Antikythera’s style is a mathy take on metalcore. The musicianship displayed on this self-released album is very fine, and the promise of the material starts off high, but eventually the songs settle into the unremarkable.

The production is also almost there. The ability of the musicians is well-represented, but there’s something muffled or restrained overall about the sound, which no amount of turning up the volume can overcome. (5.5/10)

Antikythera’s style on the follow-up to their self-titled album is largely in the same mold, but the music is heavier and features more extreme breaks into calm territory. The production is improved, but still feels a little restrained. Their music is as mathy as ever, still not particularly engaging as songs, with little emotional impact, but way better than just about anything comparable to what Victory Records has put out in the last 4 years or so. Pantheon is a good metalcore record: It switches up styles and grooves well, and the guys can play convincingly. Fans of this genre will do well to seek this band out. Others will not be converted to the genre. (6/10)

There needs to be an immediate halt to bands with "ocean" in the title. There’s Ocean, The Ocean, The Fucking Ocean, Oceano, Oceana... someone better hurry before Oceanu, Oceani, and Oceany are taken. How about The Fucking Oceanio? Quick! Snag the domain before someone else does!

Similarly, bands with "architect" in the name need to cease and desist as well. Which architect-related band is this that has released Hollow Crown? Fuck if we know. What is, clear, though, is that it’s another album of literally insufferable tech metalcore crap, with one-dimensional vocals so loud and obnoxious that it’s a chore to try to follow what the songs are doing. And then when the obligatory emo-core clean singing "reprieve" comes in, it’s when the world record for the fastest "from couch to stereo remote stop button" time is broken.

The apparent MO in these bands is make the songs as busy and ADHD as possible, which can work, but not when it’s all for the sake of making music that sounds like the people playing it are spazzes who can’t actually write a song. (3/10)

PS: Staffer Ignacio Coluccio and I have decided to start our own band. We’re calling it Ocean of the (Fucking) Architect. We’ll be playing post-metal with screamo influences. FYI, the domain name has already been reserved.

The musical style on The Hellpreacher is a crossroads of blues metal, stoner doom, punk, and a little grind. Sometimes the music sounds like a much relaxed Napalm Death, at others a garage stoner band (but with good production), and then sometimes a more trad bluesy solo will appear. Then the pace will shift back to up-tempo punk territory, and then into old school metal guitarmonies.

The lot is ok, and while you can say that the songs don’t all sound the same (which is cool), it still feels tepid at best. It could be how the burly man gruff vocals feel silly during the relaxed sections, or that the album is touted by Relapse as "sweating malevolence most death metal bands could only hope to achieve." Not really. Not at all, actually. (5/10)

Burial Hordes Devotion to Unholy Creed sounds right. It comes across as fierce and committed. The performances are done with gusto, and there are no technical issues. The album’s sound was done with attention to make it come across as a dirty, unholy thing, and that is well-represented. Perhaps a bit on the produced necro side, but still clearly within those parameters.

However, this is all on the surface. Devotion to Unholy Creed is a good album, but good in terms of being a by-the-numbers black metal record. The music sounds cool, but artistically it feels like a band reproducing a formula, not a group of artists working within an established framework, and with something to say. (5.9/10)

Global Drama is on par with the style exhibited on Cloudscape’s previous album, Crimson Skies: AOR meets prog metal, sometimes reminding of Circus Maximus and Magellan.

The new album displays elements that are heavier and harder, but when it comes down to what’s really important, the songs aren’t nearly as good, the melodies not as well crafted, nor the arrangements as well assembled. And true or not, the lyrical themes seem dorkier.

There are some definite cool moments, like a neat guitar line or a catchy chorus, and the album permeates skill and professionalism, but even at its most potent, it’s about 75% as good as Crimson Skies.

Global Drama will be something nice to pick up for prog metal fans (this album might appeal to those who liked Manitou, before the band gave up on being prog), but don’t get it until you already have Crimson Skies. (6.5/10)

What’s well-done about Coffin is that it captures a good sense of the dirty aggression that established the thrash genre in its inception. This is an aspect of the modern-day version of the style that many bands on big labels are lacking, so, cool. At the same time, it’s not like Coffin sounds like a rehearsal tape, either. The instruments are powerful and convincing, but just not slick and over-produced like Destruction, for example.

What’s still not great about Coffin is that their songs are average at best. They sound fine, do the thrash thing convincingly, but are entirely unremarkable. Doing what they do, but faster, would help, as well as honing a meaner vocal style, and revisiting their arrangements and writing some more catchy segues. For a local act, these guys have nothing to worry about. On a nation- or world-wide basis, there’s a lot of road left. (5/10)

Crescent Shield’s The Stars of Never Seen fits in well stylistically on the Cruz Del Sur roster, as it’s largely in the same genre as Slough Feg. However, fans of Slough Feg are likely to discover that Crescent Shield are a much, much worse version of their beloved band.

The music on The Stars of Never Seen is pretty good. It’s got variety, good old-school, rough-and-tumble stuff, from charging barbarian hooks to tunes that remind more of salty-dog seafaring. It’s got good instrumental performances and respectable sound.

The big killer is the vocals are overall so-so at best. The singer has some place fronting in a band. He can do some stuff well, but that stuff is either repeated too much, or he stretches his actual capabilities too far, and he’s often flat. Beyond that problem, though, is that the vocal parts themselves tend to be pretty terrible, regardless of who’s singing them. The overall impression from the vocals on this record is a bunch of whatever metal-style melodic yelling. This translates into how the vocals are melodic in theory, but in practice they often feel atonal. They greatly negate the cool stuff going on instrumentally.

Still, if you really like your heavy metal rough, and power metal is way too sissfied for you, and if bands like Pharaoh are at the top of your list, you might feel differently about Crescent Shield’s The Stars of Never Seen. (4.8/10)

Devilry plays death metal convincingly. There’s intensity and athletic performance values all over the place; the band plays tight; and you believe that they can do the same live. The problem is that it soon becomes apparent that Rites for the Spring of Supremacy is the same thing over and over again, and that thing isn’t that interesting of a song to begin with.

Culprits could be vocals that stick to the guitar rhythms too closely, too much stuff in the same tempo, riffs that are busy or dense, but not catchy... Then again, when Devilry does slow down, the songs become even less interesting, which is a bummer of a catch 22.

An interesting shift doesn’t occur till the last track, which features a thick, heavy, doomy, sort-of industrial vibe. Why do so many bands wait till the last track to try something different, and why don’t they develop more artistic ideas? More of the last track, or more of other creativity mixed in with Devilry’s tried-and-true material, would have done wonders for the record.

Devilry is something like a much simpler, more straight-forward Epoch of Unlight, who also don’t seem to put much emphasis on writing cool songs, but rather on playing music as densely and busily as they can. What Devilry does do to out-cryptic Epoch of Unlight is write songs with mysterious acronyms as titles, like "T.O.T.W.E." and "C.O.T.N.O." and "T.O.T.W.A." Then again, considering the (softened versions) of many images associated with white power on the record, the Blazing Productions label releasing NS bands, and praise for the "NS doctrine" in the booklet for Rites for the Spring of Supremacy, it’s possible that those acronyms represent too much of a fist in support of intolerance to write out. (5/10)

For all of the black metal stereotype that bands in that genre can’t play live, there’s Endstille. Or, it would seem, there’s an Endstille album. They have a bunch of them. This German band cranks out a new record every year or two, and then they go play their material live, and at major festivals, too. This is no bedroom project. It is a real band.

Endstille’s albums are always super intense and go for the throat, even when they’re playing slow. Verfuhrer continues in this vein, with blown-out, screamy black metal vocals and a drummer that’s always tearing it up. The whole achieves that specific black metal intensity that’s like grooving along on the edge of a knife.

While Verfuhrer isn’t Endstille’s best album (they were a little better when they weren’t as hotly produced, but bigger labels and distribution must beget bigger sound), it does the job and furthers the satisfaction that this band is alive and (double) kicking. (7/10)

Exodus’ seminal Bonded by Blood was not one of the classics that held up the best as time went by. Sure, it inspired a generation or two, but...

Good idea, then, to re-record it. Let There Be Blood takes the old favorites, and gives them a much deserved boost in clarity and tightness. The songs rock as they rightfully should, but they don’t sound so overly produced and sterile (like when Destruction re-recorded a lot of their classics recently), which is righteous. (7.5/10)

Nightmare Records generally does a pretty good job at putting out some cool prog-related melodic metal acts. The frontrunning prog label might want to stick to that, and not dabble in distributing third-rate death metal like Foreshadow’s Nations of Failure.

The playing is average and acceptable, but the songs are boring and feel too slow for the material played. As such, the arrangements seem tedious. Also, a lengthy clip that begins a song with copy/pasted samples of people saying "terrorism" or "terror" is so offensive on a multitude of levels that immediate abortion of the listening experience would be warranted. (4/10)

Forest of Shadows is a doom band that skirts the line of doom and not so doom. The overall vibe on Six Waves of Woe is heavily Gothic-influenced, which is definitely not the heaviest of the heavy as far as doom goes.

The vocals are largely clean, but don’t bring particularly remarkable melodies. Forest of Shadows will bring harsh doom vocals into the fold in order to boost the heaviness. The lot is done professionally and with obvious consciousness to the desired effect, but Six Waves of Woe ultimately boils down to an album that has precious few highlights. It’s not heavy, nor is it catchy, nor is it unusual. It farts around with different styles, but doesn’t do any of them remarkably well. It’s average-good, but still average. (5.8/10)

review by: Ignacio Coluccio

Maelstrom ex-staffer/ ally The Condor tells us the new Agoraphobic Nosebleed is unlike the band’s previous albums in that it’s much less a collection of spastic drum-machine driven grinding, and more an album of slower, more sober tracks that resemble songs more than ever before.

Whatever it is, Agorapocalypse rules. You might know that the guitarist is the same guy from Pig Destroyer, so if you love that band, you should probably get this, too, because you’ll hear the stylistic similarities: riffs, breaks, segues, and arrangements that are as catchy as they are mean.

Despite the interesting music and killer artwork (seriously, don’t download this. Buy it. Each page has some totally rad/ sleazy/ arty/ perverse art on it, made for each of the album’s 13 songs), Agorapocalypse’s biggest fun factor is the drum machine, and this is coming from someone who thinks that grind with drum machine is pretty much defeating the purpose of grind. There has never been a drum machine with more personality and color than here. The programming and percussive nuances even outshine Necrophagist’s on Onset of Putrefaction. There’s so much depth with this drum machine that there’s a goddamn drum machine solo on the album, and the solo is more expressive than a lot of human drummers’ solos.

Agorapocalypse’s intros and flow make it like seeing a killer grind band perform live. Crazy, intense, and yet composed and crafted. This is one highly recommendable album. (8/10)

Side Effects Expected is a quality extreme metal release. The music has some good flavor, with the greatest highlights coming from the guitar solos. German Centaurus A mix up the death and thrash genres (heavier on death) well, there are a good amount of catchy moments, and their songs have a respectable amount of separation for one to be able to tell some of them apart... but others sound like a repeat of the same song.

While the songs come across with the requisite power for a modern death metal release (read, too much artificial polish), the drums are a bit too sampled. The biggest negative in this album, though, are the vocals, which are too loud considering they are merely average, and greatly contribute to the songs seeming more repetitive than perhaps they should be.

Because of the monotony of the place-holder vocals, Side Effects Expected is just short of a recommended album. It does have some good songs, and fans of this genre are likely to get into the grooves, and particularly the soloing, but expect about three listens to this album and that will be that. (6.9/10)

Cyphosis is a Finnish metal act that mixes simple, heavy death metal with the melodic death style. So you’ll get groovy, heavy chugging with an excellent death growl, and the music will transition into a melodic-death riff with skank beat.

All the music is done well, and can be quite engaging. The tones are really cool, too. Meaty, solid guitar and drums. Excellent combination of coherence and honest heaviness.

But the album suffers greatly because of the quasi-sung sections, which are on every song. Perhaps Cyphosis is trying to channel Taneli Jarva-era Sentenced, but these sections come across as too close to the horrors of the emocore/ modern metal/ metalcore/ whatever melodic breakdowns, which unfortunately spells doom for Gods Torned. And not the good kind of doom. (4.5/10)

The new Darkane, Demonic Art, is a disaster. The main problem is how loud the vocals are. It’s not that they are too loud, period, it’s that they are too loud considering what the vocals do and what they bring to the listening experience.

Look, the vocals on this record are the least musical element of what Darkane does. The bulk of the vocals are a frenzied scream. It’s not a melt-your-face-off, super harrowing aural experience, but rather a controlled, monotone scream that should be little more than a vocal placeholder for the music. It’s boring to the point of being obnoxious, as the basic harmonic quality of the vocals doesn’t embed itself well with the music... whatever it may be doing.

There are some semi-melodic vocals in the songs, too, which are already much better, but again, are too loud.

You’ll know the vocals are too loud because when they aren’t present, you can all of a sudden appreciate what is going on with the other members of the band's parts. The rest of the time, you can make out the rhythms, and you can tell that there’s a guitarist, but based on the mixing choices, we are told that what we need to be listening to are the vocals, as if Darkane were like a pop band, which is totally stupid as vocals like this cannot carry a song.

The secondary issue with Demonic Art is that there is practically no low end. This no doubt compounds the issue with the vocal/music imbalance, as the instruments cannot find ample place to be well heard underneath all the screaming. Now, Darkane has never had much low end in their albums, and a good deal of piercing treble, going all the way back to their debut, Rusted Angel (still by far their best record). That album too has quite loud vocals, but the instruments underneath have enough thickness and tone to provide punch, which Demonic Art is sorely lacking in.

The biggest proof of disaster-dom? We couldn’t get past two songs on any of the occasions of trying to enjoy this album. (3/10)

Wasn’t Elvenking once a weird, off-kilter, arty/ retarded/ interesting power metal band? Is this is the same band we’re talking about now? Seems their records got progressively more "normal," which was commensurate with their becoming more boring, as well.

But nothing could have prepared this unsuspecting writer for Two Tragedy Poets ...and a Caravan of Weird Figures.

The music on this album is so light and fluffy that no connections to metal are possible, despite Elvenking’s continued embracing of their power metal logo and artwork (both of which are excellent, but effectively amount to a sucker trap for anyone expecting something like the Pagan version of Rhapsody, for example.)

As we say, any style of music can be done well, but Elvenking’s traditional Irish-esque flavored pop music is so abhorrent that any forays past track three will purely be out of morbid fascination, or maybe a sense of self-loathing. The vocals are the kind of highly affected pop drivel you’re likely to hear on "American Idol," which is guaranteed to frustrate you in how you’ll be physically unable to slap the singer in the mouth. All you’ll be able to do is turn the album off.

But there’s more.

- The band photos. Never have there been gayer pictures than this. One guy is posing with a flowery china tea cup and saucer. The band members obviously do each others’ eyeliner.

- The lyrics. We didn’t think it could get any worse than track 4, "Ask a Silly Question," so we didn’t bother/ were afraid to check, but that song features such hilarious lines as "My patience has been worn out by your self-esteem/ How can you say Lord Byron used to play on your dream team?"

Immediate abortion was necessary, but we admit we did slink morbidly, curiously, back to check if song 7, "Heaven Is a Place on Earth," was really a Belinda Carlisle cover and not a dumb coincidence, not knowing what would be worse — a guaranteed shitty cover of a pop song in the middle of a supposed metal album, or that an aggressively terrible band didn’t continue to up the ante of awfulness on this disgusting record by NOT including an element that could degenerate the whole affair further into hilarity. Thankfully, it was a cover, but with tweedly "Riverdance"-y fiddly bits. Perfect.

Elvenking didn’t let us down. They truly went all out in making one of the least possibly likeable albums ever, trumping even Skyclad’s Folkemon, and/or every album Blackmore’s Night has ever recorded, put together. (-1/10)

Rex Mundi X-Ile sounds like the cybernetic, extreme metal version of a trip to a disturbing carnival. There are circus acts performing all around at all times, and tattooed freaks hippie dancing to it all the while.

Since we’re talking "cyber," you’ll know you’ll be hearing a great deal of tones and sounds that do not occur in nature. Plastic drums, thin guitars, spastic keyboards, isolated, in-your-face, wigged-out, screamy vocals, and not at all a sense that you’re hearing a band playing in a room together.

That’s all stylistic, though, and any style can yield good songs. However, in Ensoph’s case, the music seems to be more about the show than it is about the content. The songs, as songs, are listenable, and the band’s sound is clearly calculated, but they come across more as exercises in wackiness/obnoxiousness than quality compositions.

However, if you acts like Umbra Et Imago, here’s your next band. (Taste the Zinc-Flavored Cotton Candy/10)

Although After the Fall is a big improvement in sound and polish from Iconoclast, there’s still something not quite there about Maltese melodic doom band Forsaken. Just about all the songs on After the Fall have some bright sections, but as a whole, there’s still something too pedestrian or derivative about this group’s music that prevents it from being remarkable. It could be how there are too many banal vocal lines, or how the guitar tone is almost there, but not quite, or how the musical staples of the genre represented on the album often come across as generic... Forsaken still sound like they take the strongest elements from Candlemass and Solitude Aeturnus, but don’t really run with them.

Thankfully, After the Fall shows Forsaken is no longer a cheese-fest. The songs and performances are respectable, and the progress is measurable, but it looks like more time will be required before this band can be an A-level group in this genre. If you like the melodic heavy/doom metal genre, and don’t have Isole’s Throne of Void, also on I Hate Records, then you really should be spending your time and money on that before even considering this, or any other, band that plays doom and sings. (5.5/10)

We talk about mini-CDs all the time... is there such a thing as a mini-DVD? If so, The Great Kat’s Beethoven’s Guitar Shred would be it. The entire contents of the disk can be watched, easily, in 15 minutes.

The ageless Great Kat has proven herself the queen of shred since her career began in the ‘80s. There’s no question about that. And you’ll be reminded of it at every possible moment on Beethoven’s Guitar Shred through quotes from notable guitar magazines.

What is less notable is the appeal of this DVD. It essentially compiles music videos of Kat shredding mainly to famous classical pieces, but at hyperspeed (read: played too fast; the music sounds like a parody). The videos are about a minute and a half each, are amateuristic, and seem to be mostly about a woman in dom attire jumping around with a guitar while mugging and posing for the camera. The musical value is questionable as neither her nor her sometimes backing band are actually playing on the videos, and often Kat’s guitar is not even plugged in. But what’s new about musicians not playing music on their music videos?

In case it hadn’t already been done, Beethoven’s Guitar Shred paints The Great Kat even more tightly into a one-trick-pony corner. The persona is as much about the image as it is about the music, and probably more about the image, as evidenced by this video. The last album we heard by The Great Kat was Wagner’s War, in 2002. It also was around 15 minutes, at hyperspeed, and relied mainly on music written by someone else. When The Great Kat can release a full-length album of original, thoughtful compositions, then the paint may dry and the artist can be free to explore the vast chamber of creativity. (2/10)

What is up with this new infatuation with the word "karoshi"? Whatever the baffling attraction may be, this German punk / alternative rock band is against it. Perhaps they’re making a statement, a plea to reason to all the poor Japanese slobs who die from overwork in their shoebox, rat-race lives. Or maybe The Antikaroshi really, really hate Finnish band The Great Karoshi, and they’ve made a career of thwarting them however possible.

However, that’s apparently not enough inane pretentiousness for The Antikaroshi. Checking out the line-up reveals that the band is made up of three members, THEA, NTKI, and AROSHI. We’re going to assume that their roadies on tour for this album are CRUS, HEDN, and EOCONS.

There’s music, too, and actually, Crushed Neocons isn’t as insufferable as the all the pre-emptive lameness might lead you to believe. It’s actually pretty good... well, at first, anyway.

The Antikaroshi play a kind of heavy punk / hardcore with grunge flair that might remind you sometimes of early Pearl Jam. Or maybe a way less polished Harmful. The first few tracks have good energy and groove, and the production is solid.

However, somewhere before the mid-point, the album either goes south (the song about dogs barking everywhere is a major landmark of suckitude), or you start noticing that the attempts at melodic vocals are pretty much terrible, to the point where it’s impossible to go on, and the album must be stopped. That’s always a major drag. (4/10)

The band who was the impetus for people who were burned to death at a club a few years back has risen again and made a new album. Rising is the testament to the triumph against adversity, and that’s about as much praise as it’ll get in Maelstrom.

The cover, featuring a drawing of a shark that looks like its being strangled by the water it is jumping out of, says it all. This album sucks. It’s not that it’s done badly. The guys can play, the singer is a good singer, and the production is fine. It’s that wimpy bar/cock rock blues sucks, and the strangest thing isn’t that Shrapnel Records would want to release it, it’s that people actually died for this. (2/10)

The opening minute or so of The Severed Inception might make you identify Swedish band Inevitable End as an Origin clone. But after a song or two, you’ll start to notice Inevitable End will punctuate its music with dynamics in speed and groove that will distinguish them. They also have a relatively stronger sense of melody than Origin does. The album is energetic, thrilling, masterfully played, and devoid of any traces of elements of the lamer styles that incorporate the word "core."

What isn’t dynamic about Inevitable End’s music is the production. Sure, The Severed Inception was produced to be the latest installment of the most brutal-sounding death metal album yet, but impact has tipped the scales too much on listenability here. It might be too much compression on everything, it might be something else, but the actual recorded music struggles with the way it is presented. This can result in a listening experience that ranges from a brutal whirlwind of a band suffocated by its own intensity, to an album that’s sonically exhausting.

Despite its sort-of clonage (not really a biggie), its lack of real song separation (more of a biggie, but still cool), and sound that does the band’s compositions a disservice (kind of a biggie), Inevitable End’s The Severed Inception is still a remarkable and recommendable death metal album. (7/10)

When metal worship and video game geekdom worlds collide, you’re likely to get band names like Infinite Missiles, one of two bands on this split that play a punky kind of thrash metal, and feature some blast beats here and there for added intensity. Both bands have made recordings that, despite having their shortcomings, are certainly energetic, fun, and well-played.

The bands have been well matched in terms of closeness of style. Both groups have excellent drummers. Infinite Missiles has a slightly less remarkable recording. The vocals make Slayer’s sound like singing. The band bridges the genres of thrash and punk well, with some crust thrown in.

Talk Sick Earth has a brighter production which reflects more sonic energy. Initially, Talk Sick Earth seems to be the better band of the split. However, the clean, pseudo-sung punk vocals get overbearing somewhere around their tracks’ halfway mark, which is largely because the vocals are too damn loud (at the expense of the guitars) considering what kind of role the vocals play. The band overuses clips from movies in their music. A good split nonetheless. (6.5/10)

Australian band Ironwood has put a lot of effort (and money) into their album Fire, Water, Ash. The digipak is carefully planned and attractive, with an abundance of pages and fine cardboard stock. And Maelstrom loves getting behind bands that sign the praises of nature and conservation. Ironwood even plugs Greenpeace in the booklet. Yay!

Unfortunately, it’s often the case that a slick digi album with no label support will spell diceyness, and Fire, Water, Ash is full of it.

The album is exceedingly long at 70+ minutes, and seems to mostly be made up of two main modes, calm, simple music (whose main players are acoustic guitar and voice), which segue into more intense, distorted metal music. The M.O. is kind of like a more violent, polarly extreme Agalloch.

The calm parts could work, but they are too simple considering the singer doesn’t have the wherewithal to carry the tunes on his own. When accompanied by busier, denser music, he works out fine, and sections that employ drony harmony are also better. The low, (we guess) earthy delivery he likes to use is not good, as it sounds like he’s going for a range that isn’t his. He’s good enough to be in a band that does something like Primordial, where the vocals are more of an accompaniment to the whole, and not the center.

The heavy, aggressive parts are better, but a little clunky, and the clean vocals can (again) make it a lot clunky. The arrangements often drag on too long, which contributes to a problem as big as any... Fire, Water, Ash’s 70 minutes are a bloated 70 minutes, and aggressive editing could have done the album wonders. Making albums is trial and error. Let’s hope that Ironwood’s future efforts involve fewer trials that result in much fewer errors. (3.5/10)

The Legion has been largely in the Marduk school of playing for most of its career, albeit a baby, wussier version. Still, they put out some straightforward, cool albums, like Unseen to Creation. As proof, it was enough for Marduk themselves to recruit Legion drummer Emil Dragutinovic in their ranks (he’s since left Marduk and gone back to his roots).

2009's A Bliss to Suffer sees the band moving in a less brutal, and more melodic direction. The sense of melody is as much ambient as it is part of the songs’ motifs. This is all fine, but what it boils down to is an album played with good fury and conviction, but that sounds like a band trying to progress in a direction that isn’t that strong. The result is a "Listenable" record (ha, ha) that does not offend, but often sounds like the same song a bunch of times over, and that song is really just fairly good. (6/10)

Magica’s frontwoman reminds us once again that Portuguese power metal band Oratory has done little to nothing since 2002's excellent Beyond Earth. Sorry, it’s just that this woman sounds a good bit like Oratory woman, except Magica girl is not nearly as good, although she tries to do more. Come to think of it, there’s some melodic values that the two bands seem to share, as well.

Hereafter is a decent power metal album. It’s almost always mid-paced, with no major flashiness in the instrumental performances, until one gets to the mandatory keyboard solo that seems to appear in every song. The singing is good, but can sometimes lapse into ugly harmonics (like on "This Is Who I Am"). Unfortunately, the way the vocals are implemented gets tiresome by the album’s half-way point (or is it the limited song-writing ability?).

Overall, the songs are average to almost good, and often have an element of the amateur somewhere in them, be it from the performances or the compositions.

Although female-fronted power metal isn’t the most common thing in the genre, there are enough better bands to check out before ever getting to this one. Try Dark Moor (2^nd anr 3^rd albums), Edenbridge, or Oratory’s 2^nd album. (5/10)

In some ways, Magica’s follow-up to Hereafter is superior: Whatever elements of amateur musicianship are improved on, and the vocals never sound disharmonious.

In other ways, Of Wolves and Witches is worse, or at least just as not great: the songs are still generally unremarkable, mid-paced affairs. What this means is the riffs and music are quite bland, both in what they play and how the vocals are mixed so that they dominate the instrumental compositions. The keyboard, as always, has its obligatory, superfluous solo spot. While the vocal talent is good, the vocal lines are never great, and when the album achieves catchiness, it’s unfortunately the bad, stuck-in-your-head kind.

This is the case of the last song, and the track "Just for 2 Coins," something like the Romanian goofy power metal interpretation of "The 12 Days of Christmas," in which the singer repeats a laundry list of events that gets a bit longer each time. It’s not clear which is worse: the laundry list in question that involves dogs eating cats eating birds, or that the singer’s accent makes it sound even more retarded.

Material aside, Of Wolves and Witches suffers overall from a tinny sound. Often the music seems to emanate something like tape hiss, reducing the recording to something one would not expect a relatively high-budget label like AFM would release.

The album’s shining moment is "Maiastra," a piano piece in which vocals come in unusually towards the end. The composition is simply lovely, and the sound does not suffer from the janky shortcomings on the rest of the album.

Re-summarizing, while some major elements are improved on here, the facets of Of Wolves and Witches that are more bothersome leave a more negative taste after album’s completion, so practically, Magica are getting worse. And this is their fourth album. Ouch. (4.5/10)

This split album between black metal acts Marks of the Masochist and Enecare is well-conceived in the basic marriage of the two bands: both supply basic, simple black metal with overdriven, necro (wall of) sound.

In Marks of the Masochist’s case, the sound is actually too overdriven, making the listener want to keep turning the record down rather than up. Something about the compressed loudness, mostly noticeable in the vocals, seems awesome at first, but after about three songs, it gets old. Maybe the monotony is also due to how the vocals follow the guitar lines too closely, or that Marks run out of creative steam pretty fast. It is cool that they manage to sometimes channel the stumbling, bumbling charm of Lugubrum at times (and have one supremely memorable riff), but their relatively laid back compositions and approaches reveal themselves as relying more on the album’s sonic impact, which in the end is an off-kilter attempt at sounding violent and extreme, but eventually reveals itself as clumsy and simplistic.

Enecare does better in that its attempt at super-compressed music carries with it more depth of atmosphere. The ambiance is thicker and heavier, and ultimately more listenable. Not really any better than good, but more interesting for longer. (Marks of the Masochist: 5/10, Enecare: 6/10)

Minotaur’s God May Show You Mercy... We Will Not is a mix of old school thrash metal (think Kill ‘Em All) and punk music, often as if that song Sodom popularized called "Ausgebombt" was made dirtier, meaner, sloppier, and with a vocalist that sounds really pissed that he’s being choked to death.

What’s good about this Minotaur album is that the songs don’t all sound the same. The energy is there, too. What’s a drag about the album is it sounds just a bit too sloppy for its own good, and the vocals are more obnoxious than intense. Considering they’re a big player in the album, this means this CD was stopped before its intended end. (4.2/10)

Mothra plays a kind of mathy sludgecore that might appeal to fans of Kylesa, Unpersons, or Dazzling Killmen. Mothra’s music is fairly heavy, fairly engaging, and fairly interesting. Definitely respectable. What isn’t up to par are the hoarse burly man scream vocals, which are generally average, and wince-inducing when that same delivery is attempted to be made into melodies. So it’s kind of a bummer that the vocals are made to be so important in the music. (6/10)

Behold the Failure sounds like a Relapse Records band going full bore, and all the time. That specific heavy, pummeling, aggressive, honest sound that marks the death and grind purveying powerhouse is well-represented, which means that if you love bands like Nasum, Coldworker, or Gadget, chances are you’ll dig Mumakil.

However, like Nasum, Gadget, or most grindcore, 27-track Behold the Failure is practically the same song 23 times, and the remaining four are tokens to show that we tried to actually appreciate the nuances between tracks. Sure, Mumakil will throw in some groovy parts to break it up, but even those are formulaic.

Behold the Failure might be only 35 minutes long, but it feels like an hour, and there are no fewer than seven times when we wished Mumakil would have called it an album and ended it while it was still short and sweet. Still, it’s grind well-done by a band that can bring the stamina and conviction in order to execute this intense formula, but make sure to switch your brain off. (6/10)

The blackened thrash that Necrophobic does on Death to All isn’t reinventing any wheels whatsoever, but it’s done well and can get you grooving. The songs’ sense of melody gives the music purpose, and the arrangements are done so the tracks move along well. The album’s sound has got a good balance of thickness and power, and makes for an enjoyable listen. Nothing artistically outstanding, but solid. (6.6/10)

My first coverage of the Wacken Open Air festival was in 2000, while I was writing for another zine. Maelstrom’s German co-founder, Steppenvvolf, and I went together. The list of experiences and observations, both exhilarating and absurd, are long, but one in particular relates to this review.

There was this really dorky guy there. Blonde, balding, but still holding on to his long, burnt-out hair. Early to mid-30s. Shitty mustache. Whenever he awkwardly shuffled around and laughed loudly and coarsely in his geeky way, you could see some sort of black crap stuck in his gums. He was about average height, a bit on the tall side, thin, but soft thin. He wore a metal-fan’s leather jacket, tight jeans, and an obviously very loved Iron Maiden shirt. He spoke a language that neither of us understood, kind of reminiscent of German, but much, much softer and more musical sounding. Like the polka accordion version of German. So we figured he was Scandinavian.

Thing is, we saw this guy everywhere. He was some sort of caricature, and although neither of us had spoken to each other about him, he had made an impression on us, because when it finally did come up, our mutual understanding about this person was passionate. And he seriously was everywhere, almost to the point of it being impossible, like how a costumed crime-fighter is everywhere.

Then we realized there were TWO of them. One was a little shorter, one had more of a bald spot, one’s hair was slightly darker. But they were twins, genetically joined in utter metal worship dorkdom. "Wow" was about the only thought we could have said then.

It wasn’t till years later that I realized that these guys were the Swedish band Nifelheim. This story is important because the impressions Nifelheim’s music makes is all the more poignant and coherent when considering where it comes from. Anecdotes and hearsay years later, about how the guys in Nifelheim were featured in a Swedish insurance company’s TV commercial, which focused on how the two brothers purportedly had the biggest Iron Maiden memorabilia collection in the world (considering they’re from Sweden, I’d believe it. It’s in one of our interviews with The Forsaken, I think), or much more dubious rumors about how they’d sodomize each other, helped to understand the center of this band’s music.

Nifelheim is rabid black thrash metal. It is as dorky and geeky as it is rabid, though. It sounds like guys who truly, honestly worship Venom, Hellhammer, Possessed, and Celtic Frost, and also grew up listening to Iron Maiden. When they formed a band, they took all those influences and mashed them together.

Each one of Nifelheim’s songs is a celebration of metal retardation: total enamorment of all that can be mindless about metal cliches like wearing studded armbands, "raising the horns," headbanging in a drunken stupor, and unwavering commitments to playing fast, hard and dirty. Nifelheim is the black metal version of that. It is their commitment to their homage to their musical heroes.

Unfortunately, this also translates into songs that don’t really go anywhere, all do the same thing, and are dorkier than they are evil. Actually, much dorkier. The debut, self-titled album does have some charm, like how blown-out the vocals are, and how the rough-and-tumble drums are, well, totally metal. Just like Nifelheim is, albeit in a totally cliched way. (6/10)

You might think that Devil’s Force is in fact Nifleheim’s first record, and the self-titled one is the second. You’d point to how Nifleheim had more solid song structures, more convincing sound, and a stronger sense of purpose.

But the opposite is true. Devil’s Force is the follow-up, and it’s even dorkier than Nifleheim. It’s the soundtrack to every metal show in a sweaty, dank basement ever, with about 30 rabidrabidrabid fans total who don’t care about how the songs go, as long as they’re metal, and that the metal in question fulfills a sense of trueness. As long as there is beer, and room to bang one’s head, and backpatches are welcome, the world is in balance. The sound on Devil’s Force perfectly sums up that experience, but without having to leave one’s home, and with much less of a chance to get soaked with beer or be kicked in the head.

The intro to the album written by Metalion from the famous "Slayer" fanzine, touting that Nifelheim do black metal as well as any black metal band, ever, is not swaying any opinions here. The songs on Devil’s Force sound like Venom and Hellhammer worship full-blast and all the time, and then a 3^rd rate Iron Maiden solo or lick will find its way into the music, like, for whatever reason, probably just because Iron Maiden is metal, and we should all like it just because.

This all is probably why people do like Nifelheim. If you like metal that is intensely shitty as much as it is intense, as silly as it is passionate, as obnoxious as it is dedicated, or that acts like Usurper or Warhammer are eminently relevant, this is your band. There is no doubt there is some charm emanating from what Nifelheim do, but it sounds like goon city. (5.5/10)

There’s something you gotta love about 3" CDs. Maybe it’s because they’re rarely used. And rarely used is the poor man’s kvlt. Maybe it’s the adage that bounces around unchecked in the back of your brain how good things come in small packages. Whatever, they’re fun.

A 3" CD holds between 21-22 minutes of CD-quality sound. The Night Troll/Tremor of the Black Manx split is on one of these CDs (CD-R, actually), and there are 11 tracks.

Night Troll might not be offended at allegations that they are hilarious. All four songs feature one duh-duh riff that soldiers on over an unwavering snare-sample click track, and always in the same tempo. Meanwhile, the rando vocals do their thing, sounding like someone having a good struggle in the S&M dungeon he built in the comfort and safety of his basement. Totally retarded, and definitely more retarded retarded than retarded awesome.

Tremor of the Black Manx is a different story all together. Their 7 tracks are retarded annoying, being spastic guitar/bass riffs over an obnoxious drum machine set to "mindless grind" and with the tackiest samples possible. No vocals. Four tracks were enough.

This split is so bad that it’s funny; like an exercise in self-deprecation. As far as that goes, it does provide entertainment. (Night Troll: 2.5/10, Tremor of the Black Manx: 0.5/10)

Axis Powers’ musical style is often like the blackened version of Napalm Death or Discharge. It’s a punk base in riffs and rhythms, but with a filthy black metal vibe and vocals like Barney Greenway if he joined Hate Forest.

Marching Towards Destruction’s opening track provides some nice heavy, atmospheric foreshadowing that this album will be bludgeoning and dark, and the gritty, powerful sound makes it seem cool. The huge drag, though, is that although the songs are aggressive and heavy, they’re all the same, with the same riffs, same tempos, same beats, and same vocals. All the time. Or at least enough of all the time to make this album boring before it hits the halfway point. (4.5/10)

While The Yumyum Tree can often invoke a vibe somewhat akin to the abhorrent genre of smooth jazz, it is a few cuts above, and that saves it. The sound of the record is excellent, and the music, from moment to moment, is very good. Unfortunately, the sum of all those moments add up to instrumental songs that don’t really go anywhere.

But Ozric Tentacles can have a place in your record collection. Good for late night, relaxed listening, perhaps after some good beers, or high — definitely for chilling. (6/10)

For every time we write that an extreme metal band’s weakest link is its vocals, there’s an album like Destroyer 666's Defiance. The harsh vocals make the album an instant classic as much as any other: heavy, abrasive, rich, aggressive and convincing; a fitting player in an album that is heavy and violent from start to finish.

As we’ve come to know Destroyer 666' blackened death metal, Defiance isn’t trying to outdo everyone else in speed or technicality, but it’s plenty fast and busy. What’s more important, the songs don’t all sound the same while never letting up on the intensity (in fact, the vibe of the album gets better and better as it goes on), and almost as importantly, it’s produced in a way that sounds honest and fucking metal. At one point, we had this on loop for three straight spins, and it rocked every instant. Certainly one of the best albums this year. (8.8/10)

Sacred Reich was a b-level thrash band from the US. Their heyday was in the late ‘80s/ early‘90s, and they made a mark. Displeased is re-issuing some of their records.

The American Way is a solid, albeit unspectacular, album. You can hear a great deal of Metallica influence in the vocals, whose syntax, although remarkable, can also be just as awkward. The songs aren’t the most intense or heavy of the genre, but are tight and hold together. The riffing can often be fairly generic, and the music is standard thrash, but well done.

It seems that Sacred Reich was more about social consciousness than many other thrash bands. This comes across in the lyrics well because of the singer’s delivery, which is done cleanly (but aggressively) in a simplified singing-cum-talking style. Songs like "Who’s to Blame" are as much about conveying a message than they are about bringing the metal. In this sense and vibe, Sacred Reich shares something more with punk music.

Distancing itself from being a purely metal band made up of metal-fanatics, Sacred Reich also recorded a funk song (featured on this disk), which talks about not listening only to metal, and exploring other genres. It’s actually one of the best songs on the album.

Good stuff, but you’ll get why Sacred Reich are not mentioned in the same breath as Sodom, for example. (6.1/10)

Wolves in the Throne room have somehow managed to be a black metal band that can sustain itself by being a black metal band. Word has it that Southern Lord fronts the group something like $10,000 to record, and that means that it must be worth it in the sales that will ensue.

For sure, Wolves in the Throne room have achieved their level through touring a great deal, which means they’re earning their due, particularly in a genre where bands traditionally don’t play live ever.

However, despite the accolades achieved through their hard work, Wolves in the Throne Room’s perceived place at the height of the artistic mountain of the black metal movement should be questioned.

Take their latest album, Black Cascade, as an example. A full-length album over four songs. The music is generally presented in drawn-out, atmospheric movements of guitar/ bass/ drums/ vocals. The mood is lingeringly heavy, melancholy, and often almost lovely, but not quite. Stylistically, it’s what one would expect from a black metal record, and it is done well. The sound on Black Cascade has the instruments coming together in a more cohesive, tight way sonically than it does on the band’s second album, Two Hunters, which is a good thing.

However, like Two Hunters, Black Cascade, for all its fine, enjoyable movements, does not feature any climaxes or epiphanies within the songs. This results in an experience that can be appreciated from moment to moment, but as a compositional body of movements marking flow and progression, Black Cascade is lacking, a criticism that can be applied to the body of Wolves in the Throne Room’s work. In this sense, one has to wonder specifically what it is that’s so great about this band. Compare an album like Black Cascade with albums from black metal giants like Emperor, Immortal, Satyricon, and you won’t find highlights like choruses or sections like a variance in riff or rhythm that play with the music’s tension and memorability. Even a genius group like Weakling, that played a drawn-out, emotionally crushing style closer to Wolves in the Throne Room’s, had climaxes and highlights to their songs lacking here.

Black Cascade is a fine black metal album that can be enjoyed, and it is recommended. It is far from a masterpiece, and Diadem of 12 Stars is still Wolves in the Throne Room’s best album. (7/10)

When a band has too many influences / tries to do too many things, it can sound like HDK’s System Overload. The music is thrash, death, with elements of nu metal, and a bunch of other little non-metal dabbles. The harder vocals can remind a good deal of Testament.

Like the music, the vocals can range from pretty good to dubious, and will shift back and forth between these poles from song to song. Sometimes the clean vocals will evoke shit deathcore breakdowns, and other times it’s pretty decent stuff for a thrash metal album. Similarly, the harsh vocals can mix well sometimes, and at others, it can evoke some minor wincing. The music can be an adrenaline-fueled attack, or a tepid breakdown.

Unlike an amateur album in which elements that don’t work come across as a result of not being trained, all the stuff, from good to bad, on System Overload feel totally calculated. Whatever it is, it misses enough that the whole album is a pass. Best thing about this one was the syringe-pen that came with the promo. Too bad the consumer version likely won’t come with it. (4.9/10)

Samael has released some terrible, terrible industrial/ goth/ pop albums over the past years. Any of those styles are cool, but if you’re going to be all tech and goth and slow and cyber, it’s suicide if your songs are also not at all catchy, and if your singer sucks as such.

Point blank, Samael has *always* sucked. Even the "classic" black metal debut is god-awful, being equally contrived and sterile.

So how to explain that Samael has released not only a good album with Above, but an album that’s also a lot of fun? There might be a case made by saying Samael has sold out by totally altering their sound to now sound like new Immortal crashing into Amon Amarth, but with a much higher degree of slickness and high-production to their sound, but that’s only true to say about a band that had its own killer, signature sound to begin with, and Samael is a bunch of posers anyway, so embrace at will.

Apparently, though, you can’t take away all the old Samael, as the last track fits more of the mold from the last album or so: way more laid back, more industrial rock style, less fun. But its inclusion on the album makes no difference.

Otherwise, it’s intense drumming, fast picking and some sort of take on Norse pride. The vocals are uniform, but now that they don’t have to carry the show, their piercing intensity fits in well. The drums sound fake, but are lively, fun, and well-chosen for the cybernetic bombastic grandeur the band has chosen. The guitars are also big.

Yes, the songs do the same thing over and over, and the album is not so much a collection of awesome individual tunes, but rather a fun, energetic romp in total. Forget all your conceptions of Samael, and check it out. (7.5/10)

Saros’ music has always been interesting in short bursts. What happens in-between is something like a trance of distraction. You can still hear them playing, and it’s good, but your mind wanders. Then your consciousness snaps back at some point, and you think again that Saros kick ass and rock. But active listening won’t last long again.

None of this is ever unpleasant. When the distraction phase occurs, it’s like your body is there, enjoying Saros, but your mind is thinking of something else, and Saros is the background soundtrack to that. It’s something akin to a pleasant version of boredom. This is the case with live shows and recordings. With Acrid Plains, the album is 52 minutes, but it feels much shorter, because a lot of the time, you don’t notice it.

The difference with the new Saros record compared to the debut is Saros isn’t playing anything fast and brutal anymore. Their style has shifted more in the vein of Grayceon (but more rocking and groovy) and Amber Asylum (not surprising, as Saros’ frontwoman is in Amber Asylum, and they got Kris Force to guest on Acrid Plains). This means a far more laid-back groove, more of a heavy, atmospheric rock kind of thing, with decent and acceptable melodic singing sections, as well as recurring parts on stringed instruments and stark, relaxed breaks. Kind of a shame we can’t hear the drummer (now known as Blood Eagle, the erstwhile Lil’ Sunshine from Weakling) do his awesome droning version of the extreme metal drumbeat staples here.

What’s most interesting about Acrid Plains is the sound production, and how it conveys the compositions. The album sounds relaxed and full, with excellent, but not at all overdriven clarity. The sound helps show that the record is one that was born out of artistic creativity and thought, but many of the compositions still make it a pleasant shade of boring. (6.5/10)

Bands on Pulverised Records are starting to have a standard sound. Seance is big, mean, heavy, aggressive, pummeling... but in the end, boils down to a bunch of sound and fury that signifies nothing. When something neat does arise, like a quasimodo version of "Flight of the Bumblebee" on bass, it lasts only 35 seconds, and it’s back to the regularly-scheduled bland programming. Don’t know if it’s how the music is presented in such a loud yet flat manner, or that the vocals are overbearing, or that the songs are just dull, but this album is as average as they come. (5/10)

It’s confirmed. Slipknot is great drums and great nothing else. Songs with heavy guitars, heavy drums, but crappy tough-guy screamy vocals, shittier melodic choruses, and chug-a-lug riffs. Slipknot equals faux heavy metaldom. And it’s probably a good thing that the world at large is distracted by them while good metal gets made in the shadows. Really good production, though. (4/10)

With Vlad Blasphemer from Czech Republic’s Maniac Butcher on vocals, Detonator 666 takes a popular approach to black metal. Namely, intoxicating the music with thrash and heavy metal.

Okay, perhaps it’s not entirely that original, but there are some potent guitar riffs and interesting vocal patterns. The screams and the agony-infused wailing gives an extra-rough touch to a sound that’s already raw.

The opening track, "Triumph of Diabolical Chaos," is diverse and sounds downright old-school. "Satanik Alkometal Hellkult" gets a thumbs up not only for the name but also for the comical lyrics. "Too Fucked Up to Stay Alive" is relatively more buoyant, despite the morbid title, and is one of the better tracks.

There’s a lot of energy passed around back and forth between the
tracks. And the crude, under-produced sound reminds us that "perfectly" and "dirty" are two words that can get along just fine. (7.7/10)

As far as one-man metal bands go, Belenos is probably the most musically gifted. The man, Loic Cellier, can play all standard metal-related instruments to a high degree of proficiency, and that includes the drums, which he rips at. What’s more, his vocals, and particularly his chanted/ Nordic tribal cleans — while not trying for anything amazing — complement and add to the music a great deal.

Of course, one also has to be able to write and arrange songs in addition to being able to play one’s parts well, and Cellier makes some outstanding Pagan-themed extreme death/black metal that has a superb balance of intensity and melody.

The 2009 version of Errances Oniriques is a total re-recording of the album of the same name that was released in 2001 on Sacral Records. We haven’t heard that one (you try to get your hands on any Belenos albums before 2007's Chemins de Souffrance), but this one is pretty killer. It’s not Belenos’ best album (Chemins is better), but if you like this project, or like the idea of extreme metal imbued with Pagan ancestral flair (and without relying on keyboards), this band is a must. The bonus track of Aeternus’ "Sworn Revenge," one of the best Pagan-related / death/ black metal songs ever, not only shows that Belenos knows its shit, but that it can do the song justice with its own version. Ave! (8.2/10)

The latest album of this long-running old-school death metal band (with hints of black metal) is convincingly heavy and groovy. It does a good job in hitting some basic, straightforward spot within a metal-lovers being. As much of Nightrealm Apocalypse’s appeal is from the feeling that Sathanas is truly about their music, and not about following some trend or dolling their songs up with forced aggression or bombast.

Nightrealm Apocalypse isn’t anything spectacular, and you can figure the whole album out after about two songs, and might have enough after about seven, but the tunes pound and groove along pleasantly throughout. If you like bands like Incantation, you’ll probably be into Nightrealm Apocalypse. (6.6/10)

Who would have thought there’s an avant-garde grindcore band from Trieste, Italy? Wait, wait. There’s another level to this band’s grind beyond the gut-eating and bile-vomiting?

If you’re browsing through the metal section at your local record store, and see Sotajumala’s Teloitus, you might wonder how some gay emo-core album accidentally got filed in there between Sodom and Suffocation. Rest easy, it’s supposed to be there. It’s on Woodcut Records, after all, which means it’s safe. We hope.

Seriously, look at that album cover. You’re justified.

Incredibly, though, in reality Sotajumala play dense, rumbling death metal. Teloitus reminds a lot of Panzerchrist (think Soul Collector) in riff writing, rhythm application, and much of the style of the melodic guitar leads, mixed with occasional Morbid Angel-isms. It comes together for a pretty killer album.

Teloitus will immediately strike death metal fans as being high quality: The production is heavy and aggressive, without being forced, and the music is tasty. Now, it kind of all runs together, which could be a little better, but the overall thing that Sotajumala does will keep metal fans engaged. While we’re nitpicking, the bass drum samples make the kick drums do that thing where they sound like they were recorded in a different room from the rest of the drum kit (an unfortunate side-effect that can happen with triggering/replacing), but this minor bummer is only really noticeable when the drums are going along more on their own, and again, it’s a major nitpick. The drums otherwise sound really good.

If you haven’t heard Panzerchrist, imagine the death metal soundtrack to all the gears and treads of a tank rolling at high speed, and then add in some Morbid Angel, and some melodic guitar solos, and a bunch of ass-kicking and tasty musicianship, and you’ve got Sotajumala’s Teloitus. (8/10)

Spheric Universe Experience put out one of the most exciting and adventurous progressive metal albums with their debut, Mental Torments. Since then, sad to say, their albums have been getting worse.

Their second album, Anima, was sophomoric in that, aside from a song or two, it sounded like an attempt to reproduce the first album as if it were a blueprint, relying on the devices of the debut, but without the freshness and hooks.

The third album, Unreal, does sound like SUE (yeah, they go by SUE. You would, too, if you named your band something so clunky as Spheric Universe Experience) is trying some new approaches to songwriting. However, none of them are better — Unreal’s biggest drag is that the adventure and excitement felt on the debut is more lacking than ever. Unreal’s songs sound relatively cut-and-dried. It sounds like SUE are more cognizant and calculating in their songwriting, but it’s at the expense of passion.

Sure, Unreal still has good vocals (but singing much less memorable melodies), good lead guitar (but less expressive than ever), good keyboards (also less expressive)... but the songs are not particularly remarkable. We are being a bit hard on poor SUE (may we call you Suzanne?), but only because of how great it seemed this band would become. After three albums, it seems the only thing improving is the drum sound. Even then, nothing is absolute, as the drumming is more bland than ever (they have a new drummer. He’s good, but not as exciting as the previous guy. Otherwise, it’s all the same people, so who knows what’s going on). Respectable, good, but considering the origins, disappointing. (6.5/10)

Nu metal lives on, still, while bands like Static-X continue to release records. Cult of Static is a sight better than the kind of thing one might expect from the dregs of the genre, like Skinlab. Sure, the songs are all simple, from riffs to arrangements, but they are ass-shaking in their own way.

Cult of Static often sounds like Meshuggah, if Meshuggah played only in even time, and didn’t use all the dissonant harmonies. The usage of one-note riffs, how the guitar is there for rhythm almost exclusively, and the vocal approach, all point to tunes that are about the groove, and nothing about the hummability.

Cult of Static can be appreciated for how great the production is. The instruments sound full and heavy, and unlike the kind of full and heavy that you’ll get on an album by Scar Symmetry, for example (pick most any of the mediocre releases on Nuclear Blast from the past 2-3 years), which sounds fake and over-produced. Static-X knows what it's doing and does that well, although some more interesting arrangements could have helped. After a few songs, Cult of Static gets repetitive — but still not as fast as Meshuggah gets old.

Still, groovy, heavy, aggressive songs that are all about rhythm has its niche, so if you like System of a Down, this would be a good album to pick up. (6/10)

Zombi is at its unique best when it channels the kind of keyboards found in a John Carpenter movie, and matches it with groovy drums. When the band is on in this regard, the result is a great mix of atmosphere, catchiness, and driving energy. Zombi’s previous album, Surface to Air, was the culmination of this fun and interesting concept. What’s just as remarkable about this band is that it’s one of the few instrumental projects that won’t make you want for vocals.

The latest Zombi album, Spirit Animal, won’t disappoint anyone who liked Surface to Air, but Zombi lags noticeably when it strays from its best methods and into more languid and somber territory. While songs like "Spirit Animal" and "Through Time" have their share of appeal or memorability, they are too long and don’t move enough for an instrumental band like this. Tracks like "Spirit Warrior," in contrast, provide a much tastier, groovy listening experience.

Having variety of tracks is all fine and good, but the less appealing tracks make up about half of Spirit Animal’s total time, which, despite this being a recommended album (and band), and a successful album, is not Zombi’s best album. Check out Surface to Air first, and if you like that, you’ll also want to get Spirit Animal. (7.2/10)

While it’s true that Wolf has been getting less and less interesting since their wonderful, first, self-titled album, you can still say they have more energy and immediacy than the latest schlock of the band they owe everything to, Iron Maiden. Wolf’s career has seemed to be about channeling the original rough energy of the NWOBHM era, putting a Swedish spin on it (Sweden, where NWOBHM is immortal), and making it now. And doing it better than actual bands from that era are actually doing.

Whatever that album was Wolf put out last, the one on Prosthetic... that one was so boring. Thankfully, the latest album, Ravenous, starts out with a killer song! Wolf has refreshed its line-up, and the opener reminds of how cool the debut was. Second song is also totally great, with good flow and a catchy chorus.

But that’s it. The rest of the album suddenly lapses into blandness. It’s like the depth and energy of the first two songs is not longer anywhere to be found. What is this, pop music? There are two good songs and 80% of the album is filler?

It seems that the only Wolf you still really need is the debut. You might forget the rest and be just fine. However, if you liked the last record, why not? (5.5/10)

Expect Hell is brutal, chaotic, and full of stamina. From time to time there’s change of pace and melodic ingredients, but the songs are dangerously close to being bland.

These boys can shred and romp around different styles, ranging from death metal to metalcore to grindcore to thrash. But the brutality needs to be intelligently controlled.

"Tourniquet Girl" is rather multihued and deliciously thick. "Ultima" is more tuneful and features lively guitar work. "Momentary Alphabetic Convergence" stands out as a silent quiver between two violent pieces,during which we get a break from Burke VanRaalte’s snarling.

With Dead Hands Rising tries to bring complexity not only through the dense song structures, but also through the byzantine approach to speed and might. (6/10)

Urna released a monument of the doom/black crossover genre with Sepulcrum, one of the best albums of that year. Their follow up, Iter Ad Lucem, is on par. As excellent as it is, overall, it does not contain quite as many memorable moments. However, this is comparing something to one of the best doom-oriented albums ever, and album # 2 is still highly recommended.

Iter Ad Lucem is relatively less black and more doom than Sepulcrum. The tones are relatively less dirty and seemingly less caked with the mold of an ancient tomb. The main stylistic characteristics and vision are still in place, though, making Iter Ad Lucem sound alternatively/ simultaneously like soundtracks to a deep, forgotten crevasse, or a vista to a sprawling, black ocean.

Urna has again put together a record that features a fantastical take on the doom vibe. The musical vision is highly processed, but does not sound plastic. Sludgy does not really describe it... at least not sludgy like Khanate; more of like a black fog so thick you can cut it. Urna is a little like how The Ruins of Beverast Rain Upon the Impure takes you on a journey through an impossible, subterranean marsh of evil, but with a big sound.

As with album #1, there are some breaks into calmer, undistorted keyboard sections, but these again are not quite as stark as on Sepulcrum. The deep and dark vocals fit in great with the layers of instruments, effects and reverberant drum samples, always weaving a splendid aura of dark, sinister musical heaviness.

Iter Ad Lucem comes across as being the result of a more focused and experienced musical vision, but the freshness and impact of the compositions were greater the first time around. Still, totally great. (8.5/10)

Sadly, the music on In the Light of Darkness is as unanimated as the band’s name. It’s heavy, dark black metal, a little like Marduk, a little like Gorgoroth, and with the proper vibe, but the songs are dull and unremarkable. Not a ton of energy or insidious presence here, but it is done properly. Middle of the road all the way. (5/10)

This Unanimated album is in a greatly different style from their most recent release. Here, it’s more up-tempo, lighter, perhaps something more like countrymen Naglfar would have done in their early years. There are quite a few solos on Ancient God of Evil, most of them rather cheesy, and one or two bluesy solos that totally suck.

Like Naglfar, the big deal about Unanimated is unclear. Ancient God of Evil is ok/good, but it’s pointless considering the depth of great albums available. In a sense, this album is better than In the Light of Darkness in that it has more energy, but it’s worse in that it’s a slapdash of styles never done better than acceptably well. (5.5/10)

Will the real Unanimated please stand up? Three Unanimated albums, three seemingly different bands.

It’s ok for bands to change styles and approaches to help inspire their art. But there’s a difference between a band like Blut Aus Nord releasing very different sounding albums that feel creatively progressive, and a band like Unanimated putting out albums that sound like derivative attempts at dabbling.

In the Forest of the Dreaming Dead (we care not enough to figure out where this album fits in Unanimated’s chronology) fits more into the Naglfar comparison made in the review of Ancient God of Darkness, but the sound is dirtier and the music more cohesive.

There are some decently good parts to the songs, mainly in how rough and solid the energy can get, but the way the vocals kind of sit on top of the music, naked and detached, brings the experience down. And in the end, this Unanimated record, despite it standing more solidly in its vision, still sounds like an exercise in repetition. (5.7/10)

Justified Genocide will be one of the best death metal albums released in 2009. It’s heavy, thrashes, blasts; it knows when to take breathers in intensity to bring more heaviness, it knows when to put in melody to help punctuate songs, and how to change feel to supply the tracks with energizing dynamics.

These aspects translate into an album that absolutely rips with fierceness, but at the same time has songs that you can actually tell apart, which is one of the greatest gifts a death metal fan can ask for. The playing is masterful, and the production (by Dan Swano) brings the intensity and depth necessary to modern-day death metal, but still retains the true, heavy nature of the style from when it was most relevant, in the early- to mid-‘90s. Excellent! (8.5/10)

Great that Testament has got all its health and resolve problems straightened out, and is making albums again. Cool also that they’ve got Paul Bostaph playing drums for them once more. The Formation of Damnation continues Testament’s style of not having the fastest songs in the thrash universe, rather focusing on a heavier feel and more traditional song structures. The Formation of Damnation might not be Testament’s best album ever, or with its catchiest songs (look to The Gathering for those), but it’s damn good and proper. (7/10)

There are plenty of black/thrash albums out in the marketplace today, but it’s the quality of the details that makes Luctus’ Jauciant pabaiga arti stand out.

The main ingredients to success are production and playing, both of which convey tremendous energy and intensity. The drums in particular sound killer here, and the guitars overflow with juicy tone and tight rhythm skills. The vocals sit just right in the mix, conveying aggression but not being a distraction or hindrance.

But the most important element of the sound is that Jauciant pabaiga arti is a powerful record that makes you want to turn up the volume, and sounds great when you do. This cannot be stressed enough in an age where more records than ever are pretty much ruined by over-compression, which makes you want to turn the music down from ear fatigue. This wonderful aspect of this Luctus is as important to its replayability factor as is the stylistic content and performance.

Certainly, an album also has to have good music, and Luctus brings it with always infectious tunes from beginning to end. There’s nothing complicated about what Luctus does — it’s straightforward black/thrash with some elements of melody to keep things fresh between extended runs of groovy chugging — but that’s the genius of it. It’s fist-pumping, exciting music the whole way, and the 43 minute running time is the perfect length. Get it! (8.8/10)

Dark Castle plays a kind of heavy, nearly instrumental sludge rock/ doom with some stoner influences. The vibe of the deliberate, weighty music can somehow be oppressive and languid at the same time.

The vocals are either periodic, or they way their heavy, dying-breath hoarseness blends in to the surrounding instrumental colossus might make you forget they are there sometimes. This is a good thing, though, as Dark Castle manages to be both a seemingly instrumental group, but with enough of a vocal presence to anchor their compositions and prevent Spirited Migration from being yet another pointless instrumental album.

Spirited Migration, as a whole, is an accomplished and well put together album, from it’s beautiful artwork to the crafted sound and capable performances. However, while there are a few quite tasty spots, the album does not feature many remarkable songs, being more a tactful, respectable exercise in heavy plodding than a disk full of exciting songs. (6.6/10)

Delta is a melodic/ power metal band with some elements of prog metal (like, they use keyboards). Their Crashbreaker album is impressive in its solid presence and professional-level instrumental performances and production. However, the vocals hurt it badly. The singer isn’t necessarily bad, but what the whiningly aggressive melodic vocals are doing often goes past the realms of tolerable and get annoying. Considering the vocals are right up there in the mix, pushing the singer in the frontman role, Crashbreaker unfortunately becomes a mediocre album, despite all the quality stuff going on behind the singing. (4.5/10)

This speed thrash outfit Hayaino Daisuki from Japan is surprising. The songs are supersonic and just downright crazy. But then again, what’s metal without craziness?

There’s plenty of power and intensity on this quarter-hour EP, but it’s hard to look past the hair-pulling, screeching vocals by vocalist Jon Chag (of Discordance Axis). It makes the rest of the music kind of hard to concentrate on.

The name of the band means "I Love Speed" in Japanese, which is quite apt. It’s like they are on speed. And nothing can ever slow them down. The most interesting track? The last one, "Aka," with its melodic spitting. (6.8/10)

Sometimes we get straggler promos to review here at Maelstrom. Most of the time, we wonder what misinformation/ lack of target audience research/ shoot-in-the-air-and-hope-to-hit-something promotions tactic results in those albums landing here.

We felt we should review Native Window, though, mostly because one of the guys in the band has an eyepatch AND broken/ rotting/ missing front teeth. Like, that’s pretty evil, right?

"Gimmicks" aside, Native Window’s album of folky soft rock is well-done. When we say "folky," we’re not talking about Pagans singing about ancestral pride, but more like USA country folky; more like Bruce Hornsby and the Range folky, but less pop.

And when we say "well-done," we mean that the vocals are pleasant and able, the playing is never clunky, and the songs are nice to listen to. With this said, Native Window is far from a compelling album for anyone not into this kind of music. With that said, it’s more welcome on our stereo than at least a third of the more overtly "evil" albums reviewed in this issue. (6/10)

Lithuanian band Soul Stealer’s self-titled album is all about the melodic power metal style. While there are some fiercely cheesy elements throughout the record, like kitschy keyboards most metal bands wouldn’t be caught dead with, or periodic bursts of hilarious falsetto singing, none of these elements are ever cheesy/terrible, but rather cheesy/amusing.

And more than anything else, Soul Stealer is pretty entertaining. The vocals talent on display here is pretty great, and even the lapses into gratuitous falsetto "metal" parts, while hysterical and kind of out-of-place with the rest of the vocals, aren’t bad, and if anything, it contributes to the fun factor.

And much of the time, Soul Stealer is engaging and fun. Somehow, parts on this record can remind one of Lost Horizon, but a kindergarten version thereof. It’s something about how the riffs interact with the keyboards and drums. When things are less fun is when the songs are in English (maybe about 20-30% of the time), which is when the listener will notice some pretty bad/cliched lyrics. (The dragging-on "Reaper" is the worst of the bunch). In the band’s native Lithuanian, the lyrics still might be awful, but most of us won’t notice. It seems also the English-language songs are the slower, less energized ones.

In summary, Soul Stealer is a fun listen whose entertainment value lies as much in the band’s talent as it does in their work being amusing and goofy, which might not be the intention, but generally unintentional retardation is the best kind when it comes to albums. (6.9/10)

It should only be logical that most albums in any given genre are average. Some are great, some are terrible, many more are good, and the majority of them are right there in the middle. Strandhogg’s take on blackened death is in that average. It’s played with energy, but the compositions aren’t as inspired as the execution... not by a long shot. Standard, simplistic riffs and heard-a-million-times chord progressions make this album run-of-the-mill, but good run-of-the-mill.

The sound is also respectably well done, and conveys a convincing amount of dirt and heaviness. However, the sampled bass drums stand out a bit too much as incongruously tidy. (5.9/10)

When a band becomes big enough, it can become like a corporation, an entity bigger than the people that make it up. Consider Sepultura. No more Cavaleras, yet it continues to roll. Slayer was still paying Dave Lombardo as being the band’s drummer even during the 10 or so years that Paul Bostaph played for them.

Stratovarius might be another such entity. Four of the guys in the band kick out Timo Tolkki, the main member, the founding member, the guy that brought all the other members on in the band, and continue on in the same way and with the same name. Does that make sense to anyone who’s ever been in a band?

What’s more, it turns out Timo Tolkki isn’t even a founding member to begin with! The last original Stratovarius member was kicked out by Tolkki after the entity’s fourth album. So, whose band is it, anyway?

Whoever’s band it may be, post-Tolkki Stratovarius has yielded one of the overall best albums this entity has ever recorded in Polaris. It’s still stylistically the same as you’d expect, simple, children’s power metal, with the same approaches to song writing, structure, solos, rhythms, and some typical riff-recycle, but the quality of the songs is the best it’s been overall in about 10 years, perhaps ever, and about as on-par with the band’s greatest album, Episode. For sure, Polaris features the best and most balanced production this band has ever had.

No single song on Polaris is one of Stratovarius’ best songs ever (of course there are excellent songs! Each track is memorable), but rather it’s the album’s flow from song to song that makes the record such a success. In the past, Stratovarius albums have had tendency to start off fast, then gradually have the passion and intensity dip into overly long mid-paced/slow blah, with maybe one more b-side-grade faster track to resuscitate the energy. On Polaris, that general approach is still in place, but it’s done more judiciously. No song is filler, and the way the songs are arranged provides the entire work with the dynamism and pacing that make listening to the album over and over, back-to-back, an appealing notion, which is huge.

Really helping here is that the mid-paced and slow songs are way better overall than what the band has generally done up till now, and that some of the cotton-candy aspect, while undoubtedly being an intrinsic part of the band’s sound and composition, has been toned down noticeably to make way for a more appealing sense of maturity and solidity, all the while being instantly recognizable as Stratovarius, and that’s a good thing. A great thing. One of the best albums of the year thing. (9.2/10)

Since its release in the mid-‘90s, the black metal community has yet to come close to releasing the kind of black metal-related folk album Kveldssanger again. It’s not super often that bands will try, but when they do, it generally falls very short. To date, only Empyrium have managed to be in the same league.

While Stridsmenn’s self-titled album isn’t an all-out attempt to be in this style, there are more than a handful of elements that are highly evocative of Ulver’s masterwork, from the application and composition of acoustic guitar, to the implementation of simple, chanted vocals.

However, as good as these elements can be in Stridsmenn, they can feel pasted on within a body of more standard black metal fare. Speaking of that, the distorted guitar/ bass/ drums/ vocals elements of this album are good, but unremarkably so. The bulk of the music is done in a droning, "boring" style placed squarely and safely within the confines of what is classified as a "proper, old-school Norwegian black metal album." It’s all pleasant enough to listen to, and solid for what it is, but it’s not exceptional by any means, and save for a couple parts, there’s not much to remember about this album. (6/10)

Houwitser is a big name in Death Metal, though perhaps not for
obvious reasons. Their records have always been a bit left-field because of their oppressive atmosphere, their relentless pounding groove and their lack of apparent polish. Embrace Damnation was like a big pack of rhinos stampeding to an alien death metal groove. Rage Inside the Womb was altogether more refined though still infused with that same sense of erratic, bottom-heavy melody. Damage Assessment was a perfect balance between the two previous records but was ultimately weighed down by inane samples starting most songs.

It's now been six years since their last record, and finally Houwitser
shows signs of life again: a two-song affair called Sledgehammer
Redemption.

The title track starts off in typical Houwitser fashion with a sample about someone eating someone else. This is what we have come to expect, so we're ok with it. But when the music starts it becomes apparent that this is a new Houwitser after all. The many years have changed the band, left a few members behind, picked up some new ones — and it shows in several key areas. Gone, for example, is the deeper-than-deep groove that has been so vital to their previous records. It's been replaced by an atmosphere that is clearer, less oppressive to the ears, but sounds altogether more mature, more in line with the old school death metal bands. It’s still incredibly heavy, but not as intensely so as before.

Something that's sorely missing in these new songs is the characteristic drum work that has been a staple of the Houwitser sound. The new drummer is excellent, and he definitely stands his own on Sledgehammer Redemption, but gone are the erratic snare-fills, the booming tom-fills, the relentless pounding on the skins that have marked the Houwitser albums since Embrace Damnation. Having said that, the new drummer has a very old school way of going around the drumkit that feels very comfortable to well-trained death metal ears, especially on "Hatred Vindicated" — his fills rattle around on the toms very smoothly, and it all sounds very satisfying.

The guitars seem very much like they did before — they still sound like they are coated in digital sludge; it’s a very satisfying sound, especially at loud volumes. The vocals are reminiscent of previous records but there’s more variety on Sledgehammer Redemption; at times the guttural growls are accompanied by hoarse snarls and screams, adding a refreshing texture to the songs. The songs are fine examples of death metal song writing, but they are devoid of the off-beat attitude of older tracks like "Unholy Orgasm" or "Parasomy."

Sledgehammer Redemption, then, seems to leave behind some of the things that have made Houwitser such a peculiar and intense addition to the death metal world. The band is comfortably turning its iron sights a few degrees into a new direction (new for the band, but old school for death metal). These two tracks convey a maturity and a higher sense of musicianship that may have lacked from previous material. Here is not a Houwitser that flails around like on Embrace Damnation or Damage Assessment, but a more focused one; a band intent on showcasing its talent and experienced view on death metal. Let's hope these two songs will lead to a dozen more, because this new Houwitser is an interesting one indeed. (7/10)

Sculptured's third album mirrors a more mainstream-ish vibe; it’s a tad happier than previous albums, but nonetheless as intelligent a band as before, made up of highly talented and original musicians who offer their take on metal like no other. Even though Embodiment could easily be regarded as the band's most accessible and least "experimental" offering, it is very much progressive in terms of sound, production, song structure and the many influences/ instruments that had been incorporated into the band's musical interpretation.

To call Embodiment simply a metal album would be an over-simplification, if not a grave error. This very album transcends way beyond and above metal's own musical icons, dogmas and frameworks.

It is intelligent to the hilt, done well and played right. From their jazzy interludes, to the melodic death-like parts, to the clear and joyous vocal parts a la Rush; Sculptured throw in some Zeuhl music (Magma, et. al.), some post-rock, or some ‘70s keyboards... no matter what, each approach is done with finesse and perfection.

The backbone is definitely hard and heavy and consists of distorted and sharp guitars and powerful drumming, but Embodiment strays off far and beyond what could be offered by metal alone, making this very album one which could pretty much appeal to many a fan of non-commercial music out there. Embodiment may not be as avant-garde as the band's sophomore album, Apollo Ends, and in that sense more digestible, however the craftsmanship of gluing together so many alien musical styles into one seamless creation is something to behold, and therefore must be heard. (8.9/10)

Dark Suns’ brand of progressive metal is unusual and unique in its own right. Grave Human Genuine is darker than most any prog metal, which includes some forays into abrasive territory (mostly harsh vocals). But what sets Dark Suns apart is the implementation of their mix of unusual elements, some as remarkable as extrended soft, calm (yet still moodily oppressive) sections, to their original style of rhythm and song structure.

However, as much as these elements might seem appealing on paper — or even interesting from moment to moment when listening to the album — Grave Human Genuine is not particularly compelling as songs or as an album as a whole. There is the oft-felt element with prog music that many listens will be required to appreciate the depth of the music, but there’s just as much of a feeling here that although the music goes somewhere, that place isn’t particularly interesting. So while this album is on Sensory — which has super high standards of quality — the quality is more in the execution and ability, and not so much in the enjoyability. (6/10)

Sadly, Queensryche continues on its path of being a seminal metal band of yore that, since its big impact ages ago, can’t help but release tepid, boring, borderline terrible albums.

American Soldier is the latest wholly forgettable effort. The songs feel like sandbox-level tunes made by a capable band running through the motions. The underlying music is as bare-bones as can be, providing a platform for the vocals to have center stage. That seems valid, as Geoff Tate is one of the most celebrated melodic singers in metal history. However, as quality as his performance is, it’s not produced in a particularly wonderful way — the vocals are not mellifluous when it seems they should be, and/or the way they sit on the music isn’t in the kind of harmony one would hope for.

Really kicking American Soldier down a bunch of notches is its being a concept album. The ugliest of this issues heads appears in the oft-abused spoken word clip, which is as bad as it gets on this record, with songs like "Unafraid" having an extended spoken clip basically throughout the whole song, and the clip is as loud as the vocals. It’s so, so terrible in itself, as a spoken clip has no musical value whatsoever, and particularly abhorrent as it’s yet another album that deals with the Iraq war / coverup / issue, and this is tired beyond belief. Much like this album and this band. (3.9/10)

Upon listening to bands such as Young Widows (and Clouds for that matter), or any other post-hardcore band in that vein of hardcore meets punk rock merger, the listener would be impressed to some extent in the beginning. Then, when recognition sinks in, coupled with several listening sessions to those albums, a new acknowledgment dawns: this music is almost sterile.

The atmosphere is lacking, as are genuine emotion and depth. This is by far removed from the atmospheric (post) hardcore strain of bands, which are worlds apart from annoying albums such as Old Wounds, which is nothing more than popular American-style commercial punk rock masquerading itself as if it were bigger and better than what it really is. Young Windows, in that case, are just another uninteresting punk rock band and they simply cannot escape that fact. (4/10)

Clouds offer a melodic blend of noise rock and post-hardcore flaked with American typical punk rock etiquette, infused with those jolly upbeat rhythms and a twist of MTV sweet and lightweight mainstreamness. We Are Above You derives much of its influence from blues and the aforementioned typical party-happy, watered down punk rock.

The execution of the music bearing several styles — some old, some new, some middle ground — is top notch; however, the choice of styles as a whole does not appeal: It is devoid of real emotion and too cheerful for its own good.

The winds of familiarity blow firmly from this album's direction, reminding the listener this kind of unexceptional music has been done before many times. Here and there one may find moments of brilliance such as the untypical semi-ballad "Slow Day," which is a sort of progressive rock anthem in the Pink Floyd tradition — somber and dense.

Other than that point of light, We Are Above You is remarkable in its ability to be absolutely unremarkable. To question the album title: You are above us? No, and No. (4.5/10)

Even though Evolve was self released in 2007, it has not reached the attention of underground media and audience until not very long ago. This is strange, unless distributing the album was problematic for the band, since it is a self release, after all.

As the band's website suggests with its clean and elegant looks and simple yet effective aesthetics, From Beneath Billows' music implies conscious shedding of all artifacts of pomposity or redundancy, and a skillful delivery of austere sonic elegance not unlike the barren landscapes adorning the album art.

Paradoxically desolate, indeed, but also warm and engaging. Evolve's conflicts clash and interweave; the plot unfolds from the very first tranquil minimal ballad to the very last distorted string of menace and anger. The opening track suggests the dark rock artistry of Tiamat's A Deeper Kind of Slumber.

As our excursion into the album deepens, a myriad of landscapes unfold. You can clearly hear Neurosis influences indeed, but Evolve is unique in its own right. It bears a brand of clarity, wisdom and strong a sense of purpose, all of which unfold and hit the listener once the play button is pressed.

From Beneath Billows have taken atmospheric hardcore a step forward, and have delivered their musical vision with finesse and mesmerizing prowess. Evolve is class, it is a photograph in brown, ocher and charcoal black, of the most beautiful and remote places this world has still got to offer. Evolve echoes this beauty: At times it whispers, and at times it screams its lungs out for all to hear... and see. (8.9/10)

Wow, an album whose theme is the legalization of crime. Yes, very mature. To think this mumbo jumbo of a theme for an album was created by Eyehategod members, rather than in the minds of some pimpled kids, makes this even more laughable.

What's even more ludicrous is Season of Mist's failed attempt at releasing southern rock / sludge and such. Season of Mist was home for some of metal's greatest and most peculiar bands to ever walk this earth. Top notch and original black and death metal, this label has released albums charged with majestic sounds, magic and mysticism.

What has a French label of such scope got to do with second-rate American sludge, for god's sake? Outlaw Order are out of their league; this choice of albums to be released is totally misplaced and misguided.

Sludge must be understood — good sludge must be recognized for what it is, and it is rare. Grabbing every available band out there and signing it could eventually turn into a big mistake; as is the case with Outlaw Order, formerly known as Eyehategod, a sludge legend in its own right. Surprisingly, Outlaw Order's debut album, Dragging Down the Enforcer is a pretty much dull sludge offering. It is derivative, bland and uninspired to say the least.

Eyehategod's bleak and twisted, filthy but also atmospheric sludge has pretty much diminished into nothing more but by-the-book dissonant riffs we have all heard too many times before. The main screamer is somewhat a parody of sludge's great vocalists as he tries too damn much. All he manages is to produce a hysterical kid's meek, dorky, even goofy shouts.

With a theme like the above mentioned and music as dull as captured on Dragging Down the Enforcer, this effort is easily overshadowed by the band's (i.e., Eyehategod) discography. Let Outlaw Order fade into oblivion and go listen to some Eyehategod instead, for this is what sludge is all about. Sadly, Eyehategod's new moniker probably has made the band forgetful of that fact. (3.9/10)

We’ll often use "retarded" as a qualifier to convey an attractive quality of cult idiot savant-ness — a kind of representation of people barely knowing what they’re doing, and that’s for the best.

However, "retarded" can also rear its other, ugly head, and that’s what the Enbilulugugal / Blood Cult split black metal CD is all about.

Blood Cult is first, and is like some attempt at Southern fried black metal, like if Lugubrum were from Louisiana instead of Belgium. The music is obnoxious and often reaches a janky, gross, yippy-skippy vibe.

Enbilulugugal is piece-of-shit black metal — the utmost in aggressively terrible, DIY output that mirrors the worst in that particular punk attitude of sucking (and not giving a fuck) as a replacement for musical quality.

What both these bands have in common is nauseating reliance on clips from movies. In Blood Cult’s case, it can get a little unsettling (a good thing), but still, implementation and reliance of clips to this degree conveys yet another dimension of the theme that these bands' music is not worthwhile.

Finally, and most importantly, here’s another album that is compressed to a hairwidth of its life, and mastered so loud, in a misguided attempt at the belief that the digitally louder and more abrasive it is, the more extreme it is... while in fact, it’s just more annoying. In this regard, things start off horribly with Blood Cult, and progress to somehow even worse with Enbilulugugal, not only repelling the listener, but effectively preventing the weaving of a proper black metal atmosphere. (0/10)

Izah’s two-song EP of atmospheric hardcore succeeds where so many others fail. Obviously, the compositions and musical arrangements that tell a dynamic tale through the self-titled recording’s 23-minute length is the main proponent of this success: heavy tunes that enjoy a grinding slowdown to a lower gear, and clean breaks that recall Old Man Gloom’s greatest albums, all coming together in a recording that flows masterfully and epically at all times.

Contributing greatly are the vocals. In this case, it’s more of a case of *not detracting*. Again, where so many hardcore-related albums feature affected, screamy / yelly vocals that are both too loud for their own good and contribute nothing to the music, Izah’s harsh vocals are mixed so that they complement the music, punctuating it excellently. Even more remarkable are the clean vocal sections, which never cause any of the dreaded wincing so familiar with the stereotypical ‘core / emo release’s shallow, wussbag, recycled, treacly range. Quite the opposite, the singing on Izah conveys believable emotion, and just like every other aspect of this progressive hardcore band, is delightful to listen to. We hope this band continues in this vein. (7.8/10)

What can be problematic with "legendary" metal personas, who have decided to make a surprising comeback after years of silence, is their alleged smugness: They seem to be carried upon the wings of their past reputation, thinking this alone might suffice where music is concerned. Simply put, they do not try hard enough upon their coming back, or alternately, offer more of the same.

Martin Van Drunen was a great vocalist, a unique voice among his many peers in the death metal underground scene, a decade, even two decades ago. His vocal performance with Pestilence and Asphyx (this reviewer's favorite of the lot) were unforgettable. His raspy, semi-hysterical, tortured, but mostly dark voice had been a dominating instrument and had always added an extra dimension of morbidity to the recording.

Van Drunen's voice is still terrific, years and years through his metal career, but alas, that fact alone cannot make an original or good death metal album.

Hail of Bullets is nothing more than Asphyx version 2.0, but other than the change of year (and name of band), there is absolutely nothing this "new" band could offer to justify its existence / resurrection.

Even though the slower parts on …Of Frost and War are the best ones (similarly to what made Asphyx such a good band: their doom oriented filthy death metal), they offer nothing you have not heard before from Van Drunen's other bands, many years ago. The faster parts are annoying, offering one-dimensional boring-as-fuck drumming and tried-out riffs. This band IS Asphyx, no doubt, so they could have at least kept the original moniker because nothing else here is original. (5/10)

Tail Swallower and Dove is a noisy and quite original blend of punk rock and post-hardcore with a hint of progression and unorthodox song structures that could be attributed to some post-rock influences. The band is ultra enthusiastic and pump a lot of that fervor into the music which in turn becomes very dynamic and potent.

Some tracks, like the opener for instance, are overtly joyous and happy while others (like track number five) are somber and reflective, if not hypnotic. These Arms Are Snakes, in addition to their unusual moniker, play also an interesting mixture of rock-oriented styles (mostly the ones that belong to the heavier parts of the spectrum) and the outcome is neurotic, unappealing and raucous, but at the same time also very much inspired and rewarding. With all these contradictions and paradoxes in mind, go ahead and try listening to this unique album — it might become the best thing you've heard in a long, long time... or the worst. (7/10)

At the beginning of the fourth track, this CD was ruthlessly removed from the CD player for lack of interest or any musical substance. This album is made of (dark) ambient devoid of any ambiance and of drone doom (without the metal ingredient in it) that is pointless and goes nowhere.

The instrumental The Distance Brings Us Closer is a boring heap of random sounds, one-chord endless drones that are "played" in perpetual loops. It’s one great emptiness in terms of musical essence, vision, or agenda. This is probably one of the most random sounding, pointless and boredom-inducing recordings ever made. (0/10)

Eighteen Wheels Burning would be a great live act: its energies amplified, its dynamics sharpened, its loudness overwhelming. It's the energy when playing live that makes the difference; the difference between a not-so-exciting album (Tweak'ed out, Strung up & Redlined) and a potent and powerful band on stage (Eighteen Wheels Burning).

You see, there's too much blues, too many niceties, too much southern rock without the abrasiveness that goes along with this style and too much fucking Eric Clapton going on here. The vocalist is rather weak and whiny, the songs familiar and tiring at times. The band claims to be a jam band, which means they are first and foremost a live band. That would be a good place to stay at: on stage, where they could be potent and convincing. The studio recording (this album), on the other hand, sounds a little bit pathetic. Tweak'ed out, Strung up & Redlined is strictly for hardcore blues fans and those who like Cream. Go see this band live, though... it should rock! (4.5/10)

Sad to note, but the Pulverised label, which released such excellent acts as Impiety and Thy Primordial, has been churning out album after album of generic, middle-of-the-road derivation.

Vanmakt’s Ad Luciferi Regnum is yet another example from this issue alone: solid, professional-level production and solid, professional-level execution, but no originality, no balls, and contributing nothing new with albums that have nothing to say.

In Vanmakt’s specific case, here’s a band that’s totally ripping off Dark Funeral, which is highly dubious in its own right: Why would anyone want to model themselves after one of the most inane acts in all of extreme metal... but so be it.

Like Dark Funeral, Ad Luciferi Regnum is fastfastfast, but it’s not hard-hitting fast, with plastic, hollow drums, twiddly melodies that don’t have heart, and nothing substantial past the moment its being listened to. Song one lasts five and a half minutes, and that’s long enough to figure out the entire album.

Still, one can’t complain that this album sucks. It’s correct, it’s played well, it has the requisite sound, but it’s dull. You’d be better off listening to Dark Funeral, which is a pretty upsetting recommendation. (5.3/10)

The long-running Lithuanian blackened death metal band Dissimulation has made a career of releasing recordings that have had some likeable elements, but damned if any of us can remember anything specific about them.

The latest effort, Atiduokit Mirusius, is a quality outing. The sound is thick and hard-hitting, and the instruments separate in a way that is both full and believable. The band plays tightly, generally exhibits tight grooves, and can feature some tasty parts. The Lithuanian vocals fit in well, and the overall feel is that you’re listening to a capable, experienced, pro band that knows how to write its own kind of music.

Moment to moment, Atiduokit Mirsius is an enjoyable album. But try to add all those moments together and you might not be left with much after you listen. This is Dissimulation’s curse: good music in the short term, look past each moment, and you’ll wonder what you’ve seen on the road you’ve been traveling on. (6.3/10)

Elder's self-titled debut full-length does not bring any new approaches, angles or stylistic twists into the stoner metal arena. They are heavily influenced by everyone out there who had been in turn influenced by Black Sabbath's bass-heavy, epic, alcohol-drenched psychedelia to the extent that it is sometimes almost impossible to differentiate one band from another.

No, Elder are by no means the messiahs of stoner / traditional doom metal. They are not even that epic. Their music is, however, fun. This album is designed to be heard in a car stereo in earsplitting volume. And earsplitting it is with its monstrous bass guitar lines, ominous vocals and heaviness in general. This is a cool and refreshing recording for hot summer nights in the city (for strict stoner fans, though). (8/10)

Tedious, boring, one-dimensional, one-trick pony... all good words to describe Burning Witch's music; music which arguably has received sort of a legendary status... god knows why.

Burning Witch's music, in its core, is nothing more than slower-than-usual, bleaker-than-usual stoner metal. Listen to the riffs, listen to the song structures, listen to the compositions, to the selection of effects and you'll see. They do add an extra droning element which does not add a thing to the recording; on the contrary, sometimes these droning guitars and endless feedback loops can annoy the hell out of anybody.

The single most unique aspect of Crippled Lucifer is the hysterical, high-pitched and tortured vocals, but even those could tire the listener pretty soon and cause desensitization, a dwindling, shocking effect and finally boredom.

The other boredom-inducing factor is the fact the tracks are strikingly similar to one another, none bears a unique "personal" stamp that would allow differentiation.

This reviewer sees no reason whatsoever for Crippled Lucifer (the original recording from 1998) to have become such a sought after or praised item, nor does he understand the reason or necessity for this double CD compilation of Burning Witch's past efforts captured on a couple of split albums and a couple of EPs. Listening to a couple of CDs back to back filled with Burning Witch's wearisome musical material is more than what the average listener could stand. (4.5/10)

The Lamp of Thoth really know how to emanate a sinister feeling of obscure times, painting in the listener's mind a bleak vista of obscure covens, cults, fogy English shores and secret spells of old.

They hold and release their unique talent to translate epic mystery to its sonic equivalent. Ominous riffs, dark theatrical vocals and semi-ritual like drumming serve as the band's seemingly simple tools with which they transcend the listeners from their comfortable habitat straight and effortlessly into dark times of ignorance, witchcraft and burning heretics.

Unfortunately, the last couple live tracks that have been added as a bonus to this re-issue of the original EP, were totally uncalled for and serve as a sour dessert at the end for quite a delicious feast. These tracks are loosely performed, under-produced and unprofessionally recorded. The choice of picking up these two amateurish live songs was poor and hasty a decision, for they pale in comparison to the initial and brilliant three studio-recorded tracks. Still a great album. (7.5/10)

It is steadily becoming harder and harder to distinguish between Evoken albums. It seems as though their once groundbreaking albums are not so groundbreaking anymore. What made Embrace the Emptiness unique, that essence that followed and was captured also on their monumental Quietus has been repeated into a steady stream of excellence.

Excellence, yes... but hardly anything close to being revolutionary anymore. Evoken had set a high standard for everyone, every time, and the expectation with each new Evoken album was sky-high. On those albums, every moment was a surprise, the plot twisting and the tunes mesmerizing. The dead weight of the heaviest of sonic waves on Embrace the Emptiness and Quietus mingled with a spiritual enigma generated by those brilliant musicians.

Since then, Evoken have released another two albums and an obscure demo, but has much evolved since Quietus? A Caress of the Void is still very much in the Evoken tradition; the music walks the seam between funeral doom and doom/death; the wall of sound is incredibly heavy; the production clear and fat and punishing.

But the enigma, you ask? quite gone. This time Evoken have not broken any rules, boundaries or own records, have not revolutionized their sound or music, have not evolved a bit. This is still an excellent album through and through, into that also a rare offering in the doom underground, however this reviewer had been expecting a metaphorical re-invention of the wheel here. After all, is it too much to ask for, from an entity such as Evoken?

Unfortunately, all A Caress of the Void has done is make this reviewer long for the epic and mysterious sounds of Quietus and Embrace the Emptiness. Is this a good thing?

Those who are familiar with the band's prior efforts might still find more enjoyment in spinning those rare masterpieces like there's no tomorrow ,rather than listening to this newest album, but it’s still a recording that is advised to grab a copy of as soon as possible. (8/10)

This album is simply wonderful, literally: Full of wonders. It is brooding, fleeting, and gentle, but also ominous and dark. It is mysterious, reflective, contemplative, and meditative, but also malignant, suicidal, and sorrowful. The powers held within the sublime sounds of string instruments and celestial voices are unfathomable and infinite. This is darkness, but also light, and darkness yet again.

Still Point, in essence is neoclassical chamber music spiced up with a fistful of drama and almost unreal and beautiful vocal performances for the end of the world, envisioning and echoing the purity of the end, of the nothing, of the nowhere.

As soon as the angels — who sound accompanied by blood-red Cellos — fade, the music takes a different turn. It allows steady drumming to interfere with a repetitive and circular beat. Now we have an orgy; vocals, strings, drum beats; musical finery, a dark velvet of sounds that sip into every human cell, the biological and the habitual, every crack in the soul and in the matter can easily be penetrated by this powerful music.

Six songs into the album acoustic guitars enter, the lamenting angels fade, as well as the strings and a clear, cold and pure voice starts singing a half-folk-ish tune; it is a sad song, yet it makes one's heart expand and rejoice. As soon as a crack of happiness has been torn in the blanket of gloom, the lamenting division is entering the stage once again; this time it is a funeral procession. One can actually see the long line of black clothed humans walk in bleak and brooding scenery, and sadness prevails.

Still Point is classical music in its true sense; it is here to stay; it bears past, present and future in its midst. It embodies the higher human aspiration: to become something higher, something better, to evolve... to become a god.

Still Point may very well be Amber Asylum's best work to date and one of the most exquisite works of musical art this reviewer has ever encountered. (10/10)

Nordic Ancestral Legacy released a demo in 2004, but have layed low since then. The Trapped Withing the Words EP is their re-entry into the doom-goth metal scene.

The style dwells in the musical aura that accompanies bands like Opeth, early Lacuna Coil, Stream of Passion, and older Tristania. Elin Anita Omholt does a good job of doing the clean vocals and tries her
best to put passion into what she does. Guitarist Eddie Risdal is The Beast in this fairytale, adding a melodic juxtaposition that works well.

"Disclosed" pulsates and reflects a game of hot potato between all of the musicians, as they seek to find the ideal mood. "Atrapada En Pesadillas" features guest vocalist Isadora Cortina, who taints the sadness with her fragile vocal chords and soothes open wounds. "Glimmer" is a serene instrumental track that bids farewell in an appropriate manner, as the curtain closes and the actors bow to the
audience. (7/10)

The first time we played this Atheist-offshoot, it passed us by in a mad rush of riff and shout. Played again, this time with us paying a lot more attention, it was pretty much the same story.

Maybe it's us, but it's probably Gnostic. There's an insane amount of music packed into Engineering the Rule, their debut album, and it's only blasted through the speakers in relatively small pieces. This makes for a very compacted and violent listen. Especially the first few times. In the Gnostic tornado of snare hit and bass rumble, it's best to hold on to something, anything, and try to enjoy the ride.

Luckily, Gnostic makes the holding on a bit easier by providing melody with their madness. The first time it was still hidden by flying debris made up of violent strings and vibrating cymbals. The second time, the melody slowly started seeping through the mechanic snare fills and bleeding Death-like guitar solos from the speakers. Then on the third listen it was as if the tornado was pierced, dissolving it entirely. The madness quieted down; tracks started making sense. Finally.

The ten songs that make up Engineering the Rule are very quick but not entirely to the point. More so they make a big point out of ignoring the main point and running circles around it via endless guitar riffs, snare fills, bass flurries and snarly shouts. There's a common element between all the songs in that there's melody, but it's entirely refracted and only delivered in a fractured manner.

A bit of a chore then, but an altogether satisfying one. There are obvious comparisons to be made, with Atheist on the foreground and Death standing very close behind but Gnostic seems an entirely new beast. Where Atheist is more refined and Death is more stylish, Gnostic is the more aggressive of the three. It’s borderline spastic at times.

We were a bit put off by the sampled sounding snare (and to a certain extent, the toms) of drummer Steve Flynn, but on the third listen it became a more comfortable fit between the other instruments. With the buzz of the guitars, the snare sound becomes flatter, less mechanical and altogether more enjoyable. There are a few moments where it's still a bother (the opening of album opener "Visceral," for example) but so be it. There's also some wild things going on with the guitars; in "Wall of Lies" there is a point where the guitar comes sweeping in, twice, almost painfully so. It's jarring to the overall flow of the music, and we don't care for it. Same goes for the clean vocals.

Ignoring, or maybe accepting the warts on Gnostic, it becomes a very rewarding experience. We're not entirely convinced it will stand the test of time, but right now it's very worth of your money. Engineering the Rule probably has the highest riff vs. dollar ratio of any record coming out this year so it should be an easy buy indeed. (8/10)

From Arcane Fires is the third album from Germany’s mystical metal trio Anael. There are stylistic similarities with bands like Shining, Deinonychus and Bethlethem.

While the music of Anael could be typified as black metal by some (initially, the album indeed sounds a bit like a slow version of Deathspell Omega on the opener "Devil’s Tongues") it may rather be at home within the category of doom metal, because instead of an emphasis on blastbeats, anger and shrill screams, the rhythms are generally more slow- to mid-tempo, and the music is melancholic, with vocals in a sometimes fragile, longing manner like Hammerheart era Bathory. At other times the vocals are delivered in a more sinister and ritualistic spoken word manner, like on "Down Winding Stairs" or the apocalyptic album closer "Muspilli."

This album contains seven songs and lasts for just over an hour. Three songs go past the epic ten-minute mark. While its predecessor, On Wings of Mercury, was a journey deep into the realm of the occult, From Arcane Fires is a little more direct, more rooted in history and personal experience.

This is an album with an interesting blend of roaring waves of guitars and richly varying tribal drums in a doom ambience. Themes concerning feelings of regret with regard to the gradual disappearance of commonly shared identity and history, and how people generally just don’t seem to care about it anymore abound.

Due to the lengthy character of the songs, it is important that enough variation be offered, and although the sound of Anael is pretty constant, the compositions nevertheless answer to this criterion. Those who manage to get used to the slightly over-saturated guitar sound will find an album with plenty of replay value, because the song structures never get too predictable.

At the album’s midpoint, the song "Blood and Honey" is particularly interesting for its intro part — an intriguing catacomb melody — which could have served as a track in its own right.

Anael have done very well with this album. Perhaps a bit samey for some, but those who pick up the vibe may grow increasingly affectionate towards From Arcane Fires. Be witness to this entrancing tribal ritual. Warm thyself to the arcane fires and sense the magic within. (7/10)

The curse of the concept metal record returns to haunt us all.

There have been albums more thematically complicated, but it’s arguable that an album all about life as seen from the perspective of one’s dog is about as retarded as it gets. Of course, anything can work, but not on this particular record.

Through My Dog’s Eyes is a relentlessly boring album overall. The music is technical, but slow, incoherent, and pointless. The instrumental layering is as bland as can be, and what the instruments are doing is of little interest. Ever touted drummer Marco Minneman’s name is of more note than the drums here, which don’t particularly sound that good (mostly the toms, which disappear).

The single poorest element of this album is the singing. Maybe it’s because of prior knowledge that all the lyrics are about thoughts a dog might have, but one can’t help but wonder that the goofy voices the singer puts on are attempts at sounding like Scooby Doo doing his best extreme metal voice. Whatever the hell is going on here, the vocals contribute little (if anything) musical, and are once again an example of something dull pushed to the sonic forefront that does not belong there.

It’s hard to believe a lot of things about Ephel Duath and this record: that they thought vocals like this could carry a record, that they thought music like this would be any kind of compelling, and that this is the same band that recorded A Painter’s Palette. (2.5/10)

PS: As if things couldn’t get any worse (we figured things were bad enough so we had some mercy by not discussing the album art), the album comes with a "bonus" DVD, featuring three piddly items: an interview, that, granted is more visually interesting than just some dude sitting in a chair blabbing — as it’s some dude walking around, like, a crazed modern painter’s loft while blabbing — is rendered a chore because of the dude’s (guitarist Davide Tiso’s) labored English. Come on, have him speak Italian and subtitle it!

The second item (the third is an uninteresting moving photo / discography collage) features one of the songs from the album set to a montage of still drawings to the song’s concept. However, the song is suddenly stopped, either because they didn’t make the video show long enough, or because even the DVD knows this album sucks.

"A Journey with no destination; a reflection of the psyche." This is how the men of Cold Northern Vengeance describe their album Domination and Servitude. It’s their first real full-length since their forming in 2002, a sonic manifestation of the Left Hand Path. Kiddies beware. In the studio everything is done by the two of them, Heathen and Gemini. Cold Northern Vengeance play black metal with Pagan folkish elements, often in mid-tempo and reminiscent of stuff like Enslaved.

They are inspired by the philosophical works of Nietzsche and even more by the works of Aleister Crowley, the infamous British occultist from the early 20th century. He caused a bit of a stir in his day for proclaiming himself "The Beast 666," inventing a new religion called Thelema and doing lots of sex and drugs, long before rock and roll was invented.

The song entitled "Heathen, Heretic, Scapegoat" allegedly contains excerpts from Crowley’s "Hymn to Pan," although this isn’t evident from anywhere in the lyrics. However, it does contain the chorus: "This is the story / of the ol’ boy Crowley / and all the poisoners will rob you of your soul / all hail the disbeliever / this is heathen rock and roll."

The obligatory intro track (with an uninteresting incantation spell from some "creeps with hooded robes" movie) is advised to be quickly skipped in order to get to "A Dangerous Wayfaring," where their own atmosphere really begins.

Musically, there is some good stuff. Mystical riffs with from-the-gut growls and a nod-worthy, toe-tapping rhythm section. The drumming is not always spot on the beat, and a bit murky and tame in the mix, but despite all this, not boring or predictable.

Track four, "The By-Paths to Chaos," is a mix of a sound collage (featuring film samples and samples of a loading gun) and a strange, semi-ritualistic march featuring sinister keyboards. It’s somewhat interesting in its cinematographic mood, but the extremely sharp high-pitched tones at the end of the tune are annoying as hell.

The longest track on the album is the 10+ minute epic "A Past Forgotten." Sparse on lyrics, but rich with melodic guitar solos.

Some poetic moments are to be found on the acoustic guitar-driven tunes "The Shores of New England." It has such a woeful mood one could imagine any moment Quorthon to turning up for a vocal guest spot. It was entirely done by Heathen alone.

"The Black Silence" is another instrumental, this time created entirely by Gemini, on which he pulls it off on the piano in the first half in a black metal jazz manner with some "raven screeches" by a guest vocalist. The second half is more classical-music orientated.

The album ends with "Communion," which is actually a slightly different version of "A Dangerous Wayfaring," but simply not as good. Towards the end, another film soundcut is included with someone’s reflection on society. What is slightly disappointing about this is that it leaves the listener with the impression that Cold Northern Vengeance may like to be known as mystics, but even more as profound intellectuals. Had they opted to end the album at an acceptable 50 minutes at the close of "The Black Silence," they could have left an impression of a musically versatile entity. Instead, they have chosen to come across as clever, which is a shame, considering that their lyrics are just not on the same par as their music.

Having said that, Domination and Servitude is an album worth checking out. It has a genuine, dark atmosphere, it rocks and offers plenty of variation (perhaps a bit too much sometimes, but anyway). (6/10)

PS: It may also be amusing to know that on stage they also have been assisted by former Maelstrom staffer Megan Leo.

Kerbenok is a nice example of an interesting new band that uses its own language (German) and mixes elements from metal styles like thrash, death, doom and folkmetal, yet retaining their work as something that is still essentially black metal.

Kerbenok consists of a core of two people who started working together in 2000, but over the years they invited several guest musicians. On this album, minimalistically dubbed O, these guest musicians have added their contributions on unusual, and sometimes exotic sounding instruments, like the tabla, kalimba and conga.

Furthermore, there are contributions on cello, horn, piano, and even on the vibraphone. The latter serves as a very surprising element within the blastbeat rage at the beginning of the album. Such an unorthodox approach can’t mean anything but something ambitious that warrants attention.

Last year, in a similar vein, the Norwegian band Ansur released their Warring Factions album. In an attempt to break away from certain musical restrictions, they challenged casual listeners by introducing jazzy saxophones and a Hammond organ. The result was a mind-provoking, progressive black metal album with a ‘70s feel.

Kerbenok are also clearly trying to expand their musical abilities into a progressive approach, but, instead of using this in order to create an alienating effect, their unusual instrumentarium gels miraculously with the solid, basic line-up of decent riffing and versatile drums.

The most intriguing examples are, unsurprisingly, the longer songs with epic lengths ranging from well over eight to nearly 13 minutes. As is so often the case, songs of such length tend to become easily repetitious, but thanks to carefully dosed variation between louder and gentler sections and imaginative compositions, things never really get dull.

The vocals are overall delivered in a deep and raspy manner that is reminiscent of old Mayhem, but occasionally there are also solemn cleans and some, let’s say, "heroic choirs." They don’t really break the black metal mood, although some listeners frown about a few songs with sensitive and wordless female vocals, as well as the use of a dulcet transverse flute. By this it should be obvious that Kerbenok have not intended to make a brutal or spine-chilling and infernal album, but one of a more reflective mood.

The album reflects, as the original artwork with the tree-eye already suggests, the fate of nature and the role of men, or, as they describe it poetically, "mankind (its confusedness), naturalness, life’s diversity and the great self. There is none which isn’t invloved in the circle of nature, the immortal soul and the magic of percepting and creating countless realities into the one and everlastying — surrounding and flowing through us." From this, one may derive that the minimalistic title that is O is not meant as a letter, but as a symbol and metaphor for Kerbenok’‘s philosophy.

Don’t be too hasty assuming that Kerbenok are losing themselves in content that is only comprehensible for those able to understand German. O is an album that is breathes a Pagan spirit that is no less appealing than stuff like Kampfar or Finntroll.

O has plenty to offer during its long running time, and without a doubt one of the finest melodic Pagan black metal releases from Germany from the past few months. Check their myspace and judge for yourselves. (8/10)

review by: Pal Meentzen

Master Slash Slave brings nerdy and rocky electronic tunes from San Fransisco. Most of the sounds are done by Matt Jones on vocals, MIDI sequencing and guitar. Current drummer Matthew Morgan is their fifth drummer in three years time.

Scandal is a mix of upbeat synth-pop and ‘60s garage histrionics, all wrapped around dark musings about drug dealers, prostitutes, divorce, social-network addiction, and all sorts of other perverse obsessions.

It’s an album rife with the best of dated sounds, including electronic handclaps. Naturally, there can be some reason to admire someone like Matt Jones for his profound love of vintage monophonic synths from a quarter century ago. And not only a love for that, but also for the unnerving sounds that would come out of those 1980’s arcade cabinets, which were like huge pieces of furniture.

Listen to hyperactive tunes like "Cold Calls" or "Na Zdrowie," both seemingly designed to have a fight to, be it in a bar or at home with the wife. The only absent sound is that of breaking glass.

The nostalgia aspect of these retro-style ditties will probably slip past a generation that hasn’t spent post-homework hours behind a Commodore 64, playing games like Rat Race Rally (with a tune that could do a great job as part of a torture method for the CIA).

However charming the whole concept behind the music may be, it is tempting to regard it as something of a gimmick, a showcase of what sounds one can churn out of a 1983 Oberheim OB-8, a Roland Juno 106, or an MC 300. For one listen, maybe two, some people will find these tunes with a focus on this vintage equipment somewhat fascinating, but there’s a chance in all likeliness that an even greater number of listeners will miss the point. It is apparent from the humorous artwork and the downright ghastly disc onprint that one shouldn’t be too draconian in the judgement of this release. It’s either that, or Master Slash Slave are maybe too eccentric for their own good.

One may also wonder how things would have worked in a regular band line-up without this electro-museum, because in terms of compositions the songs are really not devoid of catchiness. And whether it was intentional or not, the fact that the vocal style is often suspiciously reminiscent of Robert Smith (from the Cure) makes things even more difficult to rate. A calculated move?

A notable style exception is the acoustic ballad "Natasya," where it’s just a singer / song writer and his guitar. No frills, no fancy stuff.

Perhaps Jones already captures the essence by the title of the final song:

"Wouldn’t Hafta." If he’d cut down a bit on laboratorial retro-excercises and would try something in a style of — let’s say — Ben Folds, it might benefit his compositions more, because, like in the homes of many, the electronics sometimes just get in the way. (5/10)

No other label but Norma Evangelium Diaboli would suit the orthodox black metal that is plied by Swedish Ofermod. Strange is it however that since the beginnings of Ofermod (Swedish for "over-confidence") go back as far as 1996, it has taken 12 years to see their official debut full-length album (after having released — in respective order — one single, one demo and one EP).

The lyrics on Tiamtu are full of mysterious names and terms, insider speak of their sacred cult of Death and Chaos magick. Without a doubt, the Kabbalah school of thought is of major importance to Ofermod’s philosophy.

There’s plenty to wade through in an interesting 32-page booklet, a true labour of love in greyscale. In fact, all the music was played by the same guy that put the art together, and certainly not in the lousiest of ways.Very, very impressive indeed. The album was recorded at Endarker Studio and mixed / mastered by Marduk’s bassist Devo Andersson (not to be confused with the avant-garde new wave band from the ‘70s/’80s).

The album contains eight songs, of which none are too long (the longest remaining below the 8 minutes mark). The fact is that the booklet tells more about Ofermod than their music does, because as well-produced as it sounds, and as well-played the songs are, they are basically not much different from material like Deathspell’s Si Monumentum Requires, Circumspice. Even the low, raspy and gurgling vocals from L. Nebiros are delivered in a Mikko Aspa manner.

Because of the similarities, one can say this is a "true to style" album, and Ofermod bring it with such a conviction, dedication and precision that this album is too good to be rejected for such a reason.

The compositions are very complex and technical, and the mood evokes an atmosphere that goes, let’s say, "beyound songs as such," and into an atmosphere that is ritualistic and occassionally trance-like. A good example of this is the sinister piece called "Furnace of Moloch," with tribal drums and percussion, shamanic chanting and infernal screaming and fire in the background. One would almost feel like being a witness to sinister acts from a book like Foucault’s Pendulum. Another outstanding track is the final one with the catchy title "Maasseh Nethusthan," because of the interesting medievalesque intro on acoustic guitar.

It’s a slightly ambivalent task to rate Ofermod as a band, because they hardly deserve an award for productivity, let alone for having a sound that is obviously "tried and true." On the other hand, there are definitely good things to say about Tiamtu. If you are familiar with the bands on Norma Evangelium Diaboli and happen to like them, then do not hesitate and buy immediately, it will fit snugly on the shelf with similar acts. It’s dark, hermetically intelligent black metal and an impressive example of what one single musician can be capable of (with some assistance of a guest vocalist and a proficient engineer). Hats off to that. (7/10)

Pro-Pain always seem to reflect the times they live in, while maintaining their trademark angry, bulldozer, groove metal sound. Whatever government administration is around, it shall to some extent always be addressed at on the next Pro-Pain album, whose previous album, Age of Tyranny, left little to be guessed at ("Impeach, Indict, Imprison"). Age of Tyranny is an excellent, angry album, and it was a perfect album to promote on their 15th anniversary tour.

Whereas that title spoke for itself, the current title, No End in Sight, is more open to interpretation. Will this be the band’s swansong? Or does it maybe express an expectation that President Barack Obama will make an end to the failed crusade in the land of two rivers and make haste shutting down Guantanamo Bay? Knowing the vitriolic nature of Gary Meskill’s lyrics, it’s more likely that it’s about (mass)deception and disillusion.

The lyrics offer hints to religion, religious terror, and people who abuse religion to impose their will and power upon others. It goes as far as even containing direct quotes from the Old Testament. Further, there is a song that speaks of "the end" and two other mention "the day" (yes, all between brackets. One sure thing: As grim as Age of Tyranny was, No End in Sight is moderately toned.

Indeed, like on every Pro-Pain album, there are some songs ranking among old classics. The opener "Let the Blood Run Through the Streets" is super short, but crafted according to old-school Pro-Pain standards (think "Foul Taste of Freedom"). Alas, what follows is hardly above average Pro-Pain standards, if not below them.

There are several songs with the Meskil’s trademark screaming, but there are also choirs with more uplifting choruses. Take the chorus from the song "Hour of the Time": "We got a lot of hate, but a lot of hate to give. So give!" is brought like a cheerful anthemic punchline. Cheerful? What’s going on?

The lead vocals by guest vocalist Stephan Weidner are delivered too cleanly, too nicely, and the chorus has a happy-go-lucky singalong factor that one would rather expect from a band like Green Day. If Pro-Pain sounds happy, there’s something not quite in order.

The following songs "To Never Return" and "Where We Stand" also have shared vocals, but just in the chorus. They’re both songs with strange lyrics, almost religious in nature. "God knows we tried to see the light and all the world just as one nation," and "all I know is where we stand, believe yourself, embrace your faith come the end." "Where We Stand" even has a remixed version included as a last bonus song. Why is unclear, as it’s by far not the best song from the album (think of Pro-Pain’s take on a waltz).

At the end of the day, No End in Sight is a disappointing album. True is that the album mix is more balanced than before. Age of Tyranny was pretty intense because of the hi-freq range of the drums, causing a slightly washed out sound that was to some maybe more wearing to the ear. On No End in Sight, all instruments and the vocals are much more separated and distinguishable. It makes the sound much cleaner, but as a result also near-clinical... near-boring, even.

Also disappointing is the decrease in precence of truly menacing grooves in favour of singalong choruses (even though "All Rise!" is a positive exception). Come to mind those questions from the song "The New Reality" from Age of Tyranny: "Where is the anger? Where is the rage?". The answer might be found at the end of No End in Sight, on "Where We Stand": a quiet whisper: "Wait…".

Why wait? Because this album lacks both. Perhaps the next album will have more anger and rage. Let’s wait, then. (5/10)

That the Russian spirit is one of existential depression and melancholy may be known to a large number of people. Considering, it may not be very surprising that the genre of doom metal catches on well to the Slavic audience. What is surprising however, is that so little is known about Russian doom metal.

This release, a slightly older one — from 2007 — is an interesting one-man project from Philipp Skobelin. He does practically everything on Silent Veil of My Doom: vocals, guitars, bass, drum programming and samples. An exception is found in the presence of female vocals on the pretty and chilling piano duet song "Without You."

One of the biggest question for doom metal albums could be: How boring is it? Because doom metal albums often tend to be mind-numbingly repetitious in their pedestrian pace. It’s not too bad in this case, although this release also has moments of lazy and obvious riffs in order to paint a gloomy picture.

Another question is: did the composer successfully manage to come up with some musically and emotionally touching moments? Because otherwise, it wouldn’t be worth much more than hearing someone play "For he’s a jolly good fellow" in a minor key and make it sound like some pseudo-Rachmaninoff composition. Four of the nine songs are fairly long, clocking in somewhere between 9 and 11 minutes.

Thankfully, there’s obviously a talented person at work here. Skobelin attempts to write and sing his songs in English, and although it’s not always put in 100% perfect grammar, it’s clear what the songs are about: love gone lost, suicidal feelings, romanticizing death at a young age, and lots of self-regret. It’s far easier to follow than the majority of hip-hop lingo fodder.

"Phil" delivers his lyrics in grunts, in sinister lowly spoken-word style and in melodramatic cleans. While he does a fairly good job with the grunts, he sometimes really overdoes it with the cleans. On a song like "On Ruins of Our Love," he puts just that little too much pathos in certain lines ("why you have left from me, in these dreams? You were here and have turned back a shadow"). It might possibly have a toe-curling effect on some listeners. This problem also occurs on other songs. It’s a pity, because his clean voice is in essence very good, and the lines would certainly not lose their dramatic charge were they brought in a more stoic manner (also a typical characteristic for the Russian spirit).

Production wise, there is nothing to really complain about. The drum programming sounds pretty realistic and the snare-drum sound has a nice and crisp punch. On a long song like "Under an Ancient Oak," one may even forget about the whole programmed aspect at some point.

The only thing that might give it away is the uniformly flat sound of the hi-hat and and cymbals, because they always have the same artificial "decay time." This, however, is not something exclusive for this release, it happens all the time.

Odd that here’s yet another Russian album which includes a tune that is inspired by the video game series "Silent Hill." This was also the case with one of this writer’s favourite releases from last year, Rainchants from Skogyr, who also used a composition from Japanese video game composer Akira Yamaoka. Apparently there are far more sources of inspiration than the books of H.P. Lovecraft and Edgar Allen Poe. Video games!

Another source of inspiration that is very evident is the music of Yearning, the great Finnish doom metal band. Were someone to speak badly of Tears of Mankind, they might say that this album is merely following the style of Yearning, because there are really many similarities.

Silent Veil of My Doom shows potential, but especially with regard to the potential of the musician Philipp Skobelin. However, this album in question is good without being spectacular. It’s clear from which station it departs, but now it still needs to define where to go to. Might it be a circular line? This year might be a good time to find out. (6.5/10)

"MAY YOU ALL DIE OF AIDS!!!"

Now that’s a nice slogan for a piece of merchandise (and an excellent start of a review to boot). Apparently, the band Wino once sold shirts with that printed on the back in the day when they were doing concerts. What do you think would be more offensive? This, or Cradle of Filth’s shirt with the text "Jesus is a C*nt" on the back?

On the first listen, Wino sounds something like noisecore trio Shellac. Starting off in a punky manner on super short songs like "Dutch Oven," Wino venture quickly on to a place of strange time signatures, and dark edgy music for a contortionist’s performance in the circus of the dissonant. Overall there are plenty of parallels with screamo (also known as hardcore-emo), which was some kind of post-punk movement that emerged way further to the west in Colorado, with the likes of Heroin and Angel Hair.

Whatever it is, Wino is not the kind of music you’d take your girlfriend to on a Saturday night. It’s the kind of music that’s only digestible for male species. An example? Take a song like "Desperation": total jazz dementia. It begins with the dreamy sounds of a vibraphone, soon accompanied by a saxophone noodling random yet soulfully until a frenzy unfolds. Vocalist Aaron Hodge mutters like exhausted and in utter despair: "How many lies? How many lies?" It’s disturbing freestyle aggression.

Musically, Wino is like an abstract work of art. Chunky, yet fragmented. Cubist faces with hints of psychosis, arranged in a most disturbing order. One eye is where the chin is, the mouth is where an ear is. An aggressive and trebly sounding bass is hammering away mercilessly, while the drums do their syncopated precision bit.

On disc 2 of this 2CD album, the first 12 songs have vocals with a megaphone sound. Something that was considered very advanced by some, way back in the ‘90s, but today it mainly serves to vex the ears.

In short, this double CD is quite an ordeal to go through. It would have been more interesting if this were a retrospective of a collection of musicians who went on and musically developed to something bigger in the years to follow, into the new millennium. Aaron Hodge has moved on to more electronic territory with his Radium Screen project, but it is not much more accessible in all its avant-gardeness.

But as Wino were, they apparently were meaningful enough for other local bands. For this retrospective album, the help was called in for none other than mister Alan Douches, the renowned mastering engineer. He polished the sound up to the max. But whether the casual listener will find it a product with much more added appeal is fairly debatable. (5/10)

What all great ambient albums have in common is that they are still music — despite being more atmospheric noise than proper, progressive compositions, they still have an element of musicians playing instruments.

This aspect is the cornerstone of what makes Gog’s Mist From the Random More one of the best black ambient recordings ever. Not creepy, synthesized MIDI programmings or edited sound samples, but miked-up, organic instruments played in time with each other. It is precisely the quality of the recording, the clarity, the very way it feels organic to the point of drawing breath, that makes this album so compelling.

But calling Mist From the Random More "ambient" might be misleading. There are definite chord progressions and lumbering grooves throughout much of the album’s 3-track, 39-minute length, but you might not notice so much because of the wall-of-sound / electronic noise that accompanies the metered elements.

Then again, calling Mist From the Random More "black" might be misleading as well. At first, we pegged this project as ambient black metal, but too much of the compositional aspect of Gog says that’s a poor categorization.

What you will get on this 3-track, near-40-minute album is a spectrum of sounds from a dark, electric orchestra tuning up, to the grooving, psychedelic swaths of a trio of musicians playing in the same room, off each other and off the air that each’s instruments push in physical space from the interaction, all covered in a shimmering, om-like dissonance. An exquisitely powerful and uncommon album that is in its own right a triumph of sound. (8.9/10)

This Grand Show is a surprisingly great folk / thrash metal combo of epic proportions. Grayceon is fronted by Amber Asylum's electric cello player (who presides both over her vocals and the cello), as well as a couple of dudes (drums and guitar/vocals) from a rather unknown band by the name of Walken.

This wedding of classical versus metal approach has turned to be an interesting and ambitious project. This Grand Show combines the sad and highly contemplative tunes of Amber Asylum and a more metallic, rock-oriented vibe that drives and pushes the musical plot forward and lends it its dynamic and abrasive character.

This Grand Show is ear candy on many accounts. The somber cello coupled with the powerful female voice and the progressive, folk-oriented elements enveloped by thrashing guitar and interesting rhythms, make this album a varied, highly original and very much entertaining release.

Some of the tracks are a tad bizarre and unorthodox, devoid of the aforementioned elements, but more in the dark ambient school. Some parts are sad, neoclassical lullabies in the Amber Asylum tradition, while others more straightforward and more simply structured. A few incorporate all of the above. This Grand Show is exactly what the title suggests: it is a weird, original, highly diverse and wonderful album. Get this grand show. (9/10)

Maybe this reviewer is already too old for something like Nahvalr. Maybe these random sounds (now called "open source" bands: independent "musicians" from across the globe, contributing their own interpretation of a general theme, whole songs or only parts thereof, and ultimately these parts are assembled into one piece and there you have it, an album of sorts) are not what your humble servant would define as music, much less good music.

Maybe you too would ask of your music to be more than raw ambient / industrial "black metal" like the one portrayed on this album. Nahvalr bears no value or interest to those who seek something they have not yet heard as well as enthusiasts of meaningful music in general.

The coincidence by which the many musical "patches" clash together; the random sounds and arbitrary unstructured tracks (tracks indeed as they do not qualify as songs in the first place), remove the sting out of this recording, leaving it an empty and hollow container of nothingness. Add to this the horrific production (or lack thereof), the muffled gibberish and the droning single-chord strings and there you go: a myriad of amateurish "soundscapes" that are nothing more but blatant and literal noise, randomly assembled (as was the initial purpose, or so they claim), under-produced and unlistenable material that speaks one word again and again: failure. (1/10)

Face the Colossus is lacking in the qualities of challenging the listener. It's very straightforward and banal in that regard, and what you see is what you get. In that sense, it is both shallow and one-dimensional.

Dagoba are not a subtle band. They do not practice nuances in their music too much. They can't, because they need to mask the shallowness with greater-than-life melodies and a wall of sound, sort of a smoke screen to divert the average listener from their lack of musical substance.

This ultimately makes Face the Colossus a noisy album of groove-laden, semi-industrial-sounding work of little to no consequence in the emotional or mental department. Face the Colossus is like artificial candy. (2.5/10)

Resurrecturis’ Non Voglio Morire is quite an interesting album of arty metal that likes to take chances. Sadly, despite some quite good elements, the album overall is more interesting than it is good.

Non Voglio Morire’s first few songs burst out in slow, intense grinding fashion. The highlight of this chapter in the record (and perhaps of the whole record) is "Fuck Face" — which for all the world sounds like the vocals are commanding you to "fuck her face!" over and over, in a kind of aggro / sado way, like Resurrecturis was trying to be the next band in a Max Hardcore video soundtrack — which brings a killer edge with its dirty, memorable vocals.

When clean singing (both male and female, and done well) is introduced soon thereafter, something about the interplay between the seemingly disparate elements recalls Acid Bath. The musical style is different, but the application has something in common.

After the (above) second chapter, Non Voglio Morire starts going off in a much more relatively relaxed direction, embracing more of a groove / metalcore vibe, complete with quite stereotypical / loathsome application of clean singing. These tracks are hardly compelling, and diffuse much of the momentum and fun from the songs that precede them. There’s something about the energy of these tunes that makes one think of the Root album Kargeras (a sort of alternative rock-tinged blip on the career of the Czech Republic’s greatest dark / heavy metal band) in the way that it sounds like Resurrecturis is trying something to refresh themselves, but no one, particularly the band itself, will find that experiment to have long-lasting appeal.

It isn’t until the last track, the undistorted, ballad-y "In Retrospective," that it’s shown that the singer can actually sing well (basic, one-line lyrics in a three-note progression during the groove metal songs aren’t enough of an indication). This album arrangement and juxtaposition of song styles and deliveries again recalls Acid Bath’s When the Kite String Pops.

What’s most odd about Non Voglio Morire is that you might think it was a retrospective album about an unknown / cult band that made a bunch of recordings over years before calling it a career, and chronicles the progress of those recordings. That would explain how drastically the songs on Non Voglio Morire seem to change course in well-defined blocks. Even the sound production starts to sound different as well. But the liner notes say the contrary. Non Voglio Morire was conceived and recorded as a studio album, which is so weird that it is almost compelling in its own right. Again, there is some good / unusual stuff to be enjoyed here.

The art and aura around this album (which also comes with a DVD, which didn’t work in our USA player) is different and uncommon, but the band unfortunately waters down its vision by trying to cover too much ground, which stretches them too thinly, ultimately detracting from the overall appeal of their work. (6.5/10)

Geisha, or by its full name, Geisha Noise Research Group, play something which could only be tagged as atmospheric noise-rock. They do indeed incorporate many close stylistic attitudes such as sludge (rock), drone and ambient. However, their backbone is definitely noise rock first and foremost.

Unlike noise rock groups such as Melt Banana for instance, Geisha's music is more free-form and epic, almost without a firm structure, but mainly it is dark and brooding. Slower doom-jazz parts adorn the long tracks, often reminisce the unique style of Bohren and Der Club of Gore in their minimalism and somber soundscapes; other parts are pure bursts of insanity, violence and literal noise affiliated more with the grindcore etiquette.

More often than not, the music is purely instrumental, whereas the scarce moments where the human vocals are thrown in add only a twist of lunacy and hysteria to the mix, when high-pitched shrieks that serve as an additional instrument and add another dimension to the already unorthodox sounds.

The sixth and final track, "Theme from Diana," a 30-minute long piece, is the most eccentric of the lot. In a nut shell, it starts off as a metallic dark ambient song, full of sampled, distorted human speeches accompanied by surreal percussion and background effects. Halfway through the track, clean guitars and powerful drumming take over and generate a dense atmosphere of absurd and dark cinematic experience.

Die Verbrechen Der Liebe is an intense and vast musical experience for open minded people who like their music hard hitting yet emotional. Fans of bands such as Swans will highly appreciate this recording. (9/10)

From its very title, Cantata Sangui’s On Rituals and Correspondence in Constructed Realities heralds an album that will be big on pomp and small on meaning.

The music confirms this. The style is gothic / cyber / industrial metal with mostly female clean vocals, with some swamp-monster growls providing some backup. The drums sound plastic, and the singer has an ever-present minor flangy effect on her voice. Cantata Sangui likes to promote how they have no guitars (with two bass guitars instead). But you might not necessarily notice, as what comes out the most are the keyboards, the loud, fake sounding drums, and the effected vocals. The production feels cold, but not the good kind of cold, but the synthetic, sterile, lifeless kind; then again, people have liked bands such as Coil...

The real problem is the feeling of coldness is that Cantata Sangui’s songs are simplistic, but unlike a great pop song, it leaves you cold and wanting. The irony at work here is the presentation of the album fronts a hifalutin concept and image, but the songs are shallow and hollow. It’s listenable, but there is no food for any part of the soul to be found here. (4/10)

When Black Elk stray off from their familiar noise rock meets sludge path, they actually start being interesting. When their monochromatic (and at times even exasperating) heaviness gives way to more subtle colors and different sets of untraditional riffs and tunes, they manage to bring forth the ingenious musicians hidden within, during those times when truly engaging melodies, quirky and original, that manage to create a thick layer of harsh and bizarre ambiance.

They never put away their searing and vitriolic guitars though, as they are the very backbone of Black Elk's music. However, at times they manage to tame the distortion and enforce a more tranquil and dark twist to the plot, where these very guitars only co-star. Unfortunately, these anomalies are scarce and few.

Too often they go back to their frenzied and noisy, heavy metallic rock 'n roll. Never the less, Always a Six, Never a Nine is more diverse and creative than Black Elk's debut album, and it offers not just more of the same but also deeper excursions into inventiveness. (6.9/10)

When a band is made up of noted, celebrated progressive rock / metal musicians, who instead try to make an album of more catchy, simple tunes, played well below their technical abilities, you get tepid results like OSI’s Blood.

Nothing rises above average here. The songs sound like guys too proficient in the absolute opposite thing to be trying to make simpler music with basic appeal. They’re very much out of their element. Elements that point to this can be seen in how the songs go on much too long considering how their simplicity calls for shorter and sweeter; how too many of the tracks get mired in a misty, laid-back vibe that sounds bored; or how space made for communicated lyrical themes make one wish for something to offer some distraction.

The singing (which is always augmented via a slightly cavernous, digital effect) is decent-good, and is nothing better than a great back-up voice for a brighter, more juicy front person who is sadly not present here. The drums sound good, but are not remarkable or fun. The instrumentation is obviously done by masters, but it’s also restrained.

The track order shoots the album’s momentum in the foot, with the album starting off with the kind of track you’d normally find offering a respite between a string of intense numbers on other albums promoted as being in the prog world. Then a more energetic track is brought down again with another lethargic number.

Kevin Moore, Dream Theater’s once keyboardist, is one of the main names here. Drawing a connection to his work, imagine the kind of song "Space Dye Vest" is, but at about 1/3rd strength, and for an entire album, and you’re beginning to get how compelling this Blood record is. It’s unoffensive and listenable, but as the most heinous of all musical relegations: as background music. (5/10)

For all the bands that try to do too much on their albums (and fail from stretching themselves out too thin), Caina cannot do too much. Be it shoe gaze, doom, indie rock, goth, post rock, or black metal, Caina’s Temporary Antennae covers the territory, and does it in stupendous fashion not heard before.

Ugly or sublime, Caina always delivers something artistic, which is another word to aptly summarize Temporary Antennae, a profound, musical work of art. If you like Kayo Dot, but wish the vocals were better, get this album. Or, if you’re into genius, genre-spanning groups like Nucleus Torn, this is for you. (9.3/10)

An album cover featuring a highlighted, sexy redhead, with the rest of the members shrouded in darkness in the background? What is this? Pop music? Where most people believe the whole music is the product of the singer, and the rest of the music just kind of springs up out of the ground wherever she goes? Not a great way to introduce a band to the metal masses on a metal label.

Before we start calling Delain "delame," we’d better check out the music. Although the tunes do fit in well with the aesthetic presented on the cover art — the music is highly pop-oriented in its presentation — there is some enjoyable music within.

The singing is of the pretty girl variety, with the same kind of Dutch accent you can hear in The Gathering, and the songs are tailored to that. Although the linchpins of the songs are the choruses, the music isn’t superfluous, though, but April Rain is unquestionably about the vocals, which are well-done and talented. A couple songs have some use of male melodic duet, which adds a nice dimension. One song has a part with some male growling, which is, as ever, utterly terrible. Look — if you’re making a melodic album, and you try to present growls as you would singing, it will always sound like a joke because growling isn’t singing, and won’t be in its element in that capacity. We’re sure no one will take note.

Despite these (predominant) good points, April Rain does contain a fair amount of filler / redundant songs.

However, the biggest drag about the album is the mastering. Like so many albums in this decade, Delain tries to make its music stand out by making it louder. For those of you who don’t know, to do this, the sound waves must be limited, so the quiet parts are louder (reducing dynamics) and closer in relative volume to the loudest parts, which results in a greater perceived sense of power to the common listener... while all anyone really would have needed to do was turn the volume up on his or her stereo.

The bummer about this practice is that ear fatigue is greatly increased, which is very much the case with April Rain — you just want to keep turning it down. This very unpleasant factor, matched with how we keep getting the sinking suspicion that Delain is as much about image and sex appeal as it is about music and art, means that this album cannot be recommended. (5.3/10)

Hailing from France, Vialka tours the world (almost) without rest, spreading its music to both the unaware and the converted worldwide, on a daily basis. Therefore, it is only natural to find that the world has had its imprint on the band as well.

Succes Planetaire International, the band's new album, is virtually a trip to eclectic districts, or more precisely — presents the world as it is reflected through the eyes of Vialka. Different cultural shades are assimilated into the music, which feels more structured than on previous efforts while remaining true to the dazzling, post-rock nature, based on the duo's ecstatic baritone guitar and drums.

The opening "Premiers Pas" feels like a lunatic crusade, and might be considered as the modern answer to the '70s progressive rock epics. Clocking at just over six-and-a-half minutes, this is an impressively structured and performed suite. Opening with a merry introduction comprising joyous cries, tuba and flute, the melody is then repeated as a more menacing theme with turbo guitar and forceful drums. All ingredients blend just before Marylise Frecheville sings lyrically, and then it all turns into malevolent chants to which Frecheville vocalizes spastically (one of the most afflicted and impressive vocal performances you are likely to hear!).

Later, an Arabian flavor is bravely incorporated, suggesting that Vialka is indeed fit to conquer the world. The sonic textures are definitely at peak here, and the tuba and flute, as well as some crystal percussion, add lots of color to the general rumble.

The album continues to strike the listener with surprises throughout, as even though the pieces flow fluently and with reinforced subtlety it is impossible to predict what Vialka has in store for the next second. The derangement of Vialka is also maintained through the "atomic restructuring" of Bob Drake and slightly psychotic "sonic gesticulations" by Crank Sturgeon that appear irregularly and out of the blue, so that even on a capable yet straightforward reading of the comic "Hole in the Bucket" (originally of German origin, so we're told) the listener is constantly reminded of the nonlinear context that perpetually drives the entire, thoroughly gratifying output. (9.5/10)

On the surface, The Reckoning seems to be another casual metal album, the kind that goes in one ear and out the other. Sure, it has David Ellefson, but come on — he was not even the real star in Megadeth (and does anyone count the bass player in thrash bands?).

Surprise, surprise, this album is a masterful album of modern metal, part hardcore, part thrash. The music is pushed by strong rhythms (Ellefson is joined by another Megadeth refugee, drummer Jimmy DeGrasso), and benefits from the sharp, melodic twin guitar lineup. Just check out the exquisite, versatile guitar playing on "Wake Up," carrying the song on the one hand and contrasting the song's grinding rhythms with speedy and melodic decorations on the other.

Slight symphonic touches in the image of keyboard strokes (on "No Excuse" for example) and some of the guitar lines and solos (the multi-section "Final Hour") are also present and add further shade to the music.

In the end, the songwriting makes the difference and puts this album way above the ocean of similar releases – forceful songs that are delivered with a punch (vocalist Dale Steele might not be the most impressive singer around, but his performance is highly credible and functional), as well as with memorable yet aggressive hooks. (8/10)

Lung's self-titled EP is a tad longer than half an hour, three-song (the first of which is instrumental) venture into atmospheric post-hardcore minimalism. It is very much melodic in character and scarcely ever violent.

Long, laid-back interludes of strumming half-distorted guitars and simple drum beats lend the music its Southern, whisky-fumed, sun-drenched disposition. The songs tend to unfold, roll towards a climax of sorts, in the sense they lean toward increasing in power and intensity, and halfway through the long track, one will encounter a full-blown metallic hardcore-ish storm that lasts a couple of minutes and then, yet again, back into the infinite lazy tranquility.

The bottom line: we have all heard this music before, and quite often. However, this sort of music has a strange affinity to it that makes even the most cynic out there appreciative of its many qualities. God only knows there are many of this kind out there. (5.5/10)

Crucial Blast's description, filled with so many superlatives and fallacies about Noism, is the latest reminder one must stop reading info sheets and start making up their own mind whether a band/album is worth anything through careful listening.

Describing Noism as "'intensely complex and crushing death / grind," or "brain melting riffs and dissonant shred" is beyond ridiculous and unbelievably farfetched, to say the least.

Noism's "music" could be easily described as either a damaged compact disc of any given music, stuck in the player and being played ten times faster than it should be; or, alternately, a fucked-up computer game whose soundtrack is all beeps and noisy electronic squeaks of sorts.

The programmed drum-beats are a joke; the guitar playing is a bigger joke. This whole recording is the biggest waste of time this reviewer has EVER experienced. Total failure, hence... (0/10)

Jungle Death brings together groupings of recordings by black metal act Black Vomit onto one album. Although the styles and intents of the tracks vary wildly, which at first makes Jungle Death feel like a reckless, scattered failure, the album comes out on top as the various pieces in fact come together to make quite an interesting collage.

To basically understand what sound runs through every track, take the stereotypical sonic concept of a one-man bedroom project. The black metal tracks are insidiously murky, and their engulfing, necro, pounding incoherence drives their purpose as much as their coherence does. The more ambient sections, while murky, trade the death rattle for droning reverberations.

A single-minded album of any of these elements would prove boring. However, it’s precisely that Jungle Vomit is like the roadmap into a jagged, undiscovered land that makes it not only interesting, but more interesting with each listen. Well done! (7.5/10)

This release combines two previously released titles — The Rockfield Mixes Plus audio CD and Live At The Rainbow 1977 DVD.

The Rockfield Mixes Plus comprises the original mix for the Ian Gillan Band 1977 album Clear Air Turbulence. This mix, which Gillan abandoned and replaced with another, is more equally balanced compared to the more dynamic (remastered Eagle Records’ CD pressing of the) final mix.

The Ian Gillan Band (IGB) was a fusion-oriented rock outfit, and Clear Air Turbulence is considered to be the prime exhibit of the band's attempt to break out of its frontman's Deep Purple association.

One can clearly spot the influences of jazz-rock groups such as Return to Forever and Weather Report in some of the material here: some ethno-flavored percussion on "Goodhand Liza," a wickedly funky midsection on "Over the Hill," and a medieval touch on "Angel Manchenio," which benefits from some Spanish guitar playing and playful keyboards.

Occasionally, most notably on the rocking "Money Lender," the contribution of a horn section, as well as the increased volume it receives in this early mix, introduces a Blood, Sweat and Tears vibe.

But IGB was a capable band that built on the influences to create its own brand of jazzy, funky rock songs — songs that might be a bit peculiar (and with lots of quirky sonic decorations), yet it is this strange brew of fusion and hard rock that gives the album its charm and uniqueness; and anyone remotely interested in Gillan's music outside of Deep Purple should start with this album.

On to the DVD, whose focal point is another exciting testament of IGB — a 1977 live performance. Though lasting for merely half an hour, the footage is of high quality and captures the enthusiastic band faithfully from multiple viewpoints. Apart from two IGB numbers, the band also rephrases Deep Purple classics in a creative fashion: "Child in Time" is approached a bit gently, introduced by a flute solo, while "Woman From Tokyo" and "Smoke on the Water" are served funked up (with some fancy keys and thundering bass), the latter featuring a facetious, instrumental passage.

The DVD also includes a 1977 interview with Ian Gillan (audio only) and another, more recent filmed interview with guitarist Ray Fenwick, but more importantly six rare songs / alternate versions of IGB material from other albums, supplying a wider view of the band's recorded output.

All in all, a rewarding package. (8/10)

Bo Diddley was one of the originators of rock n' roll music, and since modesty was probably not a part of the man's character, he made sure nobody forgets it, penning "Bo Put the Rock in Rock 'N' Roll," which is included in this all-star session together with some of Diddley's highly recognized songs (three of them include the man's name in their titles, and others simply state how great he is). Even those who might not know the name Bo Diddley are likely to recognize his song "Who Do You Love," which has been embraced by many performers (it was a live staple for The Doors, for example).

This session, dated back to 1985, was originally released as a video and now sees an audio pressing for the first time (following Diddley's passing away last year). The sound, most probably transferred from a video tape, has its limitations, but even this doesn't cloud much over the busy performance, which is characterized by a stomping boogie.

The extensive lineup (all the regular rock instruments multiplied plus a horn section) which performs throughout the session includes such big names as John Mayall, Mick Fleetwood, Mitch Mitchell, Carl Wilson, Carmine Appice and Ron Wood. You might expect some mess due to ego conflicts, but the session is actually very stable, and surprisingly remains so even when another rock n' roll pioneer — Chuck Berry — guests on two of his own songs (the foolish "My Ding a Ling" and the classic "Rock N' Roll Music"). The result is a laid back listening experience that offers a sense of freedom and lots of pure fun. (7 /10)

Blood of Bacchus is a marvel of melodic heaviness. The female vocals are deservedly the centerpiece here, as the frontwoman is of a talent as high as any in the metal genre. But even when a choir of male vocals comes around now and again, the going is still superb.

The underlying music is there to propel the vocals, but it is worth taking in as well. Mostly, though, it’s how well the instruments envelop the vocals that makes the interplay a winner. The instruments never sound relegated to a forgotten, back-up role, allowing their intricacies and character to add to the record. It’s precisely how the tonalities of the guitars and bass curl up around the vocals in a full, heavy manner that gives Blood of Bacchus so much verve.

The mood on this album is slow and lugubrious in its constant loveliness. Blood of Bacchus plods on mostly in a calculated, precisely lumbering gait, giving the vocal melodies much room to reverberate.

The sound and mood of Ava Inferi is exquisite. Blood of Bacchus falls slightly short in terms of being one of the best albums of all time in that some of the songs’ length seems dragged on, and there’s a bit more room for emotional dynamics. However, if you love albums like Virgin Black’s Requiem Mezzo Forte, or the music of Madder Mortem, Hammers of Misfortune (think The Bastard), or The Third and the Mortal, you really need to pick this up. (8.5/10)

A new label, and a new breath of creativity for essential Ukranian folk / black metal project Drudkh. Microcosmos is the best album since Blood in Our Wells, and sees the band progressing in a direction featuring more fusion rhythmic elements. In terms of instrumental differences, indeed the drums are probably the biggest element of development, with an improved sound and deeper sense of texture. A minor development is not in the rough, low, hoarse barking vocal delivery, but rather in the increased sense of how those vocals sit within and blend with the music.

But Drudkh’s songs have regained a greater sense of meaning and dynamics here. The going’s always been good and recommendable, but for an album or two, it felt like Drudkh was treading water. While the days of droning, sleepy heaviness is clearly behind them, Drudkh continues to be a band with one of the most recommendable bodies of work in metal by continuing to release albums that evoke a metal take on the gradual rise and passing of autumn, but this time, done with newly discovered prog music elements. (8/10)

Hellveto is a one-man orchestral pagan metal act from Poland with strong black metal influences. Sole member L.O.N. manages to balance an ancient asceticism in his music with the finesse of many modern film scores and symphonic black metal. The result is Neoheresy, a thrilling trek through the old ways.

L.O.N. says the album is a focused attack against Christianity and newer religions. He channels the opposition through his hoarse, gravelly voice, which has the commanding presence to assemble similar acolytes. Opening track "Taran" includes a video of him traveling the woods and images of skulls and fire.

L.O.N.'s decision to sing entirely in Polish may turn off many listeners, but it is the truer and more authentic move in the end. His use of blastbeats should hold the attention of those looking for a little intensity, but he doesn't compromise the grand scope of his project by adding unchecked machismo.

One thing he needs to work on is not sounding repetitive. It often sounds like he's repeating himself in a loop, but it could be that his vocals are low in the mix and this writer doesn't understand him.

Producing this album must have been a challenge due to the oxymoronic nature of "orchestral Pagan" metal, in which one half of the term connotes modern production techniques and the other goes for less touching up in the studio, respectively.

Still, this all turned out surprisingly well. For one thing, L.O.N.'s guitar tone is really tight and heavy, which cuts through the mire of monotony the surrounding music can fall prey to. Secondly, he did well by not oversaturating the music with orchestral pomp; instead, it stabs in and out with dagger-like precision. Worth a listen. (7/10)

Death Valley Dreams is Meliah Rage's third album and was originally released in 1996, but was rereleased in 2008 by Locomotive Records. On it are eleven tracks of raw, outlaw hard rock with thrash. Singer Mike Munro sings in a gruff, belligerent tone that matches the guitar tone of axeslingers Anthony Nichols and Jim Koury. Their crunch and bluesy solos recall Metallica at their prime, and outro instrumental "The Last Detail" showcases their epic songwriting abilities. The initial marching drum roll is particularly entertaining.

Every song on Death Valley Dreams, with the exception of "The Last Detail," is under five minutes, which is undoubtedly a smart move. Why drag on one aural beatdown for too long when you've got other stuff to destroy? This is the material of which obstinance is made. It's the soundtrack to broken traffic laws, western duels, or any kind of bold self-assertion. Stop what you're doing and pop this is in your player now! (8.8/10)

At first, Hymn to the Immortal Wind may seem like another foray on a road well-traveled by Japanese instrumental post-rock trio Mono; more of the same for this group... albeit "more of the same" is at a level of emotive, compositional exquisiteness nothing short of elite. But assuming that this new album will feature much predictability in songs that go "languid, melancholic beginning, gradually build to frenzied, shoegazing strumming, then release" seems justified at first.

However, further inspection shows that Hymn to the Immortal Wind is in fact a progression for Mono. It still sounds like Mono; still retains the intrinsic qualities and style that has made this band the indie sensation that it is. However, the way the tracks progress and climax has been refined — Mono is employing different nuances and shades to their craft. It doesn’t feature the group’s most memorable music (look to You Are There for that), but Hymn to the Immortal Wind is Mono’s most artistically accomplished, complete work.

Much of the way the clean guitar is played with high-speed picking continues to remind one of the most emotive, nostalgia-inducing music from "The Godfather" movie, which can sometimes be a distraction from the pure emotive quality of Mono’s music, which as ever (since this band hit its definitive creative stride a few albums ago) likes to dwell in sweetly melancholic, romantically lonely and sensitive emotional territory. The music is epic, sweeping, but pretty much maintains the same emotional tone, which, despite sometimes getting modally repetitive — and could be accused of being heavy-handed and too much of the same thing all the time — is unique. And from the dynamite layers of piano, strings, guitar, bass, and drums, it sounds gorgeous. (8.9/10)

Houwitser stands proud among the best death metal bands (and hopefully stand a little taller once they get picked up for a new album) and certainly ranks in the top three of the best Dutch metal bands ever. They've released only quality albums throughout their history, but it's Embrace Damnation that is the best Houwitser album your money could buy.

Death... But Not Buried is a solid debut, but it only hints at the frantic onslaught of this, its successor. Rage Inside the Womb, which came after Embrace Damnation, is a more focused and more streamlined affair in every way, but strangely suffers because of it. It never reaches the same dizzying heights that Embrace Damnation does and sort of rumbles along at a steady, by-the-numbers pace. Damage Assessment is a return to form, especially when it comes to the relentless production, and it has almost as many memorable songs, but the record is ultimately weighed down by terrible machine gun samples that precede each track.

Embrace Damnation is where the band truly shines. It's a heavy, dizzy, mind-blowing listen and will forever feature in my personal top five death metal albums because of it. It has the gross serial killer / movie samples, in fact it has a lot of them, but they don't get in the way (except on "Unholy Orgasm" — which ironically is the best track on the album, but not because of the sample). It has their best guitar sound, which is dirty, but doesn't yet have the technical grit of later albums. And it has the frantic, snare-heavy drumming that most characterizes Houwitser's sound on each album, on Embrace Damnation backed by the most unholy bass sound creating a back bone that is unbreakable.

"Unholy Orgasm"... Probably the track that best displays Houwitser on the top of its game. There are better tracks on Embrace Damnation, like its title track, but none as indicative of the dual nature of the Houwitser sound. Ignoring the sample, it goes from groovy to steady to fast to blasting, back to groovy, steady, fast, blasting and so on. There are no fancy tricks, just angry guitar riffs, fast foot work and a seedy atmosphere that is not easily rivaled. And so it goes for the full record. It's intensly satisfying to listen to a record that can hold its veracity intact across the span of thirty minutes and infuse it with a groove that is sorely lacking on most other death metal albums of the same caliber.

The track "Catenated" asks "Do you want to go to hell?" and each tmie there is the image of an underworld filled with burly metalheads grooving along to Embrace Damnation. And each time the answer is, "Hell, yes!"

Most would argue that the identity of Nile (the band) consists entirely of their Egyptian themes / lyrics / interludes / et cetera. And while that is true to a certain extent — if you'd take away all of it, there'd be no more Nile. But there's another characteristic that is vital to Nile, and which the band has been steadily doing away with: their dirty, sarcophagus-like sound. Without that sound, Nile is no longer Nile.

It’s been easy to imagine the band blasting away deep inside the tombs of Tutankhamun, but not so after their third album, In Their Darkened Shrines. Instead, the music has slowly become more sterile, as if suddenly untouched by sand storms, dirty locusts, or any of the really cool mental imagery you want from a Nile album. It has become a race to studio perfection that is devoid of any real atmosphere.

Luckily, Nile got it right the first time, and the second time. And even the third time. Their debut Relapse full-length, Amongst the Catacombs of Nephren-Ka, though, still stands as their best effort to date.

It's the album that has everything going for it. It has the best collection of Nile songs, with "Smashing the Antiu," "Barra Edinazzu," and "Stones of Sorrow," as a sacred trinity against which I still test any other Nile song I hear. They got close on In Their Darkened Shrines with "The Blessed Dead," "Sarcophagus," and "Unas, Slayer of Gods," but it's nothing compared to the veracity with which the music is hurled from the speakers on Catacombs.

The imagery it conveys is this: "All people who enter this tomb will be chased by crocodiles in water, and snakes on land. By the Hippo in water, and the scorpion on land."

Admittedly, I can't tell my Tomb curses apart, but the gist of it is there. Play this record, and you'll get the angry beasts of Egypt against you. The snake pierces in a flurry on "Smashing the Antiu" and "Barra Edinazzu." The Hippo slowly rumbles to trample on "Ramses Bringer of War" and "Stones of Sorrow." The scorpion snaps and stings with deadly precision on "The Howling of the Jinn" and "Pestilence and Iniquity." And finally the crocodile waits, then waits some more and finally snaps its jaws shut around its prey on "Opening of the Mouth" and "Beneath Eternal Oceans of Sand."

This is what Nile is all about. This is the imagery it should convey. Not the image of four dudes slaving away in a studio trying to get every bass hit and every string strum at precisely the right place.