poland

This week is Polish metal week at Invisible Oranges! It’s not intended as a definitive guide, as Encyclopaedia Metallum currently lists 1788 Polish metal bands (theoretically, a productive blog could focus on Polish metal alone). Instead, it’s more a result of noticing that many albums on my desk happened to be from Polish bands. The […]

Hateback Lifeline2005 No Heaven Awaits Us plays metalcore the way I like it – heavy on the metal. No bullshit, no technical nonsense, just riff after righteous riff, with death growls and bulletproof production. I could do without the requisite lyrics about hardcore punk, but when metal does lyrics about metal, it’s often awesome, so […]

The Hollow Men Lifeline2006 Given the volume of music that I review, I sometimes attach post-it notes to albums with short descriptions for reference. I’ve labeled this one “generic metalcore,” which must have been evidence of initial distaste. However, on further listening, I’ll disagree. Sure, In Twilight’s Embrace has the “Swedish riffs by a non-Swedish […]

Fallout Lifeline2006 I really shouldn’t like 13th Draft, but I do. Emo is pretty much its third strike after metalcore, but I find this Polish band’s debut EP oddly listenable. Mostly, it’s because the singer has a strange stubbornness to soldier on with screams even when choruses beg for the requisite clean singing. There are […]

SleepwalkersNightmare Lifeline2006 Alienacja’s Blades Shall Speak had some of the fiercest deathcore I’ve ever heard, so I had to find out more about its label. Evidently, Lifeline Records put out its first six releases at once last March. Not only that, each CD came in a beautiful three-panel digipak, with gorgeous, full-color booklets and top-spine […]

Dead End StreetBetween the Devil… Lifeline2006 Not only did Alienacja implode and Sunrise call it quits, Fall Behind also folded recently. Writing about defunct Polish metalcore bands somehow seems quite sad, but that’s the breaks. As far as I can tell, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea was the band’s only album. Truth […]

With Vader, you know exactly what you’re going to get – straight-up death metal. That’s indeed the case with Impressions in Blood (on Regain Records). However, don’t write it off as just another Vader album; it’s perhaps the band’s best ever, for a number of reasons. First is the drumming. “New” guy Daray has actually […]