When you are in a band you normally don’t know whether what you are doing is good, bad, great or awful. In my experience, you are just getting together with your mates and killing it as best you can. Maybe, once you have a chance to make a demo or whatever, you start to realize […]

Somewhere between Soilent Green, Poison Idea and Monster Magnet you will find the sound of Columbian Necktie, and maybe that sound will really appeal to you. It has its moments, no doubt; solid riffing, varied – if somewhat traditional – rhythms, and a lot of attitude. And it is a nice palate cleanser after an […]

I have been ruminating as to how best to tackle Oniric Delusions. If you want the easy and probably most useful aspects, they are this: This death metal record is fantastic, though not groundbreaking, and deserves attention. My issue lies with the phenomena I have been experiencing lately when it comes to death metal records. […]

As I have said ad nausea, modern metal is almost entirely good. I am old enough to remember when bands would put a metal song – one song – on an otherwise hard rock album, or they would release a killer track and you would buy the album and it would be a shit-ton of […]

I am at the time of this review a junior studying zoology at a smallish university. It was a toss-up between that, physics and chemistry, but I suck at math…so not really a toss-up. Point being I like the scientific method. A lot. So I decided, upon receiving this album for review, to do an […]

You could regard me in many ways. I assume the standard way is that I am a boring ugly fat idiot. But you could also regard me as lucky. I tend to take “time off” from peering into the corners of the metalverse while I try to get my ugly fat idiotic life in order. […]

Sometimes you hear a band and you just want to call all your friends and start gushing. Which, in my case, would be pointless because all the friends I could call could care less about extreme metal. Regardless, Necrosic is just such a band. Putrid Decimation is an EP that NO serious death metal fan […]

Let’s just suppose that, in 1994 or so, Helmet wrote some songs.  Also they had a time machine. They used it to travel a few years further back and coerce the Melvins to write a couple more songs for them. Then they screamed forward to last year and forced Converge to show them how to […]

Fuck the Facts is, right off the bat, just the best band name ever. The end. Musically, the band dwells in a grindcore geography, but is not of a grindcore geography. They are more akin to Today is the Day than Pig Destroyer or Napalm Death, and the point of each song is not to […]

Black metal is a sink or swim niche for me. Either your band rises above the dross, or it becomes dross to be risen above. Part of this is simply that the niche is not my favorite. My tolerance is lower than fans and fanatics. But part of it is that some bands try to […]

I liked a few numetal bands. There, I said it. I once read an interview with Gene Hoglan where he indicated, very strongly, that we are lucky to live in an age where even the shitty metal acts are better than much of the dross he (and, as I am around his age, I) was […]

I have always been a death metal fan, from the moment I first heard it all them years ago – the textures, the percussiveness, the shear brutality. But I have been very slow and finicky about black metal. I was never taken in by the undergrounder-than-thou shit, which I found to have the same amount […]

Where were you the first time you heard death metal/grind? I was at work, listening to tapes I made of a local radio show that played punk/hardcore and a mix of reggae, rap, underground metal and the odd whatever else. They trotted things out in blocks – now bands that would eventually become Seattle grunge, […]

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 […]

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 […]

Grind is a specific kind of metal that describes, band by band, a single aspect of being, more so than any other kind of metal – or music. The bands that make grind tend to live for that aspect, create for it. Maruta is about tension; sailing riffs on the edge of the world and […]