Viva la thrash revival! Here’s the Bay Area’s own Hatchet with their debut full length, Awaiting Evil, a real barn stormer filled front to back with face melting riffs, leads, solos and quite possibly my favorite vocalist I’ve heard yet from the movement in Marcus Kirchen. His delivery isn’t entirely unique or distinctive, but he’s […]

I wasn’t expecting much from Man Made Paradise coming in, as a name like Ticket to Hell is as cliché and generic as metal band names come. I thought for sure I was in for something cheesy and/or boring, but the second I pushed play, my jaw dropped and I was locked in. Man Made […]

First, let me get my bitching and moaning out of the way. Megadeth has been a favorite band of mine for several years now – they were one of the first “real” metal bands I discovered. I’ve seen them live twice, once with crappy support, and once with Exodus, but unfortunately, I missed them. Since […]

*sigh* Bland, boring, vanilla, unoriginal, uninspiring, unenthused, lacking of energy – all descriptors of Engel’s Absolute Design. Coming from one of my favorite metal cities in the world, Gothenburg (on top of the impressive list of musicians and their former bands – I’ll dig into this more shortly), I expected more – at least a […]

While The Crossfire is Fall of Serenity’s fourth full length album, they are not the same band that recorded 2001’s Dead Man’s Requiem. Even since their last album, Bloodred Salvation, bass player John Gahlert has taken over vocal duties, guitarist Alex Fischer moved over to bass and Ferdinand Rewicki joined the group filling the void […]

This new live DVD/CD from Germany’s finest thrash band, Kreator, is a re-package, re-edit and re-release of their 1990 VHS, Live in East Berlin. Included with the live show is the mini horror movie the band made for their Coma of Souls album titled Hallucinative Coma, a documentary type thing with interviews from around the […]

They Bleeding Skies is a new band formed by Claudio A. Enzler of My Darkest Hate/Sacrificium and JJ Kontoniemi of Icon Clan and Chapters of Downfall is their debut offering. Melodic death metal in the vain of Amon Amarth is the order of the day here, and they do it pretty well. Thy Bleeding Skies […]

We were late getting into the venue, as we decided to eat before going in and as a result, missed Soilent Green unfortunately. I’ve never been a big fan of the band, but yet I wanted to see them, as seeing a live band can sometimes sway my opinion of them – oh well. While […]

Completely unfamiliar with the band coming in, I was advised before doing this review to do a little research regarding France’s Destinity, as it seems they’ve gone through some sort of direction change since their inception in the mid 90’s. After digging around at their website and Myspace, as well as their page at metal-archives.com, […]

Coming from Newcastle, UK (the home of my favorite beer I might add) is this painfully boring, tough guy attitude oriented and blatantly unoriginal metallic hardcore quartet by the name of Boltdown, and their debut LP Omnicide. What makes them so “painfully boring” you might ask? Well for starters, they seem to model themselves after […]

Cannibalised, the third full length from Biomechanical, is my introduction to the band. I caught wind of the band earlier this year through another site and promptly checked out their Myspace. The one song I heard from this album there left me reeling my jaw from the floor – it was like hearing the chaos […]

It’s no surprise that Earache took the liberty of releasing a compilation of strictly new school thrash ‘revivalists’, as their roster boasts more of these bands (Bonded by Blood, Evile, Municipal Waste, SSS, Gama Bomb, and Violator all appear here) than any other major metal label. Thrashing Like a Maniac, just as any good comp […]

After a nine year studio silence, the Bay Area legends Testament have given us The Formation of Damnation – a 10 song (11 with intro) thrash opus that delivers quality just as you would expect.As for the direction they’ve taken this time out, band founder and mainstay Eric Peterson mentioned before the release that it […]

“MONTANA?!” Is what I said to myself when I discovered where one of Candlelight’s newest death/black threats, Martriden hails from. Who would have thought the state of Montana, which I always kind of regarded as Bum Fucked Egypt, was capable of producing talent in the metal world? I for one certainly did not, but I […]

I have a great affinity for bands who possess exceptional technical skill, and also for bands with great hook writing ability without being to cheesy or poppy. Bands that can combine both of those elements though are a real rarity, especially when you figure in the nature of extreme metal.  Arsis is one such band, […]

Albums such as this where a band takes some of their classic songs and re-records them with updated production are kinda tricky business, because your always gonna have fans that say “what was wrong with the way it sounded before? I liked it that way” and turn away from it. In the case of Testament […]

With their sixth album, Children of Bodom have brought back some of the speed and classical influences that were missing from their last, Are You Dead Yet? The lack of those traits made it the most boring and uninspired sounding album thus far into their career, so to see them back to some degree is […]

Perhaps best known thus far as being Toma Araya’s little brother Johnny’s band, Thine Eyes Bleed are billed as being technical thrash, and for the most part it’s an accurate descriptor. Not overly technical nor as Slayer influenced as one might expect, they do what they do well enough I suppose, but all in all, […]

And so the thrash “revival” continues. Hailing from SoCal, War Without End is Warbringers debut full-length, after an independently released EP last year titled One by One the Wicked Fall, which initially sparked my interest in the young band. That EP showed a great deal of promise in terms of pure, foot to the throat, […]

Even though I don’t remember much about it now as it’s been so long since I’ve heard it, I recall Naildown’s debut album World Domination to be a relatively enjoyable and even somewhat original affair for melodeath – the same can’t be said about their follow up Dreamcrusher though. First off, the whole album is […]

I think from the time that Max Cavalera left his brother Igor and Sepultura behind in 1996, the entire metal world knew that at some point the two would reunite, either in Sepultura, or in a new project. In his absence, Max spent his time in Soulfly, a band that I was never really sold […]

Oh how dearly I miss Strapping Young Lad. Their over the top extremity, and of course the ridiculous/hilarious lyrics of the madman Devin Townsend, I just can’t get enough. The announcement from Townsend that SYL would be going on extended hiatus was both shocking and severely disappointing, especially considering their (at the time) recent spike […]

I really hate writing reviews of albums that I find just ‘average’. There’s just nothing to say, whether it be good or bad. It’s easy to blather on about an album you absolutely love, and it’s also really easy to trash and pick apart the worst ones. With that said, here’s Before the Dawn’s Deadlight, […]

What exactly are they putting in the water in Finland? This is a question I ask myself repeatedly with each new band from there that I stumble upon. I don’t think I’ve heard a single band (OK, maybe one or two) from Finland that I haven’t liked to some degree, and The Scourger is one […]

Here’s Prosthetic’s entry into the thrash ‘revival’, Japan’s Grief of War, and their debut offering, A Mounting Crisis…As Their Fury Got Released. Originally, the album was released through a small label in Tokyo in 2005. As expected, it’s a complete trip back to the mid 80’s, mainly paying homage to early Slayer. Now, I know […]