I had pretty low expectations for this release; Victory Records, the cliched moniker, and names like Emmure dropped in the Victory records press releases. However, this Parisian metal outfit surprised me with a pretty solid release of modern djent-y metal that has a lot more depth and style than many of their hardcore based peers […]

As I have said a few times before, If you are going to send a self released 4 song EP for review (we get a lot of demos), you’d better be really good and stand out to get some coverage, and luckily for Virginia’s With Burning Contempt, their debut 4 song demo made it into […]

Hey, even the most jaded among traditional/power metal fans would be just a little curious when the album sticker includes text like “the leading heavy metal band from South America” and “featuring Tim ‘Ripper’ owns & Ralf Scheepers (Primal Fear). And then there is that whole thing about being “for fans of Primal Fear, Dio, […]

Trying to get a reissue some face time in this day and age is a near fruitless endeavor. Chances are, someone out there has the album in question, and probably has gone to great lengths to post it as a torrent. Therefore, the term “reissue” loses some of its muster for a band like Montreal’s […]

I don’t think there’s a genre tag I dislike more than “post”. Post-punk, post-hardcore, post-rock, post-metal… Unlike its sister tag “proto”, which implies something basic, spare, or primitive, the word doesn’t have much descriptive power. When it comes to post-metal, it’s easy to see it as implying a combination of post rock and metal, but […]

Edmonton’s Mortillery gets it right. Debut album Murder.Death.Kill (HPGD Productions) really set the tone for the Canadian thrash metallers; everything from the album title to the artwork to Cara McCutchen’s vocal ferocity to the up-the-irons mentality lived, breathed, and puked METAL. Napalm Records heard it, got it, and snatched up that debut album for reissue, including the vinyl treatment. But it is with The Origin of Extinction that Mortillery have raised the bar and unknowingly dared bands the world over to try and top it. Blazing riffs, lacerating solos, vocals that move from thrash brutality to wailing heavy metal singing, and consistency of catchiness all the way through to the end. I can’t get enough of it, which is why The Origin of Extinction is a virtual lock for my 2013 best-album list. Guitarist Alex Gutierrez spoke to me about the finer details of what it’s like to be in a band of metal fans making music for metal fans and not giving a damn about wheel reinvention.

After toiling away in the Mid West death metal scene for over a decade and 5 albums, Chicago’s Jungle Rot released the best album of their consistent, if unspectacular career last year in Kill on Command. And even though it was an album released on their much maligned home town label, Victory Records, it was […]

So this is what the kids are creating for their debut albums these days, huh? So much for learning the ropes and taking several years to create an album that can be deemed their finest to date. For California’s Xanthochroid, their magnificent debut full-length Blessed He with Boils is a creation that will most likely […]

Denmark’s Saturnus may not be one of doom metal’s most prolific bands with only four full-lengths and one EP over their roughly 20-year existence, but they have remained one of the most consistent and revered. Instead if cashing in on their uncanny talent for writing catchy tunes (just try listening to “Christ Goodbye” or “Empty […]

Ho Hum- another semi super group plying old school Swedish death metal and amazingly this one doesn’t feature Rogga Johanssen, though it  sounds just like one of his many projects  and does feature one of his other projects’ cohorts- namely P.Myrén (Paganizer, Facebreaker) and R Karlsson (Facebreaker, Edge of Sanity, Scar Symmetry, Devian, Incapacity) – […]

So much of the death metal coming out of Latin America is of a purity more apparent that most other regions of the world; that is, the energy flow and overall vibe is gut-delivered and soul-derived, the lack of pretense immediately obvious. That is exactly what one hears on Mortificy’s Burn and Suffer. The Brazilian […]

It would be easy to lump Sanctium in with Be’lakor; they are Australian, play a form of progressive melancholic  Opeth and Insomnium styled melodic death metal and they really good at it. However, this band actually has ties to some other Aussie bands, like Switchblade, Bane of Isildur and most notably, impressive  doomsters Myraeth, who […]

Wow. x2. Soilwork have returned with their strongest release to date, and they’ve done it with a double album. This means they’ve just topped themselves – and likely the rest of the entire melodeath genre – twice. These two albums coalesce everything that’s always been dazzling about Soilwork, from the early shredfest barrage of Steelbath Suicide and The Chainheart […]

Have to feel some type of pity for Norway’s Audrey Horne. Thanks to the current onslaught of retro-minded, bellbottom-lovin rock, they’ve cast as an afterthought while Rival Sons, Graveyard, and Witchcraft prance around like they’ve been doing this since the 70’s, while AH has been doing it since 2002, which in some weird twisted way, […]

Generally, most releases under the Seventh Rule banner come with an inordinate amount of distortion draped over them, falling somewhere between the crust and doom areas of classification. It’s what has made the label so successful in a short amount of time, and has polarized it to those who prefer their metal a bit more […]

The guys from Horna have been silent for quite some time. A cover song on last year’s Emperor tribute, and five new songs since Sanojesi Äärelle in 2008. I thought maybe they had fallen into the abyss, turns out they had, down there on the sixth circle as the house band playing to Emperor Frederick […]

At the end of every calendar year, metal journalists spend months trying to put together the dreaded year end list. It’s a long, stressful and ever-evolving process that keeps us up at night as we order and reorder albums several times, fret over stuff we have too high on the list or stuff that got bumped off the bottom. We try to make the lists as extensive and inclusive as possible, but inevitably, stuff gets missed. Maybe an album was too obscure, got overlooked in the crowd, we didn’t hear it until too late, or simply never made it into our inbox. So some of the staff here decided to give you guys a late Christmas present and let you know about some releases that you need to hear in case you also missed it or like us, simply overlooked it or it just didn’t get coverage here. These are the mulligans that, in hindsight, deserve your attention and probably would have made our staff’s year-end lists if we weren’t so lazy and rushed by a tireless dictator. So rise, brush, floss and repeat as we drill you with our cavities and fillings from 2012:

Having not heard these guys before, but with them being from Denmark, featuring members of Cerekloth and Undergang and residing on Deepsend Records, I was fully expecting yet another slab of powerful, chunky Danish death metal a la The Cleansing, Dawn of Demise or Corpus Mortale. However, Deepsend threw me a bit of a curveball. […]

Ugly, brutish, and oppressive, Scorn has all the ingredients to be great. Primitive Man’s combination of d-beat crust, sludge, and crippling doom is a combination after my heart and they show a tremendous amount of potential with this release. Its aesthetic is almost grind-like, feeling like a Benümb album without any blast beats. There are […]

Virginia-based melodic tech-death metal masters, ARSIS, have announced Unwelcome as the title of their upcoming fifth full-length album. The follow up to their 2010 release Starve for the Devil, will be released on April 30, 2013 in North America via Nuclear Blast records. “At this point ARSIS has more than a few releases in our […]

Without having to do too much mental legwork, pondering the current state of death metal spews forth (perhaps in a literal sense) the word “boring.” It’s boring because the new crop of bands that inhabit it aren’t trying very hard; they’re just referencing their copies of Mental Funeral or Eaten Back to Life and running with it, doing as little as they can to establish their own sound. Worst of all, it’s an accepted practice. People are inexplicably excited about the retro death metal movement, even if it threatens to send the style hurdling toward the Stone Age, well before Venom could piece together a power chord. Better yet, why aren’t more bands copping Obituary? …..

After finishing 2012 on a killer note with the likes of Gorephilia, Maveth, Desolate Shrine and Paroxsihzem, Dark Descent Records is off to an equally killer and equally Finnish start to 2012 with releases from Vorum and Krypts. One could argue that the Finnish death metal revival is almost equal to the Swedish revival of […]

Ladies and gentlemen, you’ve waited almost 4 years, but it’s finally arrived:  the new Behemoth album!  Nergal has thankfully returned back to full health following his illness, and he and his fellow band mates are… wait… what is that?  You’re telling me this is NOT the new Behemoth?!?  Huh?!  Get through the intro, and there’s […]

Back in 2001, The Netherlands’ Centurian were on the cusp of death metal stardom after releasing their furious second album Liber Zar Zax.  However, the band stalled and disappeared for over a decade. But the members kept sharp and involved with notable acts like Nox, Severe Torture and recently, Infected Flesh. So now, three of […]

A lot of legendary thrash bands are past the point of having their current output deemed as “mandatory.” Frankly, no one is going to prefer what said band is doing now, as opposed to what they were doing then. And by “then,” we mean the 80’s, which were rather nice to thrash (in case you […]