There is absolutely nothing wrong with The Diseased and the Poisoned, sophomore effort from Carnifex (derived from the olde English word for ‘Executioner’). In fact, its arguably one of the better deathcore releases of the year-up there with Whitechapel’s This Is Exile-and therein lies the problem. The Diseased and the Poisoned and This Is Exile [...]

After boldy claiming their Victory Records debut Goodbye to the Gallows was the ‘most brutal CD of 2007′, Emmure return with their more humble, yet equally devastating follow up.
And while admittedly, most metal heads will turn up their nose at this group of cocked hat, short haired kids and their hoodies, but truth be told [...]

Well, based on this, (sorry labels, I don’t do digitally released reviews) enjoy possibly the last review of a Victory release on this site. Luckily, it’s is a damn fine surprise.
With a new line-up, gone are the gimmicks like songs named after Tom Cruise movies, fairy tales, suits and sense of humor. Instead, fronted by [...]

Today we were contacted by Victory Records notifying us we would no longer receive physical CDs for promotional purposes — reviews or interviews. Now, unless I’m mistaken Victory Records is the first independent label to make the switch from physical to digital promo. As harmless as it seems, this is a landmark event.
Labels, mostly the [...]

After a couple of releases on Indianola Records, Tennessee’s Across Five Aprils made the expected jump to Victory Records, where their metalcore/hardcore meets post-rock meets emo hues, fit perfectly into the Victory-core style of music so popular with the kids today. You’ve heard this formula thousand times before, and while not quite as sugary as [...]

Much like The Devil Wears Prada, Farewell To Freeway suffers greatly from the whole decent metalcore ruined by utterly sniveling, wimpy clean vocals syndrome…
Musically, the band has a decent mix of catchy, commercial heavy/clean Killswitch Engage styled metalcore mixed with a dash of Misery Signal-ish layering and harmony. There are some decent riffs and some [...]

“There is no one righteous, not even one; no one seeks God. Their throats are open graves; their tongues practice deceit. Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness. Their feet are swift to shed blood; ruin and misery mark their ways, and the way of peace they do not know. There is no fear [...]

For three albums now, Chicago’s Dead to Fall have to struggling to find their sound, both style and production wise. After seeing and interviewing the band twice now, it became readily apparent that the band, and mainly vocalist Jon Hunt, were never really comfortable with the whole serious deathcore/metalcore image and themes that they plied [...]

While hardly a ground breaking release of thrashy, energetic ATG drenched metalcore, the debut from Arise and Ruin is a solid entry into the saturated genre and certainly is a lot better than some of Victory’s other recent/upcoming releases (Taking Back Sunday, Farewell to Freeway, Moros Eros, The Audition, etc).
Canada’s Arise and Ruin are not [...]

After a promising debut of caustic tech grind metal, Tennessee’s Nights Like These, much like similar sounding act Harlots, Khann and Yakuza, have injected a sense of droning, sludgy experimentation into their lumbering dissonance and while a decent effort, it’s not quite as good as the recent Harlots release.
What you get is an album that [...]

So here is the third and worst recent ‘metal’ release from Victory. A few years back I reviewed the promising Stillborn Records debut from this then metalcore act, but then with Embrace the Gutter, it was obvious the band wanted to be lumped in with All That Remains, Diecast, God Forbid and Lamb of God [...]

Alaska was my 2005 album of the year, so suffice to say, the follow up, Colors had some pretty high expectations; expectations that are comfortably reached, but not quite shattered, as Colors is exactly what you’d expect from BTBAM; brilliance.
One only need look at the band’s prior cover only album The Anatomy of… to get [...]

In what seems to be a blink of an eye, The Warriors have already returned with their third album, not much more than a year after Beyond the Noise. Once again a new record equates to a development in sound and style and whilst Genuine Sense Of Outrage, is a much more aggressive record then [...]

If I told you that Darkest Hour’s Deliver Us would be the second best thrash/metalcore record that Victory would release in 2007, you would have called me crazy, but if you actually give the Victory debut from Nodes of Ranvier an open minded listen , you might not think I was so crazy after all.
Lying [...]

Volumes have been written on North Carolina’s Between the Buried and Me and their meteoric rise to math-/post-core demigods. For those latecomers who started paying attention after 2005’s benchmark Alaska, Victory has re-released the band’s sophomore album, 2003’s The Silent Circus, with expanded liner notes by the group and a bonus DVD of concert footage, [...]

Though not a six year hiatus like the wait between their debut and follow up the excellent Condemned to Suffer, the three year wait for the All Out War’s third album is over, and the line-up issues that seem to cause the band’s less than prolific offering, seems to have been settled with much of [...]

Personally, the prospect of wading through a “Best of Atreyu” album would seem like picking the best hemorrhoids I ever had. But I’ll give Victory credit for putting together a sellable, goodbye compilation (the band is now on Hollywood Records) that spans Atreyu’s career, as they are arguably one of the more influential of the [...]

Last year The Acacia Strain declared that their third album The Dead Walk, was ‘The heaviest album of the year. Period’. In 2007, Connecticut’s Emmure claim to have the most ‘Brutal CD of 2007′. The thing is depending on your definition of heavy or brutal, both are right.

I had all sorts of put-downs ready to [...]

Unfortunately, despite Victory Records spurt of semi metal here recently, (Beneath The Sky, Emmure), Florida’s A Day to Remember, following up their tepidly commercial debut, And Their Name Was Treason, deliver a predictably mundane yet Victory styled sophomore album that will appeal to the Hot Topic crowd.
Whereas label mates Beneath The Sky seem genuinely interested in [...]

I’m not a big fan of cover songs let alone a complete album of cover, despite being played by one of my favorite bands, so reviewing this 14 song insight to Between the Buried and Me?s infleunces was a bit of a oxymoron for me. First off, here is the track listing. This alone should [...]

My top album of 2005 was the sophomore effort, Alaska from North Carolina’s Between the Buried and Me. Formed by members of short lived metalcore legends Prayer for Cleansing Tommy Rogers and Paul Waggoner and joined on Alaska by Glass Casket members Dusty Waring and Blake Richardson, gives Between the Buried and Me an arguably all star line up and it showed. The album defies categorization and oozes brilliance from every jagged riff, clean segue and introspective jam. So when given the chance to see the band along with The Red Chord and A Life Once lost on an Ozzfest off date at a local dive bar, Mojo’s in Columbia, MO, I jumped at the chance, and at the chance to visit with vocalist Tommy Rogers….

As much as I wanted to make some snide remark about this being watered down hardcore, and Victory’s watered down hardcore roster, I couldn’t because for what it is (screamohardcore, metalcorrepunkrock), it’s pretty solid and certainly better than some of Victory’s other more aggressively promoted bands (ahem, Hawthorne Heights, Bayside).Hailing from Germany, veterans Waterdown sound [...]

Though most of you may groan, for me, 2005 has been a stellar year for the so called “death-core” genre (I use the term broadly to describe music that mixes death metal, grindcore and hardcore/metalcore); Embrace the End, The Taste of Blood, The Number 12 Looks Like You, Ion Dissonance, The Red Chord, Antagony, Animosity, [...]

Truth be told Atreyu, is the meekest of the Hot Topic ‘metalcore’ triumvirate (rounded out by Avenged Sevenfold and Bleeding Through), being easily more accessible than their peers but having just enough metal seeping into their punky, hardcore laced, catchy visage to be more respectable than Silverstein or Thrice.
Still, Atreyu and their ilk remain in [...]

A Perfects Murder’s debut album, Cease To Suffer was a solid slab of Hatebreed inspired hardcore that didn’t really do anything special, so it was a surprise to me, that after a switch from Goodfellow Records to Victory, APM would come out with this absolute monster of a disc.
Pure vein popping, chest swelling, boot stomping, [...]