Features

My review of the new Trivium album The Crusade is now up at Stylus.

My review of the new Ludicra album Fex Urbis Lex Orbis is now up at Stylus. It’s awesome, hands down one of my favorites of the year. I usually listen to music in headphones before I go to sleep; this album is one of the few I’m afraid to hear before bedtime. Not even the […]

Over the course of its three albums, Insomnium‘s sound hasn’t changed so much as matured. This Finnish band sounds like Paradise Lost doing Swedish melodic death metal, combining the majesty of the former with the pace of the latter. 2004’s Since the Day It All Came Down was pretty much perfect; Above the Weeping World […]

My look back at Prong’s Prove You Wrong is now up at Stylus.

Note to black metal bands: when playing live, turn down your damn kicks! We know you can play blastbeats. We came to hear some cold atmosphere, not a never-ending barrage of kick drums. If we wanted that, we’d go hear techno. I recently saw Keep of Kalessin open for Satyricon, and though the performance was […]

Pretty much everything Blackmarket puts out now is buy-on-sight, and Delenda is no exception. On its first album, From A Second Story Window greatly expands on the chaotic, dissonant metalcore of its Not One Word Has Been Omitted EP. The degree of maturation is shocking; it’s almost like a new band. This is due, perhaps, […]

The soundtrack for last year’s Masters of Horror series on Showtime seemed like a good idea – take new and unreleased songs from the hottest metal/metalcore/screamo/emo bands of the moment, spread the goods across two discs, and wrap the whole thing in nice packaging. So I picked up the soundtrack and put it into my […]

Good band, good label, solid album, rising buzz… then the band breaks up. I hate it when that happens. I’m talking about Fall River, a Pennsylvania band that put out an EP and an album, Lights Out (on Thorp). Matt Bayles (Mastodon, Isis, etc.) mixed the album, which had a vocal cameo by Sean Ingram […]

My review of the new Suffocation album is now up at Stylus.

Defiance was a band from Oakland, CA that came up in the Bay Area thrash heyday. The band put out three albums on Roadrunner subsidiary Roadracer, then morphed into groups called Inner Threshold and Under before disbanding in 1999. Interviews with the band (available at its well-kept website) offer a great inside look at the […]