death metal

Some time ago on her MySpace blog, Angela Gossow wrote, “I personally believe the last two Arch Enemy albums were too harmless. We got to get the grit, bite, speed and danger back into our music. Less controlled, more riffs, melodies, solos, different parts, breaks, sudden changes.” I couldn’t agree more. What frustrated me about […]

One thing Europe has that America doesn’t is girls who are into metal. At my first metal show (Enslaved) here in Berlin, I was astonished to find that 40% of the long hair there was in fact female. Each time I go to the record store, there’s at least one hot girl in the metal […]

The Mindless and Complete Stain (on Good Enough for the Escape) is the debut EP from Portuguese band The Ladder. It’s rough around the edges, as most debuts are, but it’s quite creative and exploratory. I’d be surprised if the band doesn’t find more widespread recognition soon. The Ladder’s sound is a little hard to […]

In terms of melody-to-brutality ratio, Dutch death metallers God Dethroned always struck me as kind of like Arch Enemy without the charisma. Their back catalogue was well-played and enjoyable enough, but nothing ever really grabbed me. However, The Toxic Touch (on Metal Blade) does. From the first note, the band is in complete control and […]

My review of Amon Amarth’s new album With Oden on Our Side is now up at Stylus.

This post owes its existence to Albert Mudrian, editor-in-chief of Decibel, in two ways. First, Nicke Andersson, who used to drum for Entombed and now sings for The Hellacopters, was inspired to return to death metal and form this band after reading Mudrian’s book Choosing Death: The Improbable History of Death Metal and Grindcore. Second, […]

Jared Anderson recently passed away at the tragically young age of 30. He was the bassist/vocalist on Morbid Angel’s Gateways to Annihilation tour and on Hate Eternal’s first two albums. He also had a solo project called Internecine, which released one album, 2002’s The Book of Lambs. On this album, Anderson handled bass, guitars, and […]

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

Gorod‘s debut, Neurotripsicks, was absolutely shredding, sounding like if Joe Satriani played lead guitar in Symbolic-era Death, with low death growls for the vocals. However, thin production hobbled the album somewhat. That’s definitely not the case with Leading Vision (on Willowtip), which has a deeper and beefier sound while retaining the clarity typical of Willowtip […]