The Load In August may have been a relatively quiet month in terms of the volume of events I attended, but there can be no doubt that the quality has been exceptionally high. Having already spoken at length about Radar festival in my last column, I only have three more…
There has always been the sense of the eerie and the weird to Kayo Dot’s music. Perhaps that is in the nature of all the disparate styles we often clumsily bundle up together under the guise of avant-garde or art rock. This eeriness is, naturally, hard to define; it is…
What ever happened to unpredictability? The Baroness, the Mastodon, when they were sneaky. You miss those old familiar bands, waiting just around the bend. Now though they’re everywhere you look, they’re quite different from their reckless and wild beginnings. They reigned it in. They matured. It’s nonsensical to argue that…
Summertime. The living may be easy, the fish jumping and the cotton high, but Humanity’s Last Breath couldn’t give a shit about that. As Europe is broiled by a particularly ferocious heatwave, the Swedes prepare to deliver a relentless blast of bleak and uncompromising gloom on harsh Scandinavian winds. Abyssal,…
That title, coming from this band, is honestly terrifying. We’re still reeling from Howling Sycamore’s debut release, a supergroup comprised of some of death metal’s best and making a weird type of avant-garde progressive metal, and here they stand before us with a promise of annihilation. Interestingly enough, Seven Pathways…
I was never much of a Meshuggah fan. I mean, I appreciate their music more than I listen to it on a day to day basis. Nothing is a masterpiece; Destroy, Erase, Improve changed what I thought metal could do. But I don’t spin those albums in my day to…
It’s always a tricky thing when an established group puts out a new record. You don’t want to get your hopes up necessarily, but you’re just really looking forward to hearing it. Especially if that artist is one of your favorites. You don’t want to project on them but it’s…
As a music critic, I’ve always strived to go beyond curation by attempting to contextualize the artists and albums I review. Of course, finding and recommending noteworthy new music is still an important part of the job, especially in today’s saturated music market. But the opportunity for deeper analysis has…
We’ve pointed out many times that viewing your relationship with music as some sort of pure, Platonistic dynamic is absurd. The fact is that context, mood, pedigree, and aesthetic all play a part in whether you like a band’s music or not, often playing a bigger role than any “objective”…
Hello and welcome to this, the second part of our *prognotes installment analyzing Alkaloid’s The Malkuth Grimoire. I usually don’t make a big deal out of it but, in this case, it is absolutely essential to read the first part this post, which you can find here. I won’t spend…
