Victorius’s previous offering, the six-track EP DIsnosaur Warfare: Legend of the Power Saurus [sic] (2008), is one of the best power metal releases of recent years. Although fluorescent ’80s nostalgia had long been driven into the ground already (as we’ll discuss further below), by tapping into the less-exploited dinosaur market…
After a debut full of harsh, twisting, blackened hardcore sounds comes Oslo’s SIBIIR with their sophomore full-length, Ropes. From the darkest, dankest reaches of Norway’s icy tundras, and with a more focused take on crafting extreme music, SIBIIR openly states in promotional materials that they wanted to move away from…
By the time a band reaches their third album, it is not unreasonable to have a certain set of expectations about what it will deliver. Sometimes, the band will stumble and fail to meet them. Others will rise to the challenge and comfortably surpass them. And a third group, to…
March turned out to be a massive month for solid releases all over the punk spectrum so let’s just dive in, first with the albums that need checking out and then the singles and EPs that have been spinning here at Wannabe Manor. Albums The Maine – You Are OK…
We here at Heavy Blog like to ponder the big questions: Who are we? Why are we here? Is viking metal even a thing? You know, the big stuff. In order to better address such pressing matters, we bring you Heavy Issues: a bi-weekly column by which we plan to…
There are albums which leave such an impression on you when you first hear them that it echoes out and influences all future plays of the album. It’s usually not just the music but a combination of presentation, your mood, what’s going around you, the weather, and more that sends…
Each month, we always seem to come to the same conclusion when it comes to our Editors’ Picks column: Friday release days open the floodgates and unleash a seemingly endless stream of quality new music. But while some of our Editors and Contributors sit down gleefully each week to dive into this newly stocked treasure…
While I was made aware of Ashe O’Hara through his tenure with TesseracT (Altered State is amazing, fight me) I was stoked to discover Voices from the Fuselage through this intersection. In many ways, their brighter and more atmospheric sound utilizes his ethereal timbre better, setting off other and pleasing areas of his range.…
Of the many bands I became familiar with and wrote about in 2017, few meant more to me than the Boston art-rock/prog rock/whatever you want to call it collective Bent Knee. I’ve written about them several times this year, including a lengthy interview and profile of the band with frontwoman Courtney Swain. Frankly, by the time we were ready to roll out our album of the year list (where they ranked #17) I didn’t think I would be writing about them again for a while. But they were stopping through Brooklyn again in December, this time with the always amazing prog force that is Thank You Scientist, and I knew I had to come out and see them.
Some bands hang around for a long time, producing similar but slight variations over a many year period, tweaking a tried and true format just a little with each new record. Others strive to create larger shifts in their sound over time to mixed results. There’s a certain amount of…
