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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 […]

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

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, […]

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 […]

My dual review of Norma Jean’s Redeemer and War of Ages’ Pride of the Wicked is now up at Stylus. You can read it here.

Across Tundras sound like if Sonic Youth lived out in the woods and jammed with Neil Young’s Crazy Horse. Some of the thicker distortion does suggest Hum or Neurosis, as the bio states, but the creaky, folksy feel of this Denver band places it closer to Pelican. Why Decibel and freakin’ Blabbermouth are covering this […]

Intronaut review is now up at Stylus.