Nuclear Dudes – Truth Paste Review

By Thus Spoke

Nuclear Dudes is one step closer to living up to their moniker as they are now officially more than one person.1 Joined by Brandon Nakamura (Doomsday 1999, ex-Teen Cthulu) on vocals, Sandrider’s Jon Weisnewski bounces back from the synthwave moment of Compression Crimes 1 to resume the usual trajectory of insanity. 2023’s Boss Blades—my personal introduction to this madness—was a disarmingly likeable collection of silly and serious sounds heavy and light. It was also surprisingly good. Though I’d partly forgotten this due to its brevity and my sieve-like brain, the band has such character, in name, in vibe, and artwork theme—that a commenter very sensibly pointed out is likely courtesy of Weisnewski’s small child and not his brother as I hilariously assumed—that I was instantly back in the room with Nuclear Dudes, ready for the next trip.

With a permanent2 vocalist alongside Weisnewski’s own contributions, Truth Paste is closer to powerviolence or grind than previous outings. But a vague resemblance to these genres is as close as it gets. The record is a breezy 23 minutes across 11 tracks (check one: very short runtimes), and there are more passages of outright beatdown, screaming, chaotic metallic insanity (check 2: silly heavy and intense). But it’s what’s going on within that runtime, and both during and between those especially heavy moments that matters. Nuclear Dudes don’t waste a second. Opening on a bizarre tribute to Guns ‘n Roses’ “Welcome to the Jungle”—which includes using that song’s literal intro as their own—the duo switch in a flash to an electro-grind(core), erratically accented by an array of eclectic sound effects, which is a recurrent style on the album. Approximately four and a half minutes in, it becomes clear that the preceding two tracks (“Napalm Life,” “Holiday Warfare”) functioned as a violent induction to themes that are to follow, as the title track ramps up to a pure hardcore breakdown to a woman crying “ohhhh myy gawwd it’s—”, and the ensuing chuggery forms the first ‘breather’ for the listener. That concludes the most normal segment on the record.

Truth Paste is weird, but it’s not incoherent. Despite the apparently revolving door of blooping, whirring keys and sound effects, and tempo changes that would give an F1 driver whiplash (“Napalm Life,” “Dirty 20,” “Death at Burning Man”), the whole thing flows remarkably well. Pretty much all songs transition seamlessly from the previous with overlapping samples, humming melodies, basslines, or keyboard something-or-other. Nuclear Dudes hit their peak at moments when the electronica-mixed-with-guitar transforms into synthwave by way of grind, making for ridiculously fun grooves (“Concussion Protocol,” “Space Juice,” “Pelvis Presley”) if not some very entertaining melodic excursions. Or perhaps the best parts are during those rapid-fire switches, where goofy meets brutal and jaw-smashing breakdowns are followed or preceded by floaty ethereality (“Truth Paste,” “Juggalos for Congress”).

As a novelty band that takes not taking itself seriously quite seriously, Nuclear Dudes are doing everything right. Track titles are dumb, the movie samples cheesy, and the harsh vox mix is a wry recollection of a bygone bedroom death/grind era. Nuclear Dudes own every last second of it, from the roboticised vocals (“Napalm Life,” “Concussion Protocol,” “Cyrus the Virus”) to the videogame battle sequence vibes of the keyboard gymnastics (“Dirty 20,” “Space Juice”). It’s almost annoying how un-annoying it is. And since you effectively experience it as one extended track, given those instant transitions, it becomes very easy to just vibe with it and not worry about which song you’re actually hearing at any moment, or whether what you just heard was genius or just silly. But in having superior flow to its predecessors, Truth Paste also possesses fewer true standout moments. There are no lows, it’s true, but there are also no epic peaks—no “Many Knifes,” for instance. Then again, this record is committing more strongly to the meth-head electro-grind genre than Boss Blades, and in that respect, kind of smashes it.

If you want to have a very entertaining 23 minutes and six seconds, Truth Paste should be your go-to. Nuclear Dudes has taken recruiting a vocalist, and evolving into their full hybrid mad-subgenre form in their stride, as they continue to half-sprint, half-dance ahead. This record is so tight, fun, and irritatingly self-aware that personal taste is practically irrelevant. I’m no longer going to express surprise that anything Nuclear Dudes creates will be fucking great.

Rating: Great
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Release
Website: Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: September 5th, 2025

#2025 #40 #DeathMetal #EDM #ElectronicMetal #ExperimentalMetal #Grind #Grindcore #NuclearDudes #Powerviolence #Review #Reviews #Sandrider #SelfReleases #Sep25 #Synthwave #TeenCthulhu #TruthPaste #USMetal

Cult Burial – Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust Review

By Thus Spoke

It has always overwhelmed me just how much music is out there, ceaselessly being recorded in studios and basements and forests, ceaselessly being promoted and released, and often sent into the AMG promo pile. There is so much more below the surface than above it, even as regards just one small subgenre. How can one possibly listen to it all, and discern greatness from mediocrity? How can bands stand out when countless others are branding themselves so similarly, making music so apparently similar? Cult Burial are one such band that I would likely never have come across were it not for this gig, despite the generally positive reception both their debut and sophomore albums received (the latter also coming from me). In that review, I highlighted what I perceived to be a distinctiveness to the band’s sound, their particular mixture of death, black, and post-metal sounding just different enough to give them an edge, minor hiccoughs notwithstanding. Then, Cult Burial was in the perfect position to capitalize on these unique strengths and refine the formula, and it is after two years in the shadows that the fruit of their labors falls into my hands.

LP 3, Collapse of Pattern, Reverence of Dust, is immediately and strikingly more imposing than its predecessor. More menacing in its melodies and more aggressive in its stronger leanings towards deathened territory, it also sounds literally sharper, with fewer instances of guitar being relegated to a background bit-part and more of them center-stage in the leading role. The music is atmospheric in a similarly echoing way, again recalling Praise the Plague, but now this atmosphere treads into the more unsettling territory accompanied by jarring chord progressions, akin to Akhlys (“Vincula,” “Vestige”), or even Blut Aus Nord (“Mire”), though decidedly less manic. This new sense of malice goes a long way toward giving Cult Burial a stronger hold on the listener, and helping them avoid the issue of image-sound incongruence that haunted Reverie of the Malignant.

What hasn’t changed about Cult Burial’s approach is their preferred compositional structure. Sticking with relatively brief song lengths, they rely on melodic and rhythmic hooks (“Aether,” “Vestige”) that keep the pace high between the atmospheric intros and interludes, rather than extended creeping builds. This risk didn’t entirely pay off in the last outing, but Collapse of Pattern sees a renewed vigor that makes songs, which pack in blackened doom and death in a signature smoky style with a more ‘conventional’ black or death metal solo or bridge, tonally fluid despite their fluctuations. The prevailing tone of meanness is a markedly more consistent and coherent than previously, and this now shines through most strongly where Cult Burial turn to the tangled zone of dissonance in their extreme metal leanings, which takes the humming chords and minor melodies—not to mention the pleasantly audible purr of the bass—into a realm of creepy that’s thoroughly, spine-tinglingly enjoyable (“Vincula,” “Enthrall,” “Beseech”).

The main problem is that, however cool or chilling various passages are—and they are—Collapse of Pattern never does enough to fully arrest its audience. A seeming impatience to get to the next bit compounds paradoxically with a reluctance to ever progress beyond the inevitable switch from slower intro to faster heaviness. It makes the music feel underdeveloped in two senses. On the one hand, by lack of builds and by not actually possessing the presence they tease with an overly mysterious and surface-level atmospheric aura—marked by heavy resonance. On the other hand, by the near absence of dynamism in the yet fickle and multifaceted compositions, which sway from an ominous death-doom into a distinctly tech-death acerbity. While Cult Burial made strides when it comes to improving their overall vibe—as in, there’s no longer a strange tonal separation between different songs as there was before—their music indicates that they still feel unsure of their identity. Simultaneously trying too hard to sound dark and huge and frightening, and not trying hard enough to craft a convincingly solid presence that would justify it.

Collapse of Pattern feels like one step forward, two steps back. On every listen, I am drawn in by opener “Vincula”‘s malevolently stomping, eerily moaning refrain. By the time I have reached its back half, however, it no longer grips me; songs bleed together and dissolve. Cult Burial may still have something great in them, but until they dive fully into the void or write some killer riffs, they are doomed to fade into obscurity.

Rating: Mixed
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Released
Websites: cultburial.com | cultburial.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/cultburial
Released Worldwide: September 5th, 2025

#25 #2025 #AKhlys #BlackMetal #BlackenedDeathMetal #BlackenedDoom #BlutAusNord #CollapseOfPatternReverenceOfDust #CultBurial #DeathMetal #PraiseThePlague #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #Sep25 #UKMetal

Old Machines – The Cycles of Extinction Review

By Thus Spoke

Picture the scene: it’s 3 am, and the bar is about to close. the last remaining customers—a table of four1 long-haired, denim and leather-clad men—are being shooed out. As they stagger, laughing, out the door, the bartender hears one of them (who he doesn’t know is guitarst Brian Rush of Ænigmatum, et al) saying, “Wait, wait, ok ok yeah so you’re on the keyboards doing the melody, and then I’m—what are we going for—black, death, thrash?…Yeah, awesome…” In this imagined world, the unsuspecting eavesdropper just witnessed the birth of Old Machines, who may well have begun work on their 2024 demo Backwards Through Space that very night. A year on, the crew—whose notable members also include Oxygen Destroyer percussionist Chris Craven—make their full-length debut with The Cycles of Extinction, which takes their craft and their concept from zero right to infinity, and beyond.

Cycles of Extinction is steeped in lore billions of years old, telling stories of peoples and times spanning aeons and light years—which may or may not be plotlines from many cherished video games—and sporting a runtime spanning an hour. Old Machine’s chosen format could perhaps best be described as being to symphonic death metal what Old Nick is to raw black metal.2 The bulk of the music is led by the keys, which do not attempt to disguise their jam-core sound that fluctuates between dungeon-synth camp and the kind of ambient sound-healing hum you’d get at the end of a yoga session in 2002. Guitars largely follow the rhythm and timbre of the synths—with many a hammer-on and pull-off ascending and descending alongside the identically clambering keys—if they don’t chug and gallop along to the next dramatically marching beat. There are some acrobatics, but they never usurp that keyboard’s position at centre-stage. Fast and mostly straightforward drumming keeps things at a vibrant up-tempo, with just a hint of thrashy energy, and croaking snarls share roughly equal space with booming spoken-word narration. It’s uncomplicated, but not without a certain charming passion and weirdness.

If nothing else, Cycles of Extinction sounds like Old Machines had a lot of fun making it. The tongue-in-cheek melodrama of the unadorned keyboard swooping through a movement, whilst the drums batter and riffs riff meanly, (“Glory to the Terrans of the First Contact War”) like something out of an N64 game fight scene (“The Sundering of the Irradiated Sons, and the Rebellion Sparked by the Gene-Plague”) is so silly it kind of works. There are moments where it’s almost genius: the deceleration and acceleration of “Cycles of Extinction,” complete with well-timed spoken word and manic screams; or the sudden vivacious grace of the guitars on “They Are Legion: The Tragic Exodus of the Veiled Creators ” that breaks the mould and outdoes the keys for just a moment, before the twain tumble back down a scale together. The first (“Cycles of Extinction”), and maybe even the second (“Extinguishing the Light of the Preludian Empire (Upon the Apex of Their Glory)”), time you hear that choir effect, played in an on-off jaunt that betrays their origin as having nothing at all to do with a human voice, it’s nigh impossible not to smile. But the question is: at what point are you no longer laughing with Old Machines, but laughing at them?

Unfortunately for Old Machines, the very synthetic-sounding synths with their repeated use of the same effects, chuggy, fast guitars, and prevalent spoken-word gets old. The pattern changes but little until the final two tracks “They Are Legion…” and “Glory to the Terrans…”—which in fairness do account for nearly a quarter of the runtime—when all of the best riffs, melodies, and moments are hastily stuffed in next to all the above. This is odd enough, and yet far more baffling is the decision to include two extended passages of ambience. The first one opens the album on a decidedly slow and tonally incongruent note as the first third of the 11-minute opener “Twilight of the Old Gods and the Dawning of the First Cycle.” The other slams the breaks on mid-album for a full eight minutes and 38 seconds of uneventful vagary (“Dark Space and Beyond – The Continuance of the Evolution of the Final Cycle”). If you were vibing with Old Machines’ weird keyboard blackened death metal before, then this ice cold shower kills the mood and exacerbates the irritation of following track “Crescendo of Carnage: Warsong of the Singing Swarm (Swarm Wars I)” and its especially jerky, stabby riff and key combos.

At the end of the day, Old Machines had an idea, and they ran with it. Maybe it’ll tickle some listeners enough in just the right way, because it is at times kinda fun. But even looking past the goofiness, the album’s structural issues—the monotone ambience and behemoth length—are sure to test the most saintly of patiences. If we can believe the band, The Cycles of Extinction is only the beginning; we’ll just have to wait and see whether Old Machines double down on the cheese, or evolve.

Rating: Mixed
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps mp3
Label: Self-Release
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: August 22nd, 2025

#25 #2025 #Aug2025 #BlackMetal #DeathMetal #DungeonSynth #ElectronicMetal #OldMachines #OldNick #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #SymphonicDeathMetal #TheCyclesOfExtinction #ThrashMetal

Record(s) o’ the Month – May 2025

By Angry Metal Guy

There are months when the Record(s) o’ the Month feels like a sacred duty. It is the noble, worthwhile culmination of rigorous listening and passionate discourse.1 And then there’s May. May, a month in which Dr. A.N. Grier tried to vote for a band called… SEXCAVE or some shit four or five different times using different pseudonyms (but the same IP address), and where Dolphin Whisperer almost made me rage quit by making a single comment about “sky-tearing tonalities,” which, like… what kind of pretentious fucking bullshit is that? Do you people even listen to music, or do you just sit around all day making up stupid poetic ways of saying absolutely nothing?2 But if we’re fair, he wasn’t entirely wrong. Sometimes a record arrives that doesn’t just demand attention, it seizes it like an Aztec death deity grabbing the sun.3 So for the first time in a while, the best album in May came from an unsigned band. And not just any unsigned band. It came from a band proficient in bull riding!

The beauty of the Unsigned Band Rodeö lies in its chaos. No expectations. No promo sheets. No preconceived narratives. Just music dropped into our laps like cursed artifacts.4 On Nikan Axkan, which was self-released on May 2nd, 2025 [Bandcamp], Kalaveraztekah weaponizes its vision of death metal through the lens of pre-Hispanic culture and indigenous cosmology. There’s no sense that these Hidrocálidos are some kind of novelty act. They aren’t a Mexican Eluveitie, just playing Dark Tranquillity riffs while putting a Ritual Death Flute over it for 40 seconds in every song.5 Rather, Nikan Axkan is a muscular, seething, and deeply rooted record that radiates conviction from every grinding riff. The percussion rumbles like a procession of drums echoing through stone temples, fusing to a brutal core of death metal that just fucks. There’s a Blood Incantation-like spaciness that offers a counterbalance to all this brutality and adds unexpected depth. After spending the better part of a week in what my physician has called a “ritualistic fugue state,” I managed to pull myself out of the netherworld to write that when Kalaveraztekah’s two pillars—the atmospheric otherworldly and the brutal death metal—meet, “they crash into each other like storm fronts, creating something beautiful and terrible to behold. Nikan Axkan is simultaneously brutal and thoughtful, grindy and melodic, atmospheric and immediate,” and it’s the Record o’ the Month.

Runner(s) Up:

…and Oceans // The Regeneration Itinerary [May 23rd, 2025 | Season of Mist | Bandcamp] — …and Oceans is having an Amorphisesque second act and I am here for it. They’ve always walked the line between symphonic grandiosity and black metal chaos, and with The Regeneration Itinerary, they’ve engineered their third very good platter in 5 years. The record combines sharp, Emperor-style riffing with theatrical synths, industrial flourishes, and ruthlessly precise pacing. “Demonstrating a degree of evolution in their craft” and with “exceptional [performances] across the board,” …and Oceans have once again hit that sweet balance—and ever-more unique sound in this current black metal soundscape—that makes their revitalization so welcome. But it’s not just that it’s a good continuation, I feel like they are continuing to refine and revitalize the launch with each new album they release. It’s always fun to watch bands defy Angry Metal Guy’s Law of Diminishing Recordings™, and while The Regeneration Itinerary isn’t their best record yet, 30 years after their debut, …and Oceans is still releasing vital music that’s impossible to overlook.

Jade // Mysteries of a Flowery Dream [May 9th, 2025 | Pulverised Records | Bandcamp] — Mysteries of a Flowery Dream is an atmospheric death metal record that unfolds like a guided hallucination. It’s melodic. It’s moody. It’s weirdly elegant. And it doesn’t care about my riffs-per-minute quota. It takes things slow and keeps them dreamy. Jade trades bludgeoning immediacy for textured dream-logic, and while it takes a few listens to understand what’s happening, once it clicks, it’s hard for listeners to shake. And yet, it balances out the problem that atmospheric records rarely feel heavy, because they’re too busy padding the sharp edges with “atmosphere.” But Mysteries of a Flowery Dream accomplishes its heaviness by feeling oppressive, dense, claustrophobic, and crushing—leaving the listener feeling like they’re in an experimental submarine on their way to see the Titanic.6 And while it’s not the easiest record to penetrate, Owlswald wants you to know that “those who actively immerse themselves in Jade’s expansive world will be handsomely rewarded. The excellent songwriting, replete with its cohesion, balance, and dynamism, is impressive, steadily shifting my initial apathetic impressions to genuine appreciation. So don your finest headphones, sit back, and let Jade immerse you in their dreamlike world.”

#AndOceans #2025 #AMGSUnsignedBandRodeo #Amorphis #DarkTranquillity #Eluveitie #Emperor #Independent #Jade #Kalaveraztekah #May25 #MysteriesOfAFloweryDream #NikanAxkan #RecordSOTheMonth #RecordsOfTheMonth #SelfReleases #TheRegenerationItinerary

Anthony Ellis: Ashes of Reason – Crisis Catalyst Review

By Angry Metal Guy

Written By: Nameless_n00b_603

CRISIS CATALYST – 1

In an age where technology is abundant and affordable, it’s never been easier for someone with a ditty and a dream to make their music a reality. Enter Ashes of Reason, the brainchild of one-man band Anthony Ellis, and his third full-length, Crisis Catalyst. Shouldering the responsibility to write, record, and produce your own album is painstakingly ambitious and requires deep wells of both grit and gumption. Calling the shots means you get to deliver your 100% pure, undiluted vision into the hungry earholes of curious listeners. You also risk crafting an echo chamber, reinforcing questionable choices, and forgoing feedback that could make the difference between a romp-stomping release and an aural slog.

Crisis Catalyst is an influence-laced affair, with an In Flames-tinged riff here (“Desensitised Nation”) and an Annihilator-flavored vocal delivery there (“Crisis Catalyst”). It’s at the altar of Iron Maiden, though, where Ashes of Reason worships most fervently. The problem with wearing influences on your sleeve is that you inevitably draw comparisons to your muse, especially when covering one of their most beloved tunes. Ashes of Reason’s cover of “Hallowed Be Thy Name” offers a cross-section of the woes that plague Crisis Catalyst, including dubious production and a scarcity of the show-stopping shredder cheese that most heavy metal cooks with.1

Listeners’ largest and most immediate hurdle is Ellis’ voice. He employs an assortment of styles; opener “Fight the Machine” touts Halfordian falsettos that get blood and fists pumping, and it’s a shame this style is relegated to one track because it’s by far the best one deployed. Mostly, the vocals mirror a reduced Devin Townsend (“Screaming at the Void,” “Pineapple Party”) without the range or versatility and are too often pitchy and unrefined. The biggest vocal sin is the ungainly reverb bedeviling tracks across the album (“Hallowed Be Thy Name,” “Clarity,”2 “The Long Return”).3 Hearing it repeatedly undercuts the momentum built by better moments. Layered vocal harmonies present another challenge; they aren’t inherently bad and work well when deftly implemented, but at times throughout Crisis Catalyst, they clash with jarring friction (“Screaming at the Void,” “Clarity,” “Ledger of Ghosts”). Other times, one vocal track sustains a note longer than another, creating a sloppy, uneven experience when mixed together (“Screaming at the Void,” “The Long Return”). If consuming Crisis Catalyst passively, some of these gripes aren’t immediately arresting, but once attuned, they’re distracting and difficult to endure on repeated spins.

Despite the vocals, there are plenty of praise-worthy moments on Crisis Catalyst. Rock-solid riffs snake through the album, featuring kickass licks and highlighting Ellis as an adept rhythm guitarist. Whether drawing from Gothenburg charm (“Desensitised,” “Cost Too High”), laying out Maidenesque riffs (“Clarity”4) or pumping out hard-rocking grooves (“Fight the Machine,” “Pineapple Party”), Ashes of Reason can assemble rousing compositions. Bass guitar occupies an unobtrusive yet chunky space that fits snugly in the mix (“Crisis Catalyst,” “Hallowed Be Thy Name”), while the drumming is an album highlight, flexing quick-sticked fills and fleet footwork.

Crisis Catalyst has promise, but those promising ideas are undermined by execution blunders and strange production decisions, leaving me wondering how much better Crisis Catalyst might have been with an experienced producer and another guitarist. The final result is a disappointing collection of tracks that needs more polish before serving it to the masses. If this review is harsh, it’s not out of malice. It takes a heaping dose of resolve and fearlessness to will an entire album into existence on your own, and for that, Anthony Ellis deserves a hearty tip of the cap. A good album lurks within these depths, but the experience is ultimately marred by distracting vocal effects, familiar ideas, and choices that are hard to justify. Absent a track to reel me back in, I won’t return to Crisis Catalyst after I close the chapter on this review. But with better production and more refinement, I’d be interested to hear what comes next.

Rating: 2.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Released
Website: ashesofreason.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: July 4th, 2025

#2025 #Annihilator #AnthonyEllis #AshesOfReason #CrisisCatalyst #HeavyMetal #InFlames #IronMaiden #Jul25 #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases

Crimson Shadows – Whispers of War Review

By Eldritch Elitist

When a beloved record receives a successor following a decade or more of germination, what do the fans want to hear? What do they dare hope to hear? Comparable cases have shown that the best-case scenario is typically a great record that echoes the artist’s prior success in varying degrees. Notable examples include albums that adhere to the artist’s established formula, yet whose energy has been somewhat eroded by the passage of time. Others are major departures that recall the past in genre only. Whispers of War, the third album from Canadian melodic power death metallers Crimson Shadows, reveals a third path: A record which adheres so strictly to its predecessor that it sounds like it dropped mere months afterward. With Whispers of War in my hands, I am confident that it is exactly what I’ve wanted all along.

For the uninitiated, Crimson Shadows’ sound is what would have happened if DragonForce had been mainstays in the late 90’s / early 00’s Finnish melodic death metal scene, but with a North American metalcore-adjacent sense of chunk and polish tailor-made for the 2009 Rockstar Energy Mayhem Festival. Their blend of sugary lead guitars and rhythmic violence is peak Dumb Guy Metal, and as The Dumbest Guy, I’m thrilled that this new album recaptures the formula perfectly. To compare Crimson Shadows’ album-to-album trajectory to that of DragonForce, Whispers of War is to 2014’s Kings Among Men as the first half of Sonic Firestorm is to the second half of Sonic Firestorm. Had this record been disc two of a Kings Among Men double album, not a single eye would have been batted. Everything is intact: Big riffs, bigger melodies, and ceaseless double bass drives staunchly locked to 200bpm. My biggest worry was that this unshaken formula would feel obligatory, but Whispers of War’s sheer caffeinated vigor is authentic and as undeniably addictive as ever.

Whispers of War’s quality is neck-and-neck with Kings Among Men, even surpassing it in certain areas in its battle to justify its own existence. Where Crimson Shadows’ preceding album was at its best in scattered instances of monumental grandeur, these new compositions are more compelling in their moment-to-moment execution. No song on Whispers of War feels as singularly massive as, say, the chorus of “Dawn of Vengeance,” yet its riffs feel more gleefully barbaric across the board, stampeding rowdily through verses in tracks like “Guardians” and “Rise of the Fallen Soul.” Elsewhere, the band weaves Wintersunny blastbeats into the proceedings (“Whispers of War,” “Battle Hard 2: Battle Harder”) in jolts of welcome variety. The more Whispers of War sits with me, the more I believe it superior to its younger sibling, even if I love all of Crimson Shadows’ children equally.1

What gives Whispers of War the edge as my new favorite Crimson Shadows record are its improved performances across the board. The band formed in 2006, yet in a mythically rare occurrence, has maintained their starting lineup, bassist Alex Snape being the sole exception. Guitarist / clean vocalist Greg Rounding has a notably greater control and expanded range during the record’s excellent choruses, and his and Ryan Hofing’s dueling guitar solos are elevated in both complexity and memorability. Harsh vocalist Jimi Maltais, meanwhile, remains a motherfucking powerhouse and one of the most underrated growlers in extreme metal. The only instrumental disappointment comes in the mixing of drummer Cory Hofing’s kitwork. His cymbal patterns are ear-ticklingly catchy, yet his kit’s tone and presence have been flattened in generic modern metal fashion in a downgrade from its thunderous nature on Kings Among Men.

I love this band. Maybe it’s because I had my old Xbox 360 loaded up with ripped DragonForce and Children of Bodom CDs, but to me, their music sounds like a Halo 3-branded can of Mountain Dew Game Fuel in the best possible way. There is a youthful earnestness to Crimson Shadows’ music that has become increasingly difficult to come by, and the fact that they have picked up exactly where they left off a decade ago with a record this good speaks volumes of their enthusiasm in being true to themselves and the music they love. I’d be thrilled to hear Crimson Shadows expand their sound in new directions following Whispers of War, but for the time being, this is an exceedingly rare instance where more of the same is the ideal outcome. There may be better records released in 2025, but I sincerely doubt I will spin any of them harder, louder, or with more jubilance than this one.

Rating: Great
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: PCM
Label: Self-Release
Websites: crimsonshadows.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/CrimsonShadowsBand
Releases Worldwide: July 25th, 2025

#2025 #40 #CanadianMetal #CrimsonShadows #DragonForce #Jul25 #KingsAmongMen #MelodicDeathMetal #PowerMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #WhispersOfWar

Grace Hayhurst – The World Is Dying Review

By Angry Metal Guy

Written By: Nameless_n00b_601

Making good progressive metal is incredibly difficult. Where styles like black metal can still succeed without considered songwriting or astonishing musicianship, prog is a fickle mistress, demanding expert songcraft that balances dynamic peaks and valleys, as well as considerable instrumental prowess. Even prog’s biggest bands still routinely falter when armed with a fearsome squad of world-class musicians and major label backing.1 Still, this fails to deter new artists without such resources from aiming for the sheer highs the style can offer. Enter English multi-instrumentalist Grace Hayhurst and her debut record, The World Is Dying. Except for drums, Hayhurst accomplishes the impressive task of composing and performing an expansive prog album entirely by herself. Informed by both ’70s prog rock and modern prog metal, alongside orchestral music and sci-fi media, The World Is Dying aims to be music that Hayhurst “wants to listen to.” Can this one-woman independent release fulfill her ambitions and succeed in producing a quality prog album where her contemporaries have failed?

Grace Hayhurst demonstrates a clear familiarity with prog, which she uses to craft engaging and varied songs. Her brand of prog metal is very much in line with the approach to the subgenre crystallized by Dream Theater and modernized by Haken, complete with a dash of extra British flavor á la Steven Wilson and Gentle Giant. Vocal-led compositions feature keyboards front and center, alongside odd time signatures and syncopated guitar riffs across dynamic shifts between softer, atmospheric moments and heavier passages with distorted power chords. Hayhurst follows the “prog playbook” while managing to avoid the common pitfalls of unfocused songwriting and extended solo sections, which plague many of her contemporaries. Instead of mashing together unrelated parts around a vague pop song structure, she builds on a distinct rhythmic or melodic motif and follows it throughout a song. Hayhurst weaves in and out of verses, choruses, and solos while dialing the intensity up or down depending on the part. The World Is Dying’s strongest songs use such motifs as central throughlines, complicating and enhancing compositions through texture and instrument substitutions (“Us vs Them,” “Revolution”).

Stunning compositions are only part of a successful prog equation, though, and unfortunately, Grace Hayhurst is an unengaging vocalist. The vocal parts themselves are all competently written, but vocally, she lacks the power or personality necessary to lead songs consisting of big hooks and dramatic peaks. Her vocal delivery is breathy and devoid of emotion. This makes the more chorus-focused songs (“The World Is Dying,” “It’s Our Fault”) significantly weaker, as each song’s repeated centerpiece falls flat. This isn’t helped by uninspiring lyrics throughout, which are presented with crystal clear audibility due to the production style. The record is entirely about humankind’s destruction of the Earth and the lack of consequences for those in power who have caused this. Yet, there’s no use of metaphor or abstraction in dealing with this potentially rich topic, just relatively plain language doled out in obvious rhyme schemes. After repeated listens, I find myself constantly pulled away from the tension created by lush instrumentation when what should be a memorable vocal moment fails to land.

When the vocals aren’t centered, The World Is Dying is loaded with engaging compositions, replete with musical layers and countermelodies that elevate an already-strong instrumental core. The individual sections themselves can sometimes veer into predictable, generic prog territory, but there is no shortage of textural flavor or variety, which adds nuance and replayability to several tunes. Nature sound effects are used to strengthen the concept while deepening the sonic space (“Our Forest, the Earth”), slap bass is employed for some funktastic groove changeups (“Us Vs. Them”) and guitar/synth melodies are embellished with tasty, doubled harmonies or added strings and orchestral flare (“Take Off”). On the vocal end, there are efforts made with layered harmonies and vocoders to make things a bit more interesting by pulling the focus away from a single vocal performance. Even harsh vocals are deployed at a few key moments, such as the end of the 13-minute “Revolution,” to great effect. Although on the track list, this is followed by an interlude and then the album closer, “Absent Futures,” a vocal-led acoustic ballad that falls flat due to its form.

The World Is Dying displays plenty of promise, but its potential is hampered by one unfortunately lackluster element. As a lover of prog, Grace Hayhurst’s debut is almost filled with enough whimsy and clever songwriting to excite me, but is ultimately held back by its weak vocals. I could see Hayhurst functioning well as the primary composer for a prog metal band with a dedicated singer. She still has some growth before carrying a full band on her own. For now, this album finds itself in the same predicament as its cover art: a competent package whose thematic cohesion is displaced by one disappointing component.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 8 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Independent
Websites: gracehr.st| gracehrst.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: June 27th, 2025

#25 #2025 #DreamTheater #GentleGiant #GraceHayhurst #Haken #Jun25 #ProgressiveMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #StevenWilson #TheWorldIsDying

Acidsloth – Acidsloth Review

By Thus Spoke

Can you guess what genre Acidsloth plays? Yes, that’s right, it’s thrash! Ok, no, obviously not, it’s stoner doom—what else with a name that’s a portmanteau of a drug and a notoriously slow-moving animal? Kicking1 around since 2021, Kraków’s Acidsloth already have two LPs to their name, but it’s their third that they bestow the honor of being self-titled. The reason is that this time, they’re a “full band” (to use their own terminology), totaling eight(!) musicians, five of whom perform vocals. In this sense, Acidsloth is kind of their debut. With a charmingly against-type depiction of their token animal, and the promise of “Eyehategod-level aggression mixed with Conan’s heaviness and Electric Wizard’s psychedelic weight,” Acidsloth are out to show they mean business.

Acidsloth’s more-is-more approach to vocalists sees them hand the mic to a new player on (almost) every track.2 This is a cool and unique way to inject a bit of flavor into what is an infamously monotonous subgenre, as we swap between the shriekier (Julia Markiewicz, Radosław Bury), hoarser (Jan Gajewski, Mateusz Zborowski) and the growlier (Patryk Kozera) interpretations of the sludge scream. Beyond this, their compositions follow a common trajectory, often beginning with atmospheric, slightly ominous plucking and spending most of their time brooding in distorted sludgy chugs to a sedated beat. It’s certainly solid (in literal density as well as aesthetic quality), and sometimes it’s even slick thanks to some beautifully-timed transitions and an elusive solo. But as a whole, it fails to have the weight it needs to support its posture.

The thing about having different vocalists on different songs is that it’s quite important to be able to hear them well enough to appreciate their individual skills. Unfortunately, Acidsloth’s vocal track is so low in the mix compared to the instrumentation that the shouts and screams are often lost in the fuzz and bang of guitar and bass drum (particularly on “Float” and “Sin”). Given this, you’d hope the riffs would make up for it, but here too, Acidsloth fumble the ball. Outside of two pretty sweet solos (“Hole,” “Puke”) the guitars only hint at interesting melodies with some hanging plucks (“Hole,” “Free,” “Puke,” “Satan”), and interspersed passages of up-or-down-tempo strumming (“Float,” “Satan”). There are little moments of brilliance where it seems Acidsloth finally finish coming up and deliver—brutal, sledgehammer sludge screams (“Float,” “Free”); that solo (“Hole”); groovily-tapping post metal tension (“Free,” “Satan”); moody liquid plucks (“Sin”). But it’s at these times when Acidsloth’s odd compositional habits truly hamstring what strength they gained. Frequently, songs switch gears midway, and then again, and yet manage to reprise the least-interesting elements of monotony; the cool parts not given time to command the space they deserve (“Hole,” “Free,” “Sin,” “Puke”). The worst case is “Free,” which could have Amenra-esque levels of bite and solemnity, if the mid-tier galloping sludge didn’t smother the harrowing howls, and the anticipatory build that interrupts it set the tone instead.

Doom of any kind, and sludge for that matter, is at heart designed to be uncomplicated, but its presence—whether through emotional depth or sheer magnitude—is what makes it powerful. Alternatively, maybe it can just make you feel good with some psychedelically lush soundscapes. Acidsloth has no presence beyond its literal noisiness, and there’s but a glimmer of color in the melodies. The near-inaudibility of the vocalists is made worse by the frequent use of reverb, and what is either multi-tracking or group shouts (their muddiness makes it hard to tell). The music isn’t “boring,” as such, it’s just draining to listen to, as all the best riffs, screams, and good use of rhythm and atmosphere are quite quickly ironed over with a return to the plod and a sheen of humming feedback. One thus ends up walking away with the unfair impression that there’s simply nothing going on in the entire record. Even in active listens, I struggled to cling to the positive vibes.

As a stoner doom album, maybe Acidsloth is standard fare, but I would like to think not. As a sludge album, it fares better, thanks to an emphasis on chunky—albeit mostly dull—riffing and the fact that at least some of the vocalists seem to have promise. Acidsloth are finding their feet as an ensemble, and if they can pool their assets, I think they could make something pretty juicy. Hopefully, they make the move faster than the animal they’re named for.

Rating: Disappointing
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Willowtip
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: June 20th, 2025

#20 #2025 #Acidsloth #Amenra #Conan #CultOfLuna #DoomMetal #ElectricWizard #Eyehategod #Jun25 #PolishMetal #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #Sludge #StonerDoom

Stellar Blight – Eventide: Synod of the Dying Stars Review

By Thus Spoke

Contact form promos are a high-risk, high-reward option when it comes to choosing a review candidate. The unsigned artist(s) behind the enthusiastic prose could be overselling an undercooked bedroom project, or understatedly presenting shockingly good music that makes you want to shake record labels and say “sign these guys, goddammit!” Stellar Blight, happily, are of the latter breed, though this fact is unsurprising. Comprised of the vocalist from Mānbryne (and Blaze of Perdition); the guitarist from Shodan; and the drummer from Owls Woods Graves, the trio have plenty of experience. With their debut, Eventide: Synod of the Dying Stars, they blend each of their primary styles: taking mystique, progressiveness, and punky energy from them, respectively, and creating a dynamic, raucous, and characterful blackened heavy metal that’s hard to forget.

Eventide is defined by its spiritedness; something that hits all the harder for the way Stellar Blight set the scene. First track “The Portent,” uses its time to create genuine anticipation for the rest of the album with a gallant melody that gives way to rolling drumbeats and chants. The smoke has barely cleared before the band launch into white-hot ripper and instant Heavy Moves Heavy frontrunner “Doves into Serpents”. This dynamic opening duo provide a taste of the flavours to come, elements and quirks that will recur over the remaining runtime. Riffs that enter with a satisfying slide and croon with assuredness (“Second Death,” “Stellar Blight”); group chants (“World Wide Woe”) and call-response lyric delivery (“Second Death”) black ‘n’ roll swagger meeting coercively snappy d-beats (“Weaponised Compassion”), and sulky black metal sway (“Maggots in Awe,” “Unsung”). Throughout it all, Stellar Blight maintain their identity, whether snarling in defiance or murmuring in brooding black moods—always consistently fierce, and with barely a shred of atmosphere anywhere in sight.

This ferocity peaks at moments on Eventide when the band pull the most electric aspects of their stylistic pool into one thrilling package. Wailing leads, soaked in a heavy metal richness, warbling alongside a tempo you feel in your bones, all three members roaring in unison and you grinning like a maniac (“Doves into Serpents,” “Second Death,” “Stellar Blight”). Or, taking it down a gear, folky—acoustic even—strumming weaving through ballad-like steadiness, chants backing up the blackened narration of a beautiful, but very trve sort of ballad (“Maggots in Awe”). And even outside of these passages, Stellar Blight sprinkles in spiky off-beats, smooth, slidy solos, and infectiously fun gang vocals into an ostensibly black metal template, much like fruit, nuts, and chocolate chips in the generously filled brownie batter of addictive heavy music they have crafted.1 It culminates in a viciousness devoid of malevolence, a brazenness entirely unpretentious, which carries the spirit, if not the letter of traditional black and heavy metal, and all while feeling fresh, thanks to Stellar Blight’s creative interpretation and execution.

If Stellar Blight could sustain their highest quality, they would be unstoppable, but as it is, they stumble a little. The overall pace literally begins to slow over the album’s back half, beyond the sinister and mournful “Maggots in Awe,” which justifies its tone change with an anthemic feel that sounds like Seth and Mānbryne mashed together. The weakest cuts, “Unsung,” and “Sisyphean Prestige,” follow back-to-back, and eat away at the exhilaration created by the prior material. Their melodies are comparatively unsubstantial, and disconcertingly major in key; the bite of the snarls weaker, and the chanting less inspiring; the tempos milder. Closer “Weaponised Compassion” makes up for some of this deficit, but it lacks the commanding presence highlights like “Stellar Blight” or “Doves into Serpents” have in droves, and its movements are less interesting versions of the better songs’ themes. There’s also instrumental “Eventide” sitting between it and “Sisyphean Prestige,” which is in itself good, and probably contains the best solo guitar of the lot, but at this point, it’s hard not to resent what feels like stalling before Stellar Blight get back on their game.

Gripes aside, there’s no denying that Stellar Blight are working with something very cool. It might need some refining, but the way they are already integrating black and heavy metal is distinctive and dynamic. With a consistent voice, the delivery of an all-around fun listening experience (even at the lower points), and two songs in contention for Heavy Moves Heavy, Eventide was a high-reward choice for me. Now we just have to wait and see what Stellar Blight do next.

Rating: Good!
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Release
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: June 13th, 2025

#2025 #30 #BlackMetal #BlazeOfPerdition #DeathMetal #EventideSynodOfTheDyingStars #HeavyMetal #Jun25 #Mānbryne #OwlsWoodsGraves #PolishMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #Seth #Shodan #StellarBlight

Fleshspoil – The Beginning of the End Review

By Tyme

Troy, New York’s Fleshspoil, may be new to the NYC metal scene,1 but its constituent members certainly are not. Vocalist and guitarist Jeff Andrews (The Final Sleep, Armor Column) and drummer Mike Van Dyne (The Final Sleep, ex-Arsis) have joined forces with Bay Area bassist Dan Saltzman (Illucinus) to wade into the crowded waters of the blackened death metal pool with their self-released debut album, The Beginning of the End. I wondered what Fleshspoil had in store, mainly what Andrews and Van Dyne, given their pedigree, would do to set themselves apart in a genre rife with stiff competition. Would this trio assemble and make The Empire City proud with The Beginning of the End, or, as their moniker might suggest, would they just plain stink?

Fleshspoil tosses progressive atmospherics, dashes of doom, darts of dissonance, and even some metalcore peppercorns into its death metal pot. With as much elusive consistency as The Final Sleep‘s Vessels of Grief, Andrews and Van Dyne have crafted another, albeit deathlier, sonic buffet. Representing a winding path of genres, The Beginning of the End sees crushing, Immolation-esque death metal mix with atmospheric lap-steel guitar and drum interludes (“Bleed Through This Life”) and softer, near post-metal riffs merge into Bleeding Through-like metalcore replete with shimmery clean choruses before ceding direction to a dissonantly black end (“Skies Turn to Graves”). Andrews’ ten tons of riffage serve the material well, and trading his mostly clean vocal delivery ala The Final Sleep for deathlier growls, shouts, and shrieks is a point in Fleshspoil‘s favor. Saltzman’s reserved bass work, a departure from the brutal death slams of his day job, combined with Van Dyne’s expert drumming, has no problem corralling all of The Beginning of the End‘s competing directions. Fleshspoil certainly isn’t afraid to stretch the boundaries of what’s possible, and when it works, it’s good, but it doesn’t always work.

Fleshspoil is at its best when weaving the apocalypse of their death metal with dissonance, melodicism, and progressive atmospheres. These elements are alive and well in the aforementioned “Bleed Through This Life,” which also contains some chaotic solo work courtesy of Kyle Chapman (Aethereus).2 Further success lies in the disso-chords and quirky time signatures of eponymous track “Fleshspoil,” which wanders into some atmospheric guitar and bass noodling, then trundles into a Paul Westerberg alt-rock passage that could have landed on the soundtrack to Singles. All this before ending with some mid-paced death metal riffs, screamed vocals, and marching order snares. Add the growls, shrieks, and Halford-esque cleans over the majestic doom-blackened deathliness of charred and chugging riffs on “A Frail Demise,” and The Beginning of the End finds Fleshspoil fine-tuned to decimate. If it were all within these veins, things would fare better.

I’m a fan of Fleshspoil‘s willingness to experiment, but not all results hit the mark. Time is not a factor as The Beginning of the End clocks in at a trim and tidy thirty-seven minutes. Overwrought transitions and wasted time hurt Fleshspoil the most. I found the pendulum-swinging transitions of “Skies Turn to Graves” too jarring, rendering the song more a distraction than a complementary piece of the whole. Throw in the under-developed, three-plus minute “Walking Dead” and the momentum-crushing boringness of album closer “Born Into Despair,” an alt-rock snoozer that fades in on some guitar-lite strumming and bass work and sustains shimmering guitars under shouts and clean vocals before mercifully fading out again with twenty seconds of vinyl scratches and pops. With this song, Fleshspoil completely took me out of the mood set by “A Frail Demise” and had me yawning rather than reaching for the play button again.

Fleshspoil‘s debut, The Beginning of the End, represents a promising entry into the NYC metal pantheon. Andrews’, Van Dyne’s, and Saltzman’s metal credentials are unquestioned. Fleshspoil has a lot of great ideas and the ability to execute its vision, as half of The Beginning of the End suggests. Leaving its softer sides for other projects and flexing its stronger, more progressive melodic death metal muscle should see Fleshspoil do good, even great things in the future. I will be waiting and watching to see what comes next.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps mp3
Label: Self-Released
Websites: fleshspoilofficial.bandcamp.com | instagram.com/fleshspoil
Releases Worldwide: March 28th, 2025

#25 #2025 #AmericanMetal #Arsis #BlackMetal #BleedingThrough #DeathMetal #Fleshspoil #Immolation #Mar25 #MelodicDeathMetal #Review #SelfReleases #TheBeginningOfTheEnd #TheFinalSleep

À Terre – Embrasser La Nuit Review

By Thus Spoke

There’s nothing wrong with sticking to an established genre template, but it’s interesting when a band opts to mix things up. Bordeaux’s À Terre could be said to go a step further, claiming the musical DNA of their debut Embrasser La Nuit was guided by the provocative question, “Is making Cult Of Luna or Converge really that original these days?” As a sludge/post-metal ensemble, the group’s self-awareness about their debt to the big names, leads them, in Embrasser La Nuit, to sprinkle in a handful of other influences, mainly from the French rap and hip-hop scene.1 But the real question isn’t whether or not what À Terre have created makes for a novel take on post-metal or sludge. Instead, it’s a question of whether or not what they have created is good, regardless of its callbacks or imitations.

There is certainly an air of uniqueness about Embrasser La Nuit. A trap-beat-led, post-metal version of rap (“Tous Morts,”) is not something you hear often. But À Terre don’t settle into any one distinctive style so much as flick between them, and not unnaturally. Classic sludgy trudges marry well with the hardcore stompiness that rears its head on multiple occasions (“Paris sous les Tombes,” “L’Appel de la Nuit”). The post-metal leanings lend themselves by default to the passages of ambience (“ÂCÂB,” “Presque Morts,” “Nous Sommes la Nuit”), which itself pairs as easily with rap-style delivery as harsher rasps. Flashes of greatness come in the form of a cascading pattern of synths smartly woven into an escalating build (“ÂCÂB”), or an alarm-bell riff playing to the tune of a -core/sludge mash-up (“Paris sous la Tombes”). À Terre play their interpretations of these blended genres well, but as as the elements continue to brush shoulders with one another within songs, the energies give way to indistinctness. And there grows an uncomfortable sense that it all amounts to another less-than-memorable iteration of a subgenre’s core sound.

À Terre can write sludge and post-metal. They know how to craft some battering riff-rhythm patterns (“Paris sous les Tombes,” “Nous Sommes La Nuit”), throwing in some group, and layered vocals for that satisfying touch of aggression. Their atmospheric tendencies are also appropriately sombre, and chilling, particularly as they tend towards the stripped-back-to-slow build style that marks some of the best of post-metal’s traits (“ÂCÂB,” “Prophétie”). In reminding the listener of greats like Amenra, Cult of Luna, Isis, and more, passages—and by extension, tracks—gain familiarity and the halo of quality shines on them. Yet, when I hear the pained, atonal screams over minor synths and the tides of gritty chugging (“Prophétie,” “L’Appel de la Nuit”), it’s like hearing Amenra with 90% of the emotion stripped away. The gradual increases in tension and intensity that rise and fall (“ÂCÂB,” “Presque Morts”) are not unaffecting, but their impact is greatly softened by À Terre’s tendency to force, rush, or otherwise fail to properly capitalise on them. They are at best simply inserted, if still decent (“Prophétie”) and at worst, totally undeveloped (“Paris sous les Tombes,” “Presque Morts”). Likewise, the bite of the surrounding sludge feels relatively toothless thanks to the fact that the impatience that characterises the hardcore stylings infects even the stiller moments: off-the-cuff edginess bringing angsty riffage too soon, and ambience breaking sludge far too frequently and abruptly. What results are compositions lacking in conviction, possessing none of the rawness or introspection that they ought to, combining to form something awkwardly bland.

Embrasser La Nuit thus makes for a surprisingly uneventful listening experience; surprising, because everything is technically good, and yet somehow anaemic. The glimmers of brilliance are good only insofar as they are imitations, while the exceptions to the established formula in the form of ‘experimentation’ (“Tous Morts,” and, at a stretch, a more synth-heavy approach in spots across the record) are vastly too brief to create any meaningful intrigue or spice. Leaving individual tastes aside, this kind of music should never be boring, and in fairness, calling Embrasser La Nuit boring would be overly simplistic; it’s too uneven for that. There are stretches of atmospheric musing (“Prophétie”) and snappy boisterousness (“Paris sous les Tombes”) that are, in isolation, good. Their collection nonetheless leaves more than a little to be desired.

À Terre speak to the concept of originality, but ultimately, their debut does not suffer because it lacks it. It suffers because À Terre’s homages to genre mainstays fail to elicit the profoundly affecting responses in their audience that their incarnation demands. The music is a surface-level representation of its inspirations, with only glimpses of depth. With relatively little raw humanity, despite its literal components, and a lukewarm commitment to the true presence of its pugnacity and its magnitude, Embrasser La Nuit makes only the barest of impacts.

Rating: Disappointing
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: wav
Label: Self-Release
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: January 24th, 2025

#20 #2025 #ÀTerre #Amenra #CultOfLuna #EmbrasserLaNuit #FrenchMetal #Isis #Jan25 #PostMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #SludgeMetal

Cave Sermon – Divine Laughter [Things You Might Have Missed 2024]

By Thus Spoke

When I finally heard Divine Laughter, it was closer to January 2025 than it was January this year, when Cave Sermon released it. This temporal technicality turned out to be trivial because its brilliance was immediately obvious. Divine Laughter traverses death, black, sludge, post, ambient, and more, exploring further, and committing harder to mania—as I later discovered—than debut Memory Spear, which I also devoured eagerly. There is primarily just one person behind Cave Sermon, Aussie musician Charlie Park, and until now, the project was instrumental. Miguel Méndez’ vocals—with an impressively versatile, unhinged, and savage performance—are a perfect accompaniment to what appears to be Cave Sermon’s signature abstract and interpretive compositional style, channeling a kind of musical stream of consciousness that must be experienced to be understood.

To say that Divine Laughter is affecting would be criminal understatement. The lyrics alone are touching in a sense totally devoid of sentimentality, reflecting a singularly modern capitalist loneliness, a hatred of human apathy, and a guilt in one’s complicity. But it is the truly magnificent way in which Parks tells (and Méndez narrates) this story musically which makes it so arresting. It feels, at its core, refreshingly and exhilaratingly organic; vibrant and smart and true. Reprises feel like the returning edges of a persistent thought, percussion is as often a tech-death texture as a sludgy battering ram (“Crystallised”), or a vague tap in a noisy void (“Birds and Machines in Brunswick,” “Divine Laughter”); barks pitch upwards into howls in sudden gasps of the realization of some depressing, mundane, and fearful reality (“Liquid Gold”). Quieter moments of almost folky naïveté brush up against acerbic sludginess, alien synth, and the pseudo-chaotically mixed nuts and bolts of razor-sharp death and black metal with a facile deftness I’ve not heard outside of Vicotnik’s work.1

With so few words, how can I convey Divine Laughter’s mania? Comparisons feel stale. The through lines, like paint in abstract art,2 play with and subvert the expected course of a given genre’s template. Energetic black(ened death)3 (“Beyond Recognition,” “The Paint of An Invader”) comes as a thrillingly uneven rain of vitriol. Angular, dissonant extremity tumbles into echoing industrialism, or dizzy ambience (“Beyond Recognition,” “Divine Laughter”); sludgy death remains off-kilter and wild, while charging prog-death rhythms stumble suddenly, (“Crystallised”) and spiraling solos precipitate turns to gazey post (“Liquid Gold”), and every other influence on display. Though there’s a rawness and frightfulness about the relentless transformations of guitar, vocals, and tempo, the use of synths and atmosphere, they remain surprisingly alluring thanks to the powerful emotions bubbling up in subtle resurgences of themes. A lot of this has to do with Méndez’ incredible vocal performance, another lot are these tangled, gorgeous compositions. There are so many of these beautiful, cathartic rises of yearning, urgent melody, and many of them come with the unforeseen force of involuntary emotional reaction (“Beyond Recognition,” “Liquid Gold,” “The Paint of An Invader”), though multiple listens show their edges were presaged.

The only potential stumbling block for Divine Laughter I can concede, is the noisy, sample-spliced “Birds and Machines in Brunswick.” Transitioning into the rather terrifying opening to “Divine Laughter” with its almost Portal-esque bellows, its five minutes stick out perhaps a little too much from the rest. It’s clear that this is an experiment, taking place in a transition period for Cave Sermon. Given the excellence of everything else about Divine Laughter, it is very easy to forgive this trifle. I can truly say that no album—at least in recent years—has so instantaneously affected me, smashing down the doors of my musical perception, and settling deep in my soul. Cave Sermon may have received shockingly little recognition so far,4 but they will no doubt soon be a name on the lips of many in whatever strange sphere of metal we find ourselves in.

Tracks to Check Out: Every one except “Birds and Machines in Brunswick” is mandatory listening.

#2024 #AustralianMetal #BlackMetal #BlackenedDeath #CaveSermon #DeathMetal #DivineLaughter #ExperimentalMetal #PostMetal #SelfReleases #Sludge #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed #ThingsYouMightHaveMissed2024 #TYMHM

Witnesses – Joy Review

By Thus Spoke

Since their inception in 2016, New York’s Witnesses have been a fluid entity. A constantly shifting lineup, held together by sole permanent member and mastermind Greg Schwan, where a small collection of artists lend their voices and instrumental talents to the equally shifting sounds of each album—ambient, post-metal, and doom. Joy sees Witnesses—this time as a trio, with Simon Bibby (of Thy Listless Heart) providing vocals, and Angel Hernandez percussion—turn to doom. And doom is the purported heart of Witnesses, as they claim to take primary inspiration from the British early Peaceville era of the sound. But if their past is any indicator, it would be unwise to put Witnesses in a box, because Joy leans as heavily into prog and post as it does into anything else.

Joy is comprised of five songs (plus the short “Interlude”) mysteriously described as “deeply contradictory compositions about self-actualization.” Each named “Joy,” but with a different subtitle,1 they could effectively be seen as different interpretations of the titular emotion. Joy does not sound, in general, particularly joyful, but it is not gloomy and despairing like you might expect. It is variously introspective (“Like a River”), triumphant (“I See Everything”), and dramatic (“Safety in Me”) with a blunt, clean kind of openness to the compositions, hiding nothing, transitioning crisply, but not without grace. To my ears, the likeness that strikes most strongly is to Wilderun, albeit a more pared-down version, as Bibby’s croons launch themselves upwards alongside major-modulated blackened swooshes, pounding fills, and subtle flourishes of violin. At other times, however, the doom footprint stamps itself firmly before you in the string-accented, sweetly sad sways (“Like a River”), the drooping chords pulled out in downtempo dips (“The Endings”), and the very My Dying Bride-esque spoken word (“Beyond the Sound of My Voice”). These threads combine to form a unique concoction of bare emotions and increasingly ephemeral through-lines, harder to grasp than let slip by.

Two main attributes form Joy’s strength and downfall: raw emotionality and dynamism. The first is largely down to Bibby’s vocal performance, which is at turns wistfully melancholic (“Like a River”), and commanding (“I See Everything,” “Safety in Me”). But instrumentation also plays a significant role, in doomy weepiness (“Like a River,”), or more post-metal mournful meanderings (“I See Everything,” “Interlude”). The second is gained through the aggressive progressiveness of Witnesses’ compositional style, and the impeccable percussion of Angel Hernandez. Where the former is overt—the music moving relentlessly between assertive bombast and ethereal gentleness—the latter is insidiously omnipresent; electric with shifting energies. Yet, while the force of feeling can be resonant, it frequently approaches the abrasive as the cleans are so forceful as to nearly be shouted (“I See Everything,” “Safety in Me”), or dwells in the dreaded major key. These tendencies are made unpleasant not because intense cleans and major keys are bad in themselves,2 but because they are paired with an overly gymnastic approach to songwriting, where Witnesses leaps jarringly from one mood to another, tarring the brilliance of individual passages. The most blatant example, “The Endings,” transitions through silence between styles so disparate that it wasn’t until I began more active listening that I realized this wasn’t a new song. Equally discombobulating is the sudden pathos at the endings of “I See Everything,” and “Safety in Me,” where a short passage of gentle, mournful melody and singing comes abruptly from nowhere. But this proclivity is ubiquitous and ruins many genuine moments of beauty and poignancy. The group yanks bouncy exuberance out of plaintiveness; juxtaposing half-major, half-dissonant riffs with pared-back post-metal. They repeatedly lurch from a harmonizing serenade into uncomfortably flat intonation.

It is thus the two subtler elements of Joy’s feeling and flexibility that are to be praised: those beautiful melodic moments, and the brilliant drumming. The opening track “Like a River,” arguably presents the best of the former, and is arguably the best track on the album. When it comes to percussion, it is the many, elastic fills, tumbling rollovers, and vibrant use of cymbals that provide the majority of the album’s true feeling. The drums greatly benefitted from a production that puts them right near the front of the mix but tends to relegate the guitars to a background role, draining their potency and leaving little to distract listeners in the moments when the singing—also front and center—dominates the sound palate, overly zealous.

Witnesses lives up to their name; their music feels like the stories of varied voices, potent, but unharmonised. The gorgeous, deceptive simplicity of “Like a River” gives way to a record too emotionally and tonally scattershot to stick, and it’s an immense disappointment. Those with a high tolerance for whimsical, uneven prog may find much to appreciate, but for the rest of us, there’s not an overabundance of Joy to be had.

Rating: Disappointing
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Released
Websites: Bandcamp | Facebook
Releases Worldwide: November 8th, 2024

#20 #2024 #AmericanMetal #DoomMetal #Joy #MyDyingBride #Nov24 #PostMetal #ProgMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #Wilderun #Witnesses

Griefsoul – Extreme Northern Griefmetal Review

By Steel Druhm

Written By: Namesless_N00b_87

Extreme Northern Griefmetal, the debut full-length from Finnish melodic death metal project Griefsoul, is the result of measured evolution. The creation of solo artist Emppu Kinnaslampi, the Finn has spent the past four years carefully shaping his take on the infamous Finnish melo-death sound, drawing inspiration from the frigid, dark, and unforgiving Northern winters by partially writing, composing, and experimenting with his self-described and ambitiously titled “grief metal orchestra” from the confines of a snow-covered woodland cabin. Since its meteoric rise at the beginning of the new millennia, no other genre has arguably been more consistent than Finnish melo-death, using its tried-and-true formula of thrashy, power metal-influenced riffs and harmonies, coupled with atmospheric, soaring, orchestral refrains, to drive melancholic and melodic soundscapes. So, when Extreme Northern Griefmetal fell into my lap, I was eager to find out if Griefsoul could capture the raw power and intensity of the genre and possibly even deliver a fresh new take.

Griefsoul partially fulfills my hopes. Predictably, Extreme Northern Griefmetal is heavily steeped in the well-known stylings of genre legends like Children of Bodom, Mors Principium Est, and Norther, replete with the same combination of aggression and power, catchy lead-driven hooks and breakdowns, and epic symphonic propositions that one would expect. Kinnaslampi’s talent is obvious, not only in his virtuosity on the fretboard but with his varied vocal delivery, bouncing between an abrasive fry to a blackened rasp at will. Machine-driven drum arrangements that jump between relentless double bass (“Northern Cradle”), up-tempo gallops (“Vagary,” “Meant to Be Broken”), intermittent blasts (“Twilight Flame,” “Soulburial,” “The Melancholist”), and half-time slams (“Ends in Grief”), work overtime with the systematic bass to intensify the collection of Kinnaslampi’s impressive riffing and tasteful symphonic arrangements. These elements combine to create an accessible, albeit sterile and inconsistent, melo-death album that will appeal to a broad audience.

Kinnaslampi’s exceptional talent shines through in Extreme Northern Griefmetal. His ability to blend his instrumental prowess with majestic symphonic arrangements to create intricate, rich, and atmospheric compositions is striking. From the technical interplay in the bridge of “Heart of Eternal” or “Northern Cradle,” to neo-classical overtures in “Soulburial,” or the feudal sounds that anchor the chorus in “Vagary,” Kinnaslampi assures Griefsoul’s instrumentation of thrashy melodic riffs and melancholic synths dance elegantly or deconflict altogether. Kinnaslampi’s guitar performance itself is particularly impressive, with blistering tremolos (“Soulburial,” “Heart of Eternal”), extreme power riffs (“Twilight Flame,” “Northern Cradle,” “Made to Be Broken”), and technical melodic leads and hooks (“Twilight Flame,” “Soulburial,” “The Melancholist”) that provide the aggression and power I require for melo-death to hit. Top things off with a smattering of head-banging breakdowns and blood curdling screams (“Ends in Grief,” “The Melancholist”) for good measure, and all the ingredients are in place for Kinnaslampi’s “grief metal orchestra” to really shine.

Although Extreme Northern Griefmetal is a solid melo-death release, it fails to break new ground and Kinnaslampi’s songwriting could benefit from further refinement. The album’s eight tracks follow a repetitive approach of heavy verses, melodic choruses, and breakdowns that are as methodological as they are predictable. The album’s formula becomes clear as soon as the fading solo in “The Melancholist” ends, subsequently making the album’s second half difficult for me to fully engage with. Additionally, the harmonic that concludes “Soulburial,” or the short arpeggiated chord that closes “Meant to Be Broken” are awkward, evidencing Kinnaslampi’s songwriting could use more polish. Furthermore, Extreme Northern Griefmetal’s production compounds its monotony. The overly sterile and synthetic mix— while featuring plenty of bass— lacks dynamics and is dominated by high frequencies. The drums sound artificial and lifeless, lacking variation, heft or natural feel with lackluster fills and cymbals that sound like a static wash. Even the guitar tone sounds overly mechanical at times (”Meant to Be Broken,” “Northern Cradle,” “The Melancholist”), thereby undermining one of Extreme Northern Griefmetal’s primary strengths. A real band behind Kinnaslampi would have added a much-needed organic feel to Griefsoul’s sound.

Extreme Northern Griefmetal is a promising debut, showcasing Kinnaslampi’s talent for crafting atmospheric, powerful, and aggressive melo-death. Although the album delivers on many fronts, it ultimately falls short of the fresh approach I was hoping for with too much formulaic songwriting and uninspiring production. Nevertheless, Extreme Northern Griefmetal is an encouraging start for Griefsoul and all signs point to greater successes by Kinnaslampi in the future.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: NA | Format Reviewed: 24 Bit 44k WAV
Label: Self-Released
Websites: griefsoul.bandcamp.com | griefsoul.com
Releases Worldwide: October 10th, 2024

#25 #2024 #ExtremeNorthernGriefmetal #FinnishMetal #Griefsoul #MelodicDeathMetal #Oct24 #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases

Outer Graves – Terminal Limit Review

By Steel Druhm

It’s nearly October, which means it’s time to unpack the outerwear, and just in time, unheralded Wisconsin death crew Outer Graves drop an abrasive piece of outer space-themed death metal called Terminal Limit to chill your sunny disposition into a wintery pale. Their recipe is vintage death force-fed through a grind filter with touches of black metal madness crisping the edges. The result is uniformly caustic, savage, and chaotic, without a trace of melo or prog to be found. This indicates the experiment was at least a partial success and the brew master should be awarded a large hog and a flagon of the most vile beer cheese the Badger State has available. At a skinny 27 minutes, there may not be much meat on the gravebone, but what is here will fuck you up like a space chicken and stow you away bloody and bruised. Is this a good or a bad thing though?

The sound harnessed by Outer Graves is akin to an electrified power hammer set to “Smash the Poser” and left to run amok over a holiday weekend. Opener “Scavenger” sets a grueling pace with ragged, distorted guitars grinding your ears into ass-dust as Kate Coysh screams bloody murder with some of the most uncomfortable vocals you’ll hear this year. She sounds like she’s in the grips of a hefty demonic possession while also trying to shake off an Alpha strain of Covid, and at no point does she approach human. Battering ram grooves arrive to breech your ear gates and make off with your wax booty and everything feels excessive and over the top.1 You might not realize that “Scavenger” ends ” and “Hostile Anomaly” begins as they are so similar. It’s another skull-dusting dose of merciless, oppressive grooves, pounding toms-foolery, and wretched vocals and by the end, you’ll start to feel quite on edge.

The major weakness of Terminal Limit is that a listener is liable to reach their own terminal limit before the 26-minute mark. While “Distress Beacon” is a highlight where they dial things back, it’s around this time that I began to feel hemmed in and agitated by the record’s relentlessly one-note bone smash broth. Outer Graves has good elements, but the writing is so static and unidirectional that it gets tedious and oppressive (not in a good way). Taken in isolation, you can find strengths in individual cuts. “Seismic Scourge” is an absolute cesspool of slithering Incanto-lation riffs with suckers that bite. “Re-Entry” is one filthy, brutal groove stacked atop another and the whole thing feels unsafe. And the aforementioned “Distress Beacon” has a mid-paced feel that spotlights Kate Coysh’s truly insane vocals, which rip and rasp and sound like a rabid raccoon stuck in barbed wire. The fact that all the songs are in the 3-to-4-minute window is good, but given the toxic quality of the material, they could stand to pare songs back even more in the future.

If there’s one overriding reason to hear Terminal Limit, it’s for the unvarnished and savage performance by Kate Coysh. Her sick blackened death wails and roars are unpleasant and unsettling. They will likely be love or hate for most, and as impressed as I am with them, they do wear thin after a while. Zachary Muffett brings the death hammer down with plenty of jagged, ragged riffs and locks into mammoth grooves that test the will to endure. He’s good at bringing pandemonium to your brain waves, but more diversity in approach would be a great blessing. Ryan Shaw’s rumbling bass is a welcome presence when it comes forward and more of that would also be welcome.

Outer Graves are the new kids on the chopping block and they do enough good things on their Terminal Limit debut to get me interested in seeing how they evolve. That said, I likely won’t be spinning the album much in toto though I will grab the best lifeforms for my Soundtrack for the Alien Apocalypse playlist.2 Aural masochists may get more mileage out of this than me, finding something interesting in development here, but Terminal Limit needed extra time in the polishing vault.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: NA | Format Reviewed: Fucking Soundcloud!
Label: Independent
Websites: outergraves.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/people/outer-graves | instagram.com/outergravesofficial
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024

#25 #2024 #AmericanMetal #DeathMetal #MorbidAngel #OuterGraves #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #Sep24 #TerminalLimit

Eyes of the Oak – Neolithic Flint Dagger Review

By Steel Druhm

Written By: Nameless_N00b_90

One look at the cover of Neolithic Flint Dagger, the second album by Eyes of the Oak, and it should be no surprise that they play a mix of psychedelic doom, stoner rock, and traditional metal. That means fuzzy guitars, gruff cleans, and brief psychedelic passages of the kind that Pink Floyd plays on Dark Side of the Moon. These Swedes have previous experience in genres ranging from black metal to power metal, yet you’ll hear nary a trace of either on Neolithic Flint Dagger. Instead of high energy and soaring choruses, you’ll find an album with a mellow, laid-back sound that can sometimes pack a wallop. Is this a recipe for a good time, or does this drug-influenced concoction risk becoming overcooked?

Eyes of the Oak sounds like a mix between Somnuri and old-school Black Sabbath. Yet they are not as consistently high energy or heavy as Somnuri, and they’re not as exploratory or psychedelically weird as the classics. I found them most enjoyable when taking the heavier route, but their ability to blend styles adds a lot of depth to their overall sound. Guitarist Holger Thorsin, whose past work includes thrash (Chaosys) and black metal (Noctes) shows here that he has the chops to play any style. Drummer Hugo Thorsin (Noctes) shows off his work with an impressive intro on “Way Home.” Andreas Sjöström, who has experience on guitar with a couple of power metal bands (Wyvern, Diverge), contributes the necessary layers and rhythm that give the songs a little extra seasoning. Despite their disparate backgrounds, these musicians sound right at home playing stoner doom.

Whether Eyes of the Oak plays fast and heavy or takes it nice and slow, this album is fun. Opener “Cold Alchemy” is a heavy, rousing track that is sure to get your blood pumping, and it builds momentum for the first half of the album. “The Burning of Rome” is the other heavy hitter, combining wobbly guitars with a surprisingly bruising chorus. It’s the sort of song that will have you alternating between a gentle head sway and a forceful headbang. The mellower tracks, such as “Way Home” and “In the End,” reward patience and repeat listens, while “Night Visions” has a surprisingly catchy chorus. The variety within songs helps keep them fresh and enjoyable, even as most fall into the 5-6 minute range.

The second half of Neolithic Flint Dagger does suffer from uneven songwriting, however. Closer, “Offering to the Gods,” is the only song to extend past the six-minute mark, and while it does have some nice ideas, they are not developed enough to fill up the song’s nine-minute length. But the worst offender is “The Masters Hide.” This song doesn’t feel as cohesive as the other tracks, and the album’s vocal weaknesses are most pronounced here. Vocalist Andreas Sjöström does have a voice well-suited to the genre, and for the most part, he’s on point. However, his execution is inconsistent: sometimes flat, sometimes sleepy, sometimes talky.1 The promo materials for Eyes of the Oak say they recorded their debut album, The Stone Vortex, live in a studio. I wonder if they did the same here, and perhaps this approach puts a strain on Sjöström’s vocal cords.

Eyes of the Oak play a fun, accessible form of psychedelic rock mixed with stoner doom. From the giant glowing dagger on the album cover, you get the sense they don’t take themselves too seriously, and the album sounds like the band had fun recording it. It helps that they have some great ideas and capable musicians to carry out their vision. There may be a few kinks to work out, but I look forward to seeing how they develop their sound on future albums. So sit back, relax, and get high on… life? as you absorb the music of Neolithic Flint Dagger.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: X | Format Reviewed: Stream
Label: Self-Release
Websites: eyesoftheoak.bandcamp.com | eyesoftheoak.com
Releases Worldwide: August 23, 2024

#2024 #Aug24 #BlackSabbath #EyesOfTheOak #NeolithicFlintDagger #PinkFloyd #PsychedelicDoomMetal #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #Somnuri #StonerDoom #SwedishMetal

The Mercury Impulse – Records of Human Behaviour Review

By Thus Spoke

Drone is an exceptionally difficult genre to analyse. By its very nature, it resists structure, memorability, and conciseness; its forms are indiscrete; monotony is a feature. Chicago duo The Mercury Impulse intensify and deepen this trait by channelling their drone through a noisy medium with a subtle undercurrent of dark ambient. Debut Records of Human Behaviour thus stands as a kind of mood music indifferent to musical norms and tangible emotions. A duo of musicians known for Wrekmeister Harmonies and BLOODYMINDED respectively, the pedigree behind The Mercury Impulse is one of harsh, uncompromisingly shrouded sound steeped in atmosphere. But here they take it to a whole new level, implementing compositional notions from ambient and post-metal worlds in a way that makes them almost unrecognisable as anything more tangible than amorphous smoke.

Records of Human Behaviour is so subtle that it’s hard to talk about, and hard even to listen to attentively. So hazy and indistinct throughout, that my partner thought I was listening to some trendy binaural white noise when he walked in on one occasion. So monotonous that it borders on the truly hypnotic (in the sense of being sleep-inducing). Relatively long track lengths, and a predisposition to recurring, simplistic patterns give the impression of infinity, only further enhanced by the extreme levels of ebbing, flowing feedback. An ideal backdrop for focusing at work perhaps; a nightmare to deliver your full attention to. Noise and drone aren’t typically known for being exciting, so I won’t use the “b”-word. Yet the album delivers so little in the way of anything that even my notes are sparse after many drawn-out, toneless listens.

This is not to say that there are zero things to praise here. Sometimes the quiescence provides a stage for beauty, as agonisingly soft chords of synth play a delicate, muffled refrain over a trembling, bassy ground (“Remanded to the Back of a Mirror,” “Infinite Repetition”). Sometimes also, the burr of omnipresent noise allows the spectres of dissonant notes to jab and ring to genuinely unsettling effect (“Keeping My Second Self Invisible,” “I Heard the Earth Falling”). And close listening at several points will be rewarded by a powerful sense of dread, (“Keeping…,” “Remanded…”) closer in its gut-clenching grip to dissonant death metal than anything in the realm of electronica. In this vein, one can see how cuts like “Primitive Instincts” with its clipped, inaudible voice samples, and aggressively cold and buzzing “Miles of Smouldering Trash” cleave closer to an extreme metal template in many respects. Inherently dense and suffocating, the music is brought to new depth by a relatively spacious master which deepens the already abyssal lows, and brightens albeit without sharpening into clarity the jarring, uncomfortable highs.

But despite its dark, painfully cool aesthetic, Records of Human Behaviour as a whole is a mass that swallows its distinctive passages and ultimately leaves an inappropriately light impact. “Keeping my Second Self Invisible” and “Primitive Instincts” are both unsettling, but while the former has just enough edge to be interesting, the latter is almost instantly grating. Other cuts prove themselves to be quite aptly titled as their immobility (even relative to their peers) is suffocatingly tedious (“Behind Dull Glass,” “Lessons Of Apathy”). It’s easier to view the album favourably if one imagines it to be the soundtrack to a modern psychological horror. Then at least the crescendoing waves of dissonant synth (“Remanded…” “Lessons of Apathy”) and flickering hums of feedback (“Keeping…,” “I Heard…”) could associate themselves with brutal revelations and creeping tension. As a drone album, this might even be a fairer way to assess it. But ultimately, the music does not come with an accompanying film.

Tolerance for drone varies widely, and appreciation for Records of Human Behaviour will extend about as far as one’s patience for its stubborn understatedness. When even the most interesting tracks (“Remanded to the Back of a Mirror” and “Infinite Repetition”) grow a little stale before their time, there’s little to motivate repeated listens. If you’re a massive fan of drone, or want something to help you sleep, give it a spin, but this probably won’t be creating any converts for the genre, eerie though it can be.

Rating: Mixed
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320kbps
Label: Self-Release
Website: Bandcamp
Releases Worldwide: August 23rd, 2024

#25 #2024 #Ambient #AmericanMetal #Aug24 #Drone #Noise #NotMetal #RecordsOfHumanBehaviour #Review #Reviews #SelfReleases #TheMercuryImpulse

Fuckhammer – Scorched Earth Prophets Review

By Mark Z.

Ha, what a stupid name, I think to myself. Even I can tell they’re trying too hard with that one. I close my browser and go upstairs to get ready for bed. Fuckhammer. I hear the name in my head as I brush my teeth. That was weird, I think to myself. I go to work the next day, type something wrong, and start smashing the Backspace key. Hammering it, in fact. Like a Fuckhammer. Fuck, I think to myself. Get out of my head. I go home and eat chips in the kitchen while my wife cuts vegetables for dinner. The knife slips. “Fuck!” she says. “Hammer,” I whisper to myself. “What?” she asks. But I’m lost in my own head. Stop lying to yourself, Mark. You know what you have to do. And it’s true. I toss the chips on the counter, sprint to my laptop, and open the promo bin faster than a fifteen-year-old pulling up PornHub after his parents have left to run some errands. I have to claim Fuckhammer as my own. I NEED THE FUCKHAMMER.

Only, what I got wasn’t quite the nasty thrash-death-black mix I expected. Formed in 2011, this Irish quartet play a rancid concoction of sludge and death metal, complete with phlegmy rasps that sound like the vocalist is the kind of guy who eats his own scabs. Over the years, the group have put out a few minor releases and one prior album, 2013’s Fucked. With Scorched Earth Prophets, the group’s core sound has more or less stayed the same. Most of these twelve tracks are built on mid-paced rhythms and beefy, grunting riffs that carry plenty of Southern-style groove. Yet the band also throw in some odder stuff, with lots of these songs having those weird pseudo-dissonant notes that remind me of what a mid-2010s metalcore band might play right before a breakdown. “Impartial Agenda” also strays from the path, complementing its sludge-centric approach with creaky lead guitar that makes it sound like the band booked a cheap flight to the slums of New Orleans and never came home.

Fuckhammer do offer some decent stuff here. The opening almost-title-track “Scorched Earth Profits” works well enough with its chugging riffs and peppy rhythms. Likewise, “Hangman’s Fracture” has a quick guitar line that carries some odd Eastern flair, and closer “Irregularities” has a slow winding riff that staggers forward like a drunkard on Bourbon Street. The catchy chugs and brief black metal foray in “Passage to the Afterworld” are also pretty enjoyable, but the best song here is easily “Curse of the Crimson Altar.” The track unleashes plenty of groove, incorporates intriguing samples in which two guys talk about the occult, and unloads some big thumping stop-start riffs that are sure to get your gut flabs flopping.

Unfortunately, there’s a lot that stops me from getting excited about Fuckhammer. The vocals are suitably repulsive but grow monotonous, and many of these songs either pass by without note or don’t quite stick the landing. “Unmerciful Sisters,” for instance, sounds like the band wrote half a song and called it good, while “Vexillogical Fixation” feels like it ends too abruptly. While “Brain Turbulence” mixes things up with its crusty approach and faster tempo, moments like that still aren’t enough to blow your hair back. The real problem with Scorched Earth Prophets, though, is a lack of character. Fuckhammer certainly know how to build a decent song and write a catchy riff, but the group simply feel far too nondescript and safe, especially for the sound they seem to be going for. Music like this begs for an unrefined, no-fucks-given approach. Yet here, the performances are largely tight and polished, and the clean, boomy production carries none of the grit an album like this needs.

When I see a name like Fuckhammer, I want fucking FILTH. I want to feel like listening to them will give me an STD that hasn’t even been discovered yet. But rather than getting too dirty, Scorched Earth Prophets simply offers a decent little collection of twelve songs that are respectable but not remarkable. Fuckhammer seem like a cool bunch, and Scorched Earth Prophets is worth a listen for those interested in exploring the lands where death and sludge don’t differ. For the rest, maybe just stick to Eyehategod and bathtub liquor the next time you need your fix of filth.

Rating: 2.5/5.0
DR: 3 | Format Reviewed: V2 mp3
Label: Self-Released
Websites: fuckhammer.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/f666hammer
Releases Worldwide: August 9th, 2024

#25 #2024 #Aug24 #DeathMetal #Eyehategod #Fuckhammer #IrishMetal #Review #Reviews #ScorchedEarthProphets #SelfReleases #SludgeMetal

Medieval Steel – Gods of Steel Review

By Steel Druhm

Medieval Steel are a classic example of a band that had way more talent than luck. They dropped an EP in 1984 that was well-regarded and earned them attention. I was certainly spinning it often as a surly and belligerent teen since it slotted in well with Manowar, Cities, and Warlord.1 There should have been enough momentum from the EP to build a real following, but Megaforce Records kept them in limbo and didn’t properly promote or support them. A new demo was recorded in 86 but never officially released, and the band soon called it a day. They reformed in 2013 to drop their long-delayed full-length debut, and in keeping with their hardscrabble musical career, it’s taken them 10 years to follow it up. Gods of Steel is that follow-up and it has what may be the most Steel-baity album art of all time. So what does a band out of time and seemingly born to lose sound like in 2024? Let’s rip open this time capsule together.

I mean it as a positive when I say the opening title track hits like a nuclear missile fired from 1986. “Gods of Steel” is like the perfect fusion of Manowar, Saxon, and Liege Lord and my back hair was overflowing with fur bounty even before founding frontman Bobby Franklin arrived to wail and kill. This is so painfully 80s that the nostalgia could clog an artery in a lifer like myself. Big, burly trad riffs and pounding drums are the groundwork for Bobby’s larger-than-life vocals and the song commands respect as it goads you toward war and retribution. This is swordcore done well and you will feel blessed by the favor of Ares. “Kill the Pain” keeps the crusade going with a rowdy, punchy sound full of machismo and testosterone. The meaty riffs cruncha-muncha as Bobby sings of pain, suffering, and redemption. The heaviness factor is quite pleasing and the hooks are real and tough to extract. “Soldier of Fortune” is anthemic 80s magic with tons of references to Savage Grace, Lizzy Borden and Marching Out era Yngwie. It’s catchy as fook with a chorus that sells harder than that Phoof™ guy.

While songs like “Great White Warrior” have grand moments, there are some lesser inclusions here that bring the badass levels down. “Memories” is a sappy power ballad that almost works but is just too maudlin and cringey for its own good. “Maneater” is infused with heavy riffs but it’s a very stock 80s rock/metal cut that Y&T could have come up with, and closer “Satanic Garden” is a bit better but also underwhelming. That makes Gods of Steel a mixed bag of swords and rubber chickens with strong moments sharing space with lackluster ones. Luckily, the balance of the 43-minute runtime favors the bold.

The biggest surprise for someone who loved the band’s 80s output is just how well Bobby Franklin’s vocals have aged over the decades. He had a voice like a laser back in the day and little of the wattage has dulled over time. He sounds meaner and more badass now with a newfound rough-hewn edge, but the highs are still there and he’s still a commanding vocalist with gravitas and power. He often reminds me of Ancient Empire’s Joe Liszt but with more range. New slinger Jeff Miller comes ready for battle with a truckload of hefty riffs sure to plow your brain field. On the heavier cuts he really tears into your ears with thick leads and big grooves, giving the material a biker bar toughness. Chris Cook has been manning the kit since the demo days and his powerhouse war drumming style hits hard and forces you into formation. If only the writing was more consistent, this crew could knock down some walls and take some scalps in the metal world.

I’ll always have affection for Medieval Steel and I’m thrilled to see them active again. When Gods of Steel is good, it’s very good, and when it’s not, it isn’t terrible. Now if they could just deliver the next album before 2030 we’d be getting somewhere! If you like traditional metal done with class and conviction, check out their 84 EP and then give this one a flyer. You just might find a new place to plant your extra swords. Steel on Steel wiolence complete.

Rating: 3.0/5.0
DR: 7 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Release
Websites: facebook.com/profile | instagram.com/medievalsteelband
Releases Worldwide: May 3rd, 2024

#2024 #30 #AmericanMetal #Cities #GodsOfSteel #HeavyMetal #LiegeLord #Manowar #May24 #MedievalSteel #Review #Reviews #Saxon #SelfReleases #Warlord

Neurectomy – Overwrought Review

By Felagund

I just couldn’t turn down an album by a band called Neurectomy. I’ve heard of a lot of medical procedures in my day, but I wasn’t as familiar with the process by which a nerve is severed or removed to reduce pain, never to grow back again. With a new “ectomy” added to my growing surgical lexicon, I was still apprehensive. But while tech death can certainly be hit or miss (with the misses often being tedious, forgettable affairs), I was far too interested in the band name and the album art to let something as silly as past experience impact my decision-making. And that is how I ended up with New York-based Neurectomy’s debut album Overwrought on my to-do list. And while I can’t speak to the band’s abilities when it comes to nerve-related removal, I certainly have my opinions when it comes to their brand of unrelenting technical death metal.

Some of my favorite tech death albums from recent years strike a key balance: they’re able to whip plenty of technical wizardry at the listener without sacrificing emotion, accessibility, or (just a drop or two) of melody. Groups like Carnosus, Archspire, Obscura and a host of others have found success (in my own bold estimation) by implementing this approach to varying degrees. Neurectomy certainly whip technical wizardry at the listener, bouncing as they do from one skillful, mind-bending solo to another. The problem is that Neurectomy were so focused on reaching such lofty heights of proficiency that they forgot to make actual, memorable songs. Why write a compelling riff when you can toss in another squealing, lightning-fast solo? Why leave room for an atmospheric interlude when you can delve into another whirlwind of impressive, soulless guitar noodling? If this sounds harsh, it’s because I know Neurectomy can write more balanced songs, they just chose not to.

Case in point: album opener “Abducted for Research” kicks off in a grimy, fetid fashion before finding a wonky, almost dissonant groove that immediately grabbed my attention. Unfortunately, this interesting groove is quickly abandoned in favor of less memorable, speed-demon technicality. It returns again near the end of the track, but is once more unceremoniously replaced by more “look what I can do!” guitar work. Following track “Culinary Cadaveric Art” also hints at Neurectomy’s ability to compose music beyond an array of bright n’ shiny solos. This tune features a big, thick riff that caused my ears to perk up. Could they be going in a different direction? Are we going to get more than undeniably proficient but utterly unmoving musicianship? No. The aforementioned big, thick riff disappears almost as quickly as it arrives, to be replaced by a brief bass solo and more gratuitous guitar wankery.

And it’s here, after only two tracks, that Overwrought truly devolves into flamboyant futility. The band Rush have an instrumental tune entitled “La Villa Strangiato” from 1978 that has a particularly apt subtitle: “An Exercise in Self-Indulgence.” And that’s what the following 6 songs feel like to these battered eardrums: a 32-minute opportunity to prove to the listener just how talented these musicians are. I cannot deny that the oddly-named track “Dolphin” features a stellar opening that feels like you’re being sucked into a black hole. I will gladly report that mid-album number “Zombified” includes an unexpected, jazz-tinged section. And I’ll happily exclaim that closer “Crimson Tsunami” flirts with an honest-to-goodness riff as well as a slower, more moody interlude (featuring a solo, of course). But all of these brief, shining moments are merely minor exceptions that prove the rule. Add in percussive, deathened growls that only serve to further punctuate this dizzying display, and you’re left with an album that, like the Tin Man from The Wizard of Oz, is plenty shiny but has no heart to speak of.

Sometimes an album isn’t bad because the band aren’t talented, but because technical prowess becomes the sole marker for success. If we were to award Neurectomy points for stellar musicianship, the score below would indeed be a lot higher. It’s not that what they’ve produced is unlistenable; far from it. But it’s also painfully forgettable. It’s mad scramble to produce more squealing notes, more solos capped off by more pitch harmonics is impressive, but it’s also excessive. Perhaps I find this slab all the more frustrating because it’s clear Neurectomy are capable of finding humanity amidst the wizardry, they just refused to go that route. And the result? A debut that is overindulgent, overproduced, and exceedingly Overwrought.

Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: Best Guess | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Self-Released
Websites: neurectomy.bandcamp.com | instagram.com/neurectomy
Releases Worldwide: November 17th, 2023

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