I wanted this album to be bad, so I could redouble the album’s badness with some bad one-liners referencing the album, i.e. “I can find the space for this…in the garbage,” or better yet, “Cynic are the kings of those who know…how to suck.” You get the gist; I wanted to use their song titles […]

“Post-rock” is always a genre I’m reluctant to throw around because of its inherent “what the fuck genre is that?” status. For my part, slapping “post-rock” anywhere near or around a band has many times put them in listener’s purgatory, and I have shoved numerous worthy post-rock bands aside prior to hearing their albums that […]

It would seem that every time I come across a Cradle of Filth CD, I feel slightly more inclined to school people. Not proverbially school them, but literally. I cast aside grammatically challenged losers like moldy bread, begin using more sophisticated words like “assuaged” and “indubitably” in daily speech, and resume my lifelong quest to […]

What a waste of time. Not that the record is completely able to be shelved, never to be played again or anything, but how is this an hour long? There is an inordinate amount of time that is simply dead air. There’s no explanation, no reason, nothing. Just silence. And isn’t it music that we […]

See, I’ve never been a big fan of the ‘Croptic crew from down under. I enjoy portions of Isle of Disenchantment and most of Scepter of the Ancients, but they just never struck me as a band I could listen to again and again. I saw them live at Summer Slaughter (their first North American […]

“Class is cancelled.”The first words on Ruling Class Cancelled are bellowed by Jason Netherton of Misery Index after a riffalicious introduction, before their not-so-grandiose seven-and-a-half minute side of the split gets underway. And I mean not-so-grandiose in the best way possible; I mean, who the fuck wants grindcore that drags on forever? “Not I,” says […]

I would be an idiot to say this is a terrible album, but I couldn’t pass up saying this is perhaps Neuraxis’ most pedestrian moment. Where once bombast and sheer power dominated this, one of the most celebrated of the Canadian death metal bands around, now it would seem they prefer a different approach; one […]

With most good bands, I remember riffs. Walk up to any metal kid in your neighborhood and ask him to recite the opening riff from ‘Angel of Death’ by Slayer (because he might know the riff from Thin Lizzy’s song of the same name). Actually, chances are, you are that kid. So go on. Hum […]

Last time I enjoyed a Kataklysm album through and through was Serenity in Fire, perhaps due to Martin Maurais’ ball-bustingly fast drum performance, so much so that it made me question whether the drumming was performed by a person or if the double kick pedals were cleverly disguised as a game of Whack-A-Mole, packaged with […]

“The fans have spoken and we delivered it.” – Jon Schaffer, Iced Earth guitarist. Since the December return of Matt Barlow to the Iced Earth fold, fans and critics have speculated the ‘classic Iced Earth’ vocalist’s ability to bring back both the noise and the funk of previous releases, perhaps moreso one than the other. […]