20 Buck Spin hits another out-of-the-park homerun for 2023 with albums…yes, plural from California’s blackened death metal band Ulthar.  My first experience with Ulthar was seeing them on their debut album tour, Cosmovore, as they toured with Misery Index.  I became an Ulthar fan, picking up their cd and long sleeve shirt at the show. […]

Portland’s newcomers Idolatrous are here to answer the age-old question… what would it sound like if Amon Amarth were from Oregon and used epic keyboards/synths in their chunky form of Viking-based melo-death? Well, it sounds fucking amazing, and certainly, if you are a bit tired of Amon Amarth‘s tried and tested, safer last couple of […]

Here we are in 2023, 5 years after their last effort (2018s Reduced to Flesh) and these long-time thrashers from Denmark are now on their eleventh studio album.  Hatred Reborn is another in a long line of awesome death/thrash albums going all the way back to 2001’s self-titled debut.  Hatred Reborn also marks the debut […]

My first introduction to Symphonic Black Metal was Cradle of Filth’s Total Fucking Darkness, sent to me by a friend in England who happened to be Dani Filth’s roommate at the time. Small fucking world, right? Anyhoo, when the intro for “The Black Goddess Rises” started I couldn’t believe what I was hearing, mind you, […]

I haven’t listened to anything from Rogga Johannson (Wombbath, Revolting, Catacomb, Reek, Massacre, Paganizer, Ribspreader,  etc), in a while, so I thought id check the latest releases from his Furnace project (along with Catacomb bassist Peter Svensson), as its one I had not heard before. Big mistake….. as it was like a recovering drug addict […]

Swedish death metal played in the USA is more of a needle in a haystack type of deal.  California’s now-defunct Fatalist was one of the better USA type of bands and they had a short run, with minimal output but their material still owns. Trying to find another band that, captured that buzzsaw Swedish sound, […]

“Sweden’s Wretched Fate is a new band formed by members of melodic death metal band Non Divine Sun, and their debut album, Fleshletting is the album that Bloodbath should have released last year.” That paragraph above was the opening paragraph from my review of the 2019 Wretched Fate debut, Fleshletting. And with the band’s second album, Carnal Heresy, I’m feeling […]

Much like last year’s solid Inhuman Depravity album, Depraved Murder is a new-ish ( they had a debut back in 2015) band from an obscure country, where as soon as the album started playing, I know the primary influence immediately. But where Inhuman Depravity was from Turkey and was an obviously Sinister-loving band, Depraved Murder […]

UK’s long-running doom mavens, Paradise Lost have been a hit or a miss for me.  I’ll admit to being a tremendous fan of their first two albums Lost Paradise and Gothic mainly because of the doom/death/goth atmosphere, but after that, their material was a departure of that sound and just did not do it for […]

I get nostalgic for 90s and early 2000s Death Metal quite often. So many excellent bands and albums were spawned from those years that a list would literally wallpaper a house. So, as I listen to the debut from three quarters of Grief of Emerald, Death Reich, I go back to those special days of […]

Many bands choose the self-released route nowadays, and I’m opting to believe Shores of Null is one of them. They’re far too consistently superb to not have attracted some attention from the larger metal labels, such as Century Media, Season of Mist, or Nuclear Blast. Their 4th full-length, The Loss of Beauty reinforces this. Their […]

One could argue, that along with Distant’s Heritage, To the Grave‘s Director’s Cuts, Chelsea Grin‘s double album, and Suicide Silence’s newest, the debut from Ov Sulfur is up there as one of 2023’s early high-profile deathcore releases. Featuring former Suffokate vocalist Ricky Hoover (who has beefed up considerably in the 9 years since his Suffokate […]

Video game and D & D-obsessed,  Canadian husband and wife duo, Crown of Madness is back to follow up their enjoyable 2022 EP, The Void, and lay the final piece of groundwork for their upcoming full-length album. Continuing the Ulcerate-styled artful dissonance they created on The Void, Elemental Binding shows a duo in lockstep with […]

Kat Shevil Gillham is in yet another doom band, one of the bands she is the vocalist for heavy hitters Thronehammer, which is a personal favorite of mine.  For Nine Altars she does vocals and plays drums and this is the debut album, 3 songs at over 30 minutes..yes these are some long ass songs. […]

I cannot even begin to tell you how many false starts I’ve had with this review due to my ongoing writer’s block. However, when there’s something released that I believe in and know would have an impact if the right ears took a listen, I must push through it. If you didn’t know by now, […]

The second album from the duo of the excellently named vocalist/guitarist ‘Wolven Deadsoul’ and drummer E.H, was a completely blind grab for me. But when it threw around words like ‘Swedish death metal’, ‘Asphyx’, ‘Grave’,  ‘Benediction’, and such, I had to check it out despite the aggressively purple cover.. I was greeted with some excellent […]

There is only 1 Suicide Silence album I do not have in my collection and if you guessed it was their self-titled affair from 2017 you would be correct.  I am not a fan of that album or the musical direction they went in.  I was especially disappointed in it after they released the great […]

“While we all have lots of bands who influence still… we all rip off Meshuggah.” -Devin Townsend I mention this quote because, despite my opinion of them (I do not much like them, kind sir), their influence and impact on modern heavy metal cannot be overstated. This is not to say Entheos has or ever […]

War is hell. It has the power to change borders and boundaries, tear nations apart and displace millions at a time. What India’s  Sarcoptes has done with Prayers to Oblivion, is break down five aspects of war to create fifty minutes of thrashing, blackened military insanity. It’s an album that seems daunting at first, the […]

I initially grabbed this promo strictly due to the striking cover photo (courtesy of Tatiana Lebedeva), literally not knowing anything about the band or album, other than that it mentioned depressive and one-man black metal in the promo blurb. So with the band’s moniker, album title, and song titles like “I Choose to Die”, No […]

France’s tech-death metal gods, Gorod, return with The Orb – their seventh album.  Holy smokes I did not realize how time has flown by and the band is self-releasing this through Bandcamp. For me, the best tech-death metal bands are First Fragment, Gorod and Obscura.  I know, I know there’s like a bajillion of tech-death […]

I get to stare at possibly my best tattoo every day, which is for Skeletonwitch, which sometimes give me the skeleton itch. Meaning I want to hear new music from the boys. They’re from my hometown and mean a great deal to me, all of them lead different lives now, and getting music from them […]

Carathis is a one-man project helmed by one, Erech Leleth, who also serves in Grandeur as well as Ancient Mastery, Narzissus, and Golden Blood. He’s been pretty prolific since 2021 with a hand full of splits and EPs and Personal Records has taken two of his latest EPs, The Amethyst Fortress and The Moonstone Temple, […]

This collaboration of Obsequiae and Inexorum members has their take on Melodic Death Metal with elements of the Swedish scene – all wrapped up in a 90’s classic sound, that In Flames would be proud of…well this album kicks some major ass! With 10 songs in 39 minutes, “In Yearning, Alive”, starts abruptly, with a […]

In 1994, I was a twenty something working at Best Buy. We had received a copy of the Emperor/Enslaved massive split Hordanes Land and it caught my eye. I had no clue what Black Metal was, had never heard of the genre at all. Of course, Emperor comes first, and those four tracks alone had […]