Sporting ex-Darkane vocalist Lawrence Mackrory (from the excellent Rusted Angel album) on bass and backing vocals, I had high expectations from Enemy Is Us and their second full length Venomized, despite the not so great band name. What I got was a heaping dose of unmemorable mediocrity.
Venomized is a lesson in Swedish repetitiveness. Don’t get [...]

Much like the recent release of label mates A Thousand Times Repent, Georgia’s Hereafter An Odyssey deliver an EP (which was originally self released by the band) plying a style that’s been done to death (core), but do it well enough to warrant your attention if you are a fan of the genre, or new [...]

With most recent deathcore simply obsessed with showing me how heavy and broodle they are (Annotations of An Autopsy, Emmure, Embrace The End, I Declare War, etc) a few bands such as Born of Osiris, Veil of Maya, Fate and Atlanta’s A Thousand Times Repent are trying to engage in a little more than a [...]

North Carolina’s Jonin are an interesting prospect. They play a sort of haughty and complex Progressive Metal or AOR but with American Metal or metalcore undertones and they have a superb vocalist that sounds like a mix of Maynard from Tool and Tuomas Tuominen from Fall of the Leafe.
On paper, it’s a very intriguing prospect [...]

Over the years, I’ve probably written about The Feds coming to town a dozen times or more in my regular gig at the local paper, so it seems a little odd that the first time I’m actually hearing them is for a review here.
First, I’ll say that there are some good things to be found [...]

And so the template laid down by Between the Buried and Me gets aped again; chaotic metalcore/tech metal, ambitious, proggy injections, quirky off kilter song structures, soaring arpeggios, etc.. Then throw in some Horse the Band 8 bit styled video game programming and you have Maine’s Last Chance to Reason and their forgetful debut.
Though bands [...]