Continuing the old timey, dusty death metal vibe of the label’s previous releases by Trenchrot and Omnivore, Canada’s Sabbatory are here to deliver some no nonsense old school death/thrash metal. And like this years earlier release from Morfin, the primary influence is an easy one to hear: (very)early Death. Sure, there is lots of other old […]

Are my ears ringing? Why is everything in this style sounding so similar? It’s like déjà vu all over again for the umpteenth time. I remember listening to this everywhere – in my car, in the room, even in the bathroom. I listen to metal a lot. I’ve heard this as Liturgy, I’ve heard this […]

Sometimes I just need a break from all the brutal music I listen to. Whether it’s some bouncy folk/viking metal, some melodic black metal or just something else to reset to internal brutality meter. Recently, it’s a few choice releases- the debut from Moldavia’s Arcturus worshiping Chordewa, Deathpoint’s soaring metalcore, Barishi’s prog waft and this, the second album […]

New Song And Pre-order Packages Now Available + Band To Kick Off Summer Tour As Part Of The Rockstar Energy Drink Mayhem Festival American Death Metal Icons, CANNIBAL CORPSE, are pleased to announce the release of their thirteenth full-length, entitled, A Skeletal Domain. Lucky number thirteen? Lucky or not, it’s a quantity of releases (not even counting […]

Remember the likes of Cryptic Slaughter, Wehrmacht and Beyond Possession, from years past??  Well Gammacide, from Texas, kind of got lost in the shuffle back in the day, which is a shame, since their only album, Victims of Science was a brutal blend of thrash, hardcore influences and blast beats. Also some Rigor Mortis influence, […]

Cognitive is a brutal technical death metal hailing from New Jersey.  I met guitarist, Rob Wharton, through Internal Bleeding guitarist, Chris Pervelis, last year and Rob and I hit it off pretty quickly with our sarcastic sense of humor.  He sent me their ep, The Horrid Swarm and I was an instant fan.  I met up with him on their tour with Wormed, last fall, and was able to talk at length with him, regarding the band and everyday life.  Cognitive put on a blistering set that night and it was awesome to see them crush!  I even picked myself up a shirt, that has some vicious looking demon on it, with sharp teeth, giving a gruesome smile.  Scares the hell outta my kids everytime I wear the shirt.

Despite their ever snowballing popularity, Mastodon has gained their fair share of detractors during the post-Leviathan phase of their career.  The bombastic showmanship and scattershot songwriting of Blood Mountain proved a bit too left field for some listeners, while the tangled prog-rock odyssey of the brilliant Crack the Skye no doubt left some portions of […]

Où est le boeuf? Apparently it’s in Montreal, Canada an it’s all located on the second, fun as hell record from the awfully named Dark Century. But luckily the band’s tongue in check delivery allows for the moniker and the album name and the album cover, but the music itself is where its at here. Dark Century play […]

It would be impossible to avoid mentioning Neurosis in this review, so let’s get it over with at the beginning. The bassist and singer from Stoneburner, Damon Kelly, is none other than the son of Scott Kelly, founding member of experimental metal titans Neurosis. Damon has been on tour with his father’s band a few […]

Willowtip’s entry into 2014 early/Spring run of superlative tech/brutal death metal comes by way of the tiny country of Malta and the  third album from Abysmal Torment, a band previously unknown to me. And boy is it a doozie. Using Floridan death metal as a very broad template, Abysmal Torment manage to dirty the core sound […]

Metal Blade Records is proud to announce the addition of ANAAL NATHRAKH to its roster! Comments ANAAL NATHRAKH: “We are very pleased to announce our signing with Metal Blade Records. It means we are joining a roster with some truly titanic figures, and a label responsible for releasing some utterly legendary albums. Few other labels can touch their […]

I am only casually familiar with Wretched‘s previous release, Son of Perdition, which struck me as a more technical, less core-ish Carnifex, and belonging to that sort of ilk that has all the right ingredients but somehow didn’t manage to make it stick. With their fourth full-length offering, Cannibal, Wretched has stepped up the game […]

A while back I was chatting with Bob Bagchus from Soulburn, ex-Asphyx and I asked him, in an interview, about what it would be like for Asphyx to do a blast beat and than go into an abrupt doom laden part, that I thought it would be pretty interesting.  He said he was not opposed to the idea, however he was fairly certain it probably would not happen.  So than I get Philadelphia’s own, Trench Rot’s debut album Necronomic Warfare and was like the band is in my head, because they did just that.  The heavy doom laden crushing bulldozer sound of Asphyx and Bolt Thrower is prevalent on the album, however than the band will go into a vicious blast beats.  The timing of the tempo shifts is dramatic and really adds to the intensity of this excellent debut album.

It is a rare and beautiful thing when a band is heavy not for heaviness’ sake, but as a necessity to reaching a deeper, more worthy goal of expression. Both the post-sludge and post-black genres of metal are oft-exploited templates for such explorations, and therein lies their crossover appeal. With Savage Gold, Brooklyn’s Tombs joins […]

The second album from the reformed Pillory, (who released one album, No Lifeguard at the Gene Pool back in 2005 then broke up in 2008) isn’t quite what you’d expect from Unique Leader.  And while it continues the label’s excellent run of simply killer 2014 releases, it does it from a slightly different angle. Rather […]

I was ecstatic when Ice-T’s and Ernie C’s heavy metal syndicate, Body Count made a comeback eight years ago with their Murder 4 Hire album. Unfortunately that disc turned out to be a dud and became the bastard child no one speaks about in the group’s discography. Despite Ice-T, the music simply wasn’t that interesting […]

I got this brutal little nugget in my email and wasn’t exactly sure what the hell I was in for. Judging a book by the cover isn’t always trustworthy in a literary sense, but with Metal you can usually gauge what your experience is going to be. So, by that rationale Sangus doesn’t disappoint; because […]

Chronicles of Oblivion is the third full-length offering from France’s Deep in Hate, newly signed to Kaotoxin. A progression from the band’s initial sound, Chronicles of Oblivion sees the band playing a somewhat technical style of deathcore in the vein of Thy Art is Murder injected with a lethal strain of Decapitated-influenced modern death metal. […]

If you simply cannot wait to get your hands on Crowbar’s impending Symmetry in Black,  need another Neurosis album now, or if you enjoyed the second under the radar excellence from Finnish doom sludgster’s Lurk, Kaldera, or was underwhelmed by last years Morne effort, Shadows (as I was…), then the debut album from France’s Oruga (or larva) is […]

The sludge scene is very active in France, with bands like Year of No Light and Dirge releasing surprisingly, relevant post-metal, and other bands like Carne and Overmars (RIP) churning out music that pays more debt to the genre’s roots in hardcore. Newly established band Mur, hailing from Paris, falls into this latter camp, and […]

Back in May of this year I made the 2 hour trek to the Riot Room in Kansas City, Missouri to see Paganfest V. This years iteration was the usual mix of big name headliners in Finland’s Korpiklaani and Turisas, a little different flair with Taiwans’s Chthonic and Kentuckian Winterhymn. Of course my main reason for attending was to see to two Finnish folk heavyweights, who rarely make it to the midwest, let alone Missouri.

After a 6 year layoff, death metal legends Incantation returned in 2012 rather triumphantly with Vanquish in Vengeance, one of the  more successful reunion/ comebacks of the last few years. But how would the band respond after the comeback/reunion glow and excitement that often fogs objective reactions after long layoffs has faded and the band […]

Uk supergroup Vallenfyre caused a minor ripple in the metal scene back in 2011 with their debut, A Fragile King, a pretty solid doom death outfit with nods to the bands primary members Gregor Mackintosh of Paradise Lost and Hamish Glencross of My Dying Bride and drummer Daniel Erlandsson. It was a solid effort but not great, especially considering the […]

I typically have loved and probably will love everything and anything that Dark Descent Records releases. Their 2014 thus far has been stunning with the likes of Corpsessed, Lie In Ruins, Lvcifyre Thantifaxath, and a Binah EP. However, here is the third album from blackened death thrashers Gravehill, the second for Dark Descent, and as with […]

Here are five 7 ” EPs from Atlanta based Boris Records and all three are rooted in denim and beer or Satan, being retro, old school thrash at their core with various elements of either death or black metal.   Up first is home grown thrashers,  Sadistic Ritual the label’s very own home town in Atlanta […]