour of new releases. With bands like Bolt Gun in the broader “post-metal” landscape, we expect powerful themes with a cinematic delivery, something the…
Though it’s tempting to claim we’ve reached the pinnacle of genre splicing and experimentation, the inherent nature of music makes this process inevitable and ongoing. Music will only become more innovative as more bands create and contort existing genres. Naturally, styles once considered experimental will eventually become staple genres, only…
Reviewing music adds a unique element to retrospection. While everyone reflects on their past opinions, revisiting a detailed analysis of an album frames that type of reflection in a much more formal way. It’s the difference between a casual remembrance of past feelings and revisiting several paragraphs of your opinion…
In their groundbreaking work, A Thousand Plateaus, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari defined the rhizome as an alternate model for thought and political analysis. In their words: We’re tired of trees. We should stop believing in trees, roots, and radicles. They’ve made us suffer too much. All of arborescent culture…
Fresh off a short UK tour with rising formidable heavy weights Conjurer and LLNN, Earth Moves are back with a gripping and powerful sophomore release of emotive post-metal, Human Intricacy. Their debut The Truth In Our Bodies caught my attention in 2016, ranking among my top albums of that year.…
Remember a few years ago when every major outlet was running articles about how post-metal stagnation was the final signal that the genre was denying? Most of them were gleeful, fueled by a complete misunderstanding of how widely varied and versatile the genre really was. The reality was that, often…
In their much anticipated follow-up to Mariner, the band returned to their core writing mode free of outside collaborators for their Metal Blade debut A Dawn To Fear, and have simplified their songwriting process to eschew a full-album concept, instead offering a collection of independent songs without preconceptions in the writing process. The result of this experiment is a record that is massive, plodding, expansive, and pensive, if not daunting and exhausting for those who aren’t too keen on The Big Slow™
One thing I can say about Russian Circles is that they have always been consistent. I’ve seen them open for Minus the Bear in Brooklyn in 2006, headline a tiny club in Milford, Connecticut in support of Geneva in 2009, open for Coheed and Cambria and Between the Buried and…
Combining atmospheric sludge and doom, featherweight post-rock and lashings of black metal come Latitudes with their most recent outing Part Island, a meditation on the elemental link between the natural world and the self, moor and mind if you will, and the slow but sure disintegration of one, and by…
