I really enjoyed Bite Your Head Off, the 2012 debut album from Australia’s King Parrot. It was a fun and rollicking blast which hybridized grind, thrash and punk into a fresh and unique sound, spiked with a refreshing sense of humor. Apparently a lot of other folks enjoyed it as well judging by the rising […]

I’m having a hard time coming to grips with the second album from Finland’s Oceanwake, Sunless. Not that I don’t like it or anything, it’s just its sort of in stylistic limbo between traditional melancholic lumbering Finnish doom metal and a more Post Metal ebb akin to country mates Callisto or fellow Europeans like Desert Beneath […]

You never know what you’re going to get from Finland’s Svart Records. I suppose you could say that their staple genre is doom, but within that it could either be the stoner/doom of bands like Domovoyd, Acid King, and Pombagira, the death/doom of Vainaja, Kuolemanlaakso, and Heavydeath, Essenz’s patented black/doom, or the more progressive/psychedelic approach […]

I can close my eyes and envision being in Aokigahara, A forest in Japan at the northwest base of Mount Fuji that is known as a popular place for suicides. The forest apparently has a historic association with Demons.  Enter Osmose Production Record artists Cohol and their second album Rigen.  Describing themselves as ‘Blackened Crystal Death’, […]

Don’t always trust tags that someone pulls out of their ass; always listen and decide for yourself.  The labelling of “post-rock/blackened hardcore” for Vienna auteurs of execution, Seagrave and the debut album Stabwound doesn’t even begin to do justice.  Post-rock always makes me think of something gorgeous, dreamy, hypnotic, etc.  Sure, the guitar work on […]

AAaahh Overkill, to me they are the foundation of all my thrash dreams, hopes and wants. They started for me with their 2nd album Taking Over and I was hooked, the music, the anger, the dark humor and just the overall sonics that they sent to through my speakers. I say sonics because when I […]

Dog days of Summer are approaching. That means heat and sweaty gussets. The only remedy and answer for mother nature’s bukkakke of humidity is some brutal (and we mean brutal) death metal. It just so happens that brutal death metal is the specialty of Comatose Music! Thus, we’ll make the upcoming heatwave even more brutally intolerable by partnering up with Comatose and Clawhammer PR to throw four (4) of the label’s recent gut wrenching slabs of metal at you.

It has been more than a thousand years since the minstrels, troubadours, and minnesingers of the Middle Ages strummed their lutes and cooed their poetry to eager and usually royal ears. Obsequiae, if they could travel back to those days, would have lulled the lords and ladies of court into wondrous reverie with a gentle opener […]

The first Hardcore record I ever got was Agnostic Front’s Cause For Alarm. I was in high school and I had never heard anything like it before. It was the early days of the crossover scene and until this point I had been listening to metal exclusively. That quickly changed. The short songs, the vitriol […]

Hot on the heels of Gruesome’s utterly wonderful Savage Land comes another slice of truly tremendous Death worship in the form of False Prophecies. The mysterious entity that is  Undead have chosen to take a different approach to Gruesome however, the latter band choosing to emulate the early Death to such an extent that the resulting […]

“The French female-fronted metal band UNSAFE brings the metal scene to a new level”… or so says the band’s label Mighty Music. A tad ironic, being that that is quite a mighty claim in itself, the problem is that it is nowhere close to the truth. Not that Enter Dark Places is a bad album, […]

I am a giant Kolliasist. His debut with one of my all-time favorite brutal tech death outfits, Nile, happens to also be my all-time favorite Nile record. Blast beats are a given, but his take on the groovier, crushier Nile moments really sold me, and gave the band a compelling depth that has, in my […]

Last year Erik Thomas reviewed a band from Nashville Tennessee called Inferi who released an album called The Path of Apotheosis.  To me that was one of the better melodic death releases of last year and kind of came out of nowhere. Zoom forward to present day Mariestad Sweden and Implode.  Implode was formed in […]

It’s good to see that Incinerate is still hanging in there.  Releasing only their 3rd album since a 2000 demo.  Incinerate drop albums just after the brain cell crushing, wearers of unreadable band shirts have stopped wondering, “whatever happened to them”, snapping their necks back in place with Eradicating Terrestrial Species.   Considering their recent […]

 Okay this album is definitely going to be a grower, but that’s not a bad thing mind you, it’s just at times expectations can be a mindf**k. You anticipate, you dream and dwell on that one moment of what you envision or what you dream about forever ( in this case Sanctuary reforming ) and […]

Having been around since 2000, and with 6 albums under their belt already, Warsaw Poland’s Antigama continue to be one of the most underrated yet productive bands in Grindcore. and album number 7 shows no signs of the band letting up. The Insolent starts off with the very aggressive “Reward or Punishment”.  If one could […]

Man, this is evil stuff.  It’s not fast, it’s actually quite melodic but I’ll be goddamned if this shit doesn’t get by on sheer tonnage alone.  The Dead hail from Australia, a country/continent with a rich heavy scene that doesn’t always get the credit it so rightly deserves.  I’m coming into this review as an […]

Like a lot of you, Drudkh first popped up on my radar with their 2006 release, Blood In Our Wells. It really took me a long time to look beyond the hype that album generated, but I eventually came to appreciate it for what it was. What it wasn’t was The Second Coming of a […]

2015 brings the return of England’s Paradise Lost for their 27th year in existence. It also brings fourth their 14th full length album. In this day and age, it is amazing to have a band with this kind of longevity and productivity. Add to that the fact that the lineup is original except for the drummer, […]

Here is another example of how great French Death Metal bands are. Recueil Morbide, which translates to English to ‘Morbid Collection’ blast their ways into toad throat lovers everywhere this year with the release of their album which just happens to be called Morbid Collection.  If there were any initial knock on this record it […]

I’ve read descriptions of this band as “psychedelic stoner metal”, “psychedelic doom”, “psychedelic (insert genre here)” and I must say, it’s too easy to throw that tag onto a genre if someone doesn’t understand the actually influences regarding a sound being conveyed. With Ufomammut I find that descriptor appropriate but moreso in the vein of […]

So Floridian black metal act Mindscar were around back in the early 00s with a few demos and such and back then, their guitarist/vocalist Richie Brown was the bassist for Trivium for a year, before Heafy and co got famous. But the band faded out of existence after a lone 2001 EP, However Brown reformed the band with in […]

I don’t have much patience with geeker-provenance or hero worship. I was pleased as punch to hear Carcass and Godflesh put out fantastic, true to form records after being away for a while, but for the most part I agree with Death Grips: “Fuck where you’re from, fuck where you’re going, it’s all about where […]

Gruesome released one of the best death metal albums of this year in ‘Savage Lands’. Not only that, but the album is an excellent love letter to the older Death -albums, old school death metal and most of all, to Chuck Schuldiner. We chatted briefly with one of the main motors of Gruesome, drummer Gus Rios, about how the band came to be and how ‘Savage Lands’ turned out how it did. So sit down, pour yourself some Chianti, eat a corpse and let death consume you.

Black Tower is a Canadian trio that play a form of punk/thrash/power/heavy/black metal that’s a perfect fit for Unspeakable Axe Records, and might actually be their best release yet. And while that mish-mash of styles might overwhelm some, it’s going to appeal to a lot of folks, as it’s done with an awesome retro but fun […]