Gastropode is probably French for slugs and snails, or perhaps more general univalve animals, because it is almost exactly the same word as Gastropod which, as a struggling Zoology major, I know for a god damned fact includes slugs and snails. I could Google it, of course, but I just don’t think knowing for certain […]

Due to an unfortunate and excruciating ear infection that has had me uniaural for about three months I failed to write this review in a timely fashion, for which I must apologize to the band and the band’s guests. This EP deserved a timelier addressing. Because, frankly, it smokes. It does not smoke because it […]

“Somnambulant” is the song on this album that captures most what I feel Anopheli was trying to convey, musically, on this album. A lone bass plucks away a somber melody that wants nothing to do with the light of day. An accompanying drum rhythm kicks in with some cello harmony following suit; this introduction of […]

“Heirless” is the perfect intro for this album. Equal parts foreboding, dissonant, and soothsaying; it encapsulates what is about to occur during the play through of Monarchy; Rivers of Nihil’s second album. On this sophmore release, this Reading, PA band have expanded upon the ability to tell a story, craft a memorably technical song, and […]

Eschewing the standard tropes of the “bigger, louder, faster, heavier, etc” second album adjectives that most metal bands embrace, Secrets of the Sky have written an album that peaks and wanes with life, character, mood, melody, and dissonance. Pathways is an album through and through with segues that give the listener the feeling of arriving […]

For being a band in it’s infant stages of existence, Sweden’s Monolord certainly carries with it an air of age. I am only vaguely familiar with their previous release, Empress Rising, but they seem to convey a very agile & stable blend of doom with accents of the whole Palm Desert scene and an almost […]

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 […]

In the years that I’ve spent on this earth, I’ve come to the conclusion of “everything in due time” or as I like to reword it, “I wasn’t meant to do that before I did”. Case in point: Tad. I never took the time out of my day to venture forth into Tad’s area of […]

Enslaved that has really impressed me over the years has been their ability to craft albums that have a completely identity of their own but can only be albums written by Enslaved. I was first introduced to them with the album Isa. It was actually the title track and it’s music video that caught my […]

Denver’s In The Company of Serpents are a guitar/vocals (Grant Netzorg) & drums (Joseph Weller Myer) duo that bring a certain flair of rhythm and blues to the tried and true sound of doom/sludge/stoner metal. In 2014 they released Merging in Light, a 3 song EP that continues what they established on their previous releases […]

“The mouth of hell”. That is what Hadal Maw roughly translates to and the band has released an album that defines that translation with substantial purity. Very much steeped in the realm of death metal, they manage to throw in bits-and-pieces of discordant hardcore to complete a sound that is very reminiscent of modern death […]

It’s a difficult task trying to describe a band without using other bands as a jumping off point. I find myself easily slipping into that realm of “so-and-so sound like this aspect of such-and-such but with a little less emphasis on riffing…blah-blah-blah, etc, etc”. I hate having to rely on that but it’s very very […]

Time To Die is Electric Wizard’s eighth proper full length in a little over two decades. Reading some of the press releases, interviews, and reviews for this album leading up to its release (and afterwards), I was anticipating an album that would be wholly abrasive and pissed off. I misunderstood because this album isn’t so […]

“I see behemoth coming/I see a serpent coming/I see a beast is coming/I see a deadly heat is coming” –”There Is A Serpent Coming” Being as this is the first song to contain vocals on an Earth record since Pentastar: In The Style of Demons, it’s very appropriate and telling. One could use any of […]

From my understanding, the tracks and album title take their name from an Icelandic form of dividing up the day/clock into 3-hour increments. Ótta is the 3am start. Knowing this helped me grasp the feel of the album a little more. With Ótta, Sólstafir has extended their departure from metal that was fairly evident on […]

I’m a sucker for album art. If an album looks semi interesting in anyway shape or form, I will want it. The album doesn’t even have to be good, truthfully. I don’t have a standard or a preference or a guide by which I follow. I impulse buy and either reap the benefits of having […]

Wow. Fucking wow. Aleph Null, a Germanic trio of sludge-like proportions, mix the best of everything you remember best about grunge combined with a whole lot of sludge, 70’s rock freewheelin’ experimentalism, and just enough catchiness to give Torche a run for their money in the “we’re sludgy-yet-grungy-yet-catchy” department. This album is equal parts fuzz, […]

I started this review with the feeling that after about seven listens I had grasped what was being conveyed and therefore I would be able judge and critique. The more I kept on listening, though, the more this album seemed to present itself; as if it were a shy child (who had tendencies of acting […]

How this band isn’t more well-known is beyond me. In a world of musical styles being constantly blended, theirs seems to be a sound wholly their own. A slight mix of down tempo grunge and what could be misconstrued as shoegaze, they manage to not only be consistently rhythmic but also, in a cerebral sense, […]