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happymetalgirl · 4 years

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May 2020

Umbra Vitae - Shadow of Life

Converge frontman Jacob Bannon is so impressively artistically prolific, sometimes to his own detriment, that I am hardly surprised by the arrival of and results of Shadow of Life, a more death metal-oriented project that still has Converge’s DNA all over it. Still teeming with wild hardcore energy, Shadow of Life is really not all too different in approach from any of Converge’s most direct work, Bannon pulling from a different elemental this time. The project’s brevity works in its favor, but despite being so short, it feels quickly exhausted of its creativity. Converge is made great largely by the dynamic of the band’s direct metalcore aggression and the variety of curveballs they throw in, but Umbra Vitae reduces that to the raw aggression that sure hits hard, but becomes easy to predict after not too long.

6/10

Havok - V

So it’s not as good as Conformicide, but Havok still deliver the goods on their unfortunately unimaginatively named fifth LP. The band’s Megadeth-esque brand of politicallly charged thrash shredding certainly comes at a particularly apt time and the riffs they deliver indeed sound inspired and the performances ripe with frustrating at the various systems that got us to this seminal moment in history. David Sanchez’ piercing, throat-grating screams are as fierce and fiery as ever and impressive in how quickly he’s able to rattle some of his lines off, and the rest of the band remain tight and cohesive across the album’s eleven experience-crafted thrash tunes. Compositionally I feel like there aren’t as many individual high points within songs that made so many tracks on Conformicide such ferocious bangers, but the band certainly still show themselves to be a good few leagues above average when it comes to writing potent thrash. Where I wish the album went harder was the lyrics. Granted this came out right at the beginning of May, before the killing of George Floyd, and was probably recorded and written before if not early on in the pandemic, but it still feels like it could have gone for more than just the usual targets. I appreciate the band’s tackling of the crisis of credibility of modern media on “Post-Truth Era”, their explicit condemnation of the United States’ unhinged military bullying overseas on “Merchants of Death”, and their acknowledgement of the bias/lies of retelling of history by the powerful and how the lies get bigger over time, but I wish the band were this precise and cutting most of the time on this album because so much of its lyricism is super vague, sometimes in a kind of non-comittal way. The song “Fear Campaign” points out the various ingredients in a fascistic rise to authoritarianism happening right now, but it never moves beyond the usual thrash tropes of distrust of government and corporate media. Meanwhile songs like “Don’t Do It” speak just a bit too generally of social despair to pack much of a lyrical punch, while the lyrics to the track “Phantom Force”, whole not particularly offensive, just repetitive paranoid gibberish. It’s not directly related to the music, but it doesn’t help that the band, who have built their identity so heavily on musical political commentary have been rather quiet in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the sharp heightening of the volatility of the political climate. You could argue it shouldn’t impact their music, but it does suggest that they’re intentionally trying to maintain a level of ambiguity in their railing against the system that will allow anyone to read their own ideology into certain crevices, an approach to artistic sociopolitical critique that isn’t really right for this time. Despite that criticism, I still quite enjoy this album for its continuation of the hypercharged thrash the band has been doing so well.

8/10

Green Carnation - Leaves of Yesteryear

Joining the ranks of recently reawakened bands, Green Carnation returns from their fourteen-year slumber with a five-track slab of their trusty slightly gothic/doomy prog and for the most part it goes pretty well. The band’s performances are solid and it sounds like they never even left. The album likes to sway between melancholic (but not entirely hopeless) forms of gothic sorrow and slower classic heavy metal forms of inspiring melody much like Khemmis, Spirit Adrift, or even Pallbearer. I’d say the opening title track is the example most rife with sweet guitar melody that hits this spot well, and while the rest of the album isn’t a drastic drop in quality, the band definitely hit with their best shot first, and overall make a pretty worthwhile comeback.

6/10

Vader - Solitude in Madness

The Polish death metal icons are on their twelfth album now and at this point for them it’s just a matter of proving to themselves that they’re worthy of their status as aforementioned icons of the genre. At this point their solid and consistent discography speaks for itself and justifies the band’s similarly consistent approach. While never being one for overly lengthy projects, Vader’s twelfth is one of their shortest projects to date, not even breaking the half-hour mark, but making great use of its brief runtime nonetheless with vibrant, pummeling performances and just enough compositional dynamic to bring out the quality in everyone’s performances. Sure it’s kind of predictably direct, but that has been Vader’s MO for decades and it continues to deliver ripe, juicy organic death metal, so I’m fine with them not changing their style up with how well they can consistently conjure a half hour or so of sufficiently exciting and potent death metal. What they decline in stylistic evolution they continue to make up for in raw, experienced, and expressive performances, and Solitude in Madness is just another example of it.

7/10

Chaos over Cosmos - II

Dazzling with proggy guitar technicality again on this quick response to last year’s EP, Chaos over Cosmos take another diversion on the vocal front, with the vocals on this album being both much less present and more predominantly unclean. The third track “One Hundred” is probably the standout cut of the four tracks here, layering on the synths and the whispered passages between space-traversing guitar leads. I still think the band could work on making the production a little more crisp and the compositions maybe a little more frequently injected with flair, but I definitely think they’re on the right foot going forward.

6/10

Witchcraft - Black Metal

Going the route of Thou on Inconsolable, Swedish doom occultists Witchcraft bust out an entirely acoustic album quite fit in its ultra depressing tone for these ultra depressing (or enraging) times. Taking such a minimalist approach does pose a bit of a gamble for any band used to a more bulky instrumental arsenal on the make-up-less appeal of the performances at the core of their ethos. Thou absolutely nailed it, and I’d say that Witchcraft are pretty successful here as well, for just how committed to potent acoustic depression Black Metal is. It’s a bit heavy handed at some moments, but for the most part it’s a well-measured half hour of candid sorrow at a rather fitting time for it.

7/10

Tortuga - Deities

I feel like at this point, I’ll give any band points for playing stoner doom and only half sounding like a Black Sabbath rip-off, and Tortuga definitely earn those points. This album actually released on the first day of the new year, but I didn’t hear about it until now, and I figure it’s worth propping up. Deities is the Polish outfit’s sophomore full-length after their eponymous debut in 2017 (which I also missed of course), and it is definitely a breath of fresh air for the genre it represents. Relying not on monotonous Iommi-imitation to carry otherwise thin compositions, Tortuga follow their own uniquely ambient approach to the genre that focuses more on building a dense atmosphere and mood with the thick, hazy guitars and rumbling bass lines than on numbed, bong-worshipping psychedelia. We get a few of the other staple elements of the genre: wild effects-pedal psychedelia, lyrics about mythical Lovecraftian monsters, and audio samples of old-timey Christian fundamentalist preachers fear-mingering about drugs; but none of it sounds contrived or unoriginal. Deities sounds like if Dopethrone-era Electric Wizard had a little more atmospheric dynamic and less on-the-nose Sabbath worship. Granted the vocals on Deities aren’t as fuzzed the fuck out and the bulk of the album is not dedicated to pissed-off, drugged-out, gargantuan heaviness, but it sure is a solid album in the path it walks for itself.

8/10

...and Oceans - Cosmic World Mother

Despite checking all the productional and stylistic boxes for a modern death metal record, Cosmic World Mother offers not very much in the way of anything compositionally or aesthetically unique or exciting. It feels almost like it’s just embodiment of the Emperor/Behemoth-inspired wing of the genre as a hive mind just on autopilot. The band crank out a few brief highlight motifs here and there, the occasional epic pairing of synthetic strings and tremolo-picked guitars, but most of the album is (while competent, no doubt) pretty one-note and predictable in a way that really only becons repeated listens to make sure you’re really sure you’re not missing anything from the homogeneous blend of songs together you remember from your last attempt to stay attentive through it.

6/10

ACxDC - Satan Is King

After a long road to their debut album back in 2014, grindcore stalwarts ACxDC finally follow up with a worthy sophomore effort this year, during which time Full of Hell have happily risen to the occasion on at least two stellar modern grindcore full-length (as loaded of a term as that is for grindcore) releases. But the L.A. quartet is back and quite fired up in the midst of the sociopolitical turmoil that we’ve all been submerged in. While more traditional in its instrumentation, not as laced with industrial noise elements as Full of Hell’s music tends to be, ACxDC captures a similarly powerviolence-adjacent thrashing intensity and the band do not take their foot off the gas at all throughout the 23-minute affair. The guitars blare with a shout all their own and chug with the kind of mechanically smashing crunch found in modern death metal, the drums and the bass lines are never over-the-top in terms of speed or technicality with the band opting more often for synchronized hardcore punches than grinding through blast beats, which probably puts this album deeper into powerviolence territory than I initially let on. And Sergio Amalfitano’s vocals shift from intense death howls and growls to fast-paced blackened hardcore shrieking with respectable fruidity, probably not as erratically as Dylan from Full of Hell, but certainly quite capably. I’ve been turning to a lot of intensely aggressive and violent metal in these infuriating times, particularly grindcore, and Satan Is King has been a solid addition to that alongside the new WVRM and Caustic Wound albums.

8/10

Old Man Gloom - Seminar VIII: Light of Meaning

The prequel to the band’s previously released full-length this year (Seminar IX: Darkness of Being) finds them in an even more esoteric vein than what they were in back in March. Oscillating between Sumac-esque sludge (which Aaron Turner’s vocals make those parts of the album featuring them all the more uncannily similar to) with subtle experimental flair and more modern-Mastodon/Isis-esque sludgy post-metal to full-on noise music experimentation, the band’s “eighth” “seminar” at the very least makes for a dynamic and interesting listen. Some of the band’s exhibitions in certain styles don’t really do much convincing for their branching off into those directions; some of the noise passages feel kind of like waiting at a traffic meter for a more invigorating portion of the album to kick in, as do some of the less-imaginative sludgy sections. But for what the collective do with their array of experiences, influences, and artistic instincts they come through with more hits than misses, I’d say. The longest track on the album, “Final Defeat” is impressively cohesive in its amalgamation of so many sonic elements. though the subsequent and similarly lengthy “Calling You Home” is an example of the other side of that coin, dragging and uneventful. It’s worth at least a cursory listen for its eccentricity alone, it may vibe with you even more than me, if not, at least it’s an interesting meeting of various creative minds in the post-metal sphere.

7/10

Xibalba - Años en Infierno

Offering an especially weighty slab of sludgy/doomy death metal with some tasteful streaks of hardcore and sludge metal mixed in to the dense swirl, Xibalba bring slow-churning, bulky death metal to the conversation of the various injustices and catastrophes of this year, and the band’s hardcore energy and knack for pummeling rhythms in that vein are exactly the kind of pissed off that such an album as Años en Infierno needs. And that hardcore compositional approach and/or mindset means that Años en Infierno is no homogeneously sluggish record; Xibalba pick up the tempo for rapid-fire hits of deathly hardcore punches and slow down to wind up for devastating finishing blows all with magnificent smoothness. Whether trudging through thick, filthy riff sludge like a massive beast stomping its way through a knee-deep muddy battlefield on slow burners like “La Injusticia” and the doom-laden “El Abismo, Pt. 1” or like that same muscular hulk sprinting on dry land on songs like “Santa Muerte” and “En la Oscuridad”, Xibalba are an organic, brutish force in all the ways I like my death metal and hardcore to be, at the same time.

8/10

Behemoth - A Forest

Named after the cover of The Cure’s “A Forest”, Behemoth’s EP-sized mark on 2020 is ultimately a mild one. Intended clearly to show a more eccentric side of the band with the theatrically tortured guest vocals from Niklas Kvarforth of Shining, the band’s cover of the titular track is really not all that wild for a band who came up from raw shitty black metal roots and traversed their way through blackened death metal to the biblical glory of The Satanist; the band have already shown their vast capacity for branching out from and expanding death metal and black metal, and this cover of The Cure happens to be just a more clumsy, rather than illuminating, display of that ambition. It’s not a terrible cover or a poor representation of Behemoth’s ambition, but I don’t think it’s quite the grand statement the band is making it out to be. The same can be said of the redundant inclusion of the live cut of the cover song. As for the other two tracks on here, “Shadows ov Ea Cast upon Golgotha” (which kind of drags and meanders with no real direction) and the more fast-paced “Evoe” (which is at least a lot more fastinstrumentally vibrant), both are solid enough cuts that sound very well like they could have come from the I Loved You at Your Darkest sessions, though not surprisingly notably below par for that course, much less the high bar of The Satanist, which ultimately makes this kind of a benign addiction to Behemoth’s catalogue.

6/10

Helfró - Helfró

This actually came out in April, but I’m late as it is so what the hell, hailing from the small, but mythic black metal scene of Iceland, Reykyavík’s Helfró make quite the standout statement with their self-titled debut record here. At a modest thirty-seven minutes, Helfró is a stinging and searing, but also impressively aggressively balanced display of black metal and blackened death venom. The guitar riffs are sharp and cutting when they need to be and also quite full-bodied while able to keep up with the high-flying tempo set by the double-bass-blast-beat drumming to capture the delirious hysteria of . The band takes their attack from the icy piercing of mountaintop blizzards of speed and distorted dissonance to fiery rumbles of hellishly low guitars and demonic bellows of damnation, and all with such control and gracefullness; I am all for it! This is a hell of a debut record and I will certainly be looking for more from Helfró to come.

8/10

Asking Alexandria - Like a House on Fire

After being completely put off by the band’s self-titled album a couple years ago, I have not returned to Asking Alexandria at all since then, until now with Like a House on Fire. Honestly, I was kind of expecting some sort of response from the band after such a light and messy album to prove to people like me that they can excel with heavy music still, and I mean the only way to go was up after the catastrophe that was the band’s self-titled album, right? Well I was wrong in the kind of response the band came through with; doubling down instead on their departure from metalcore, Asking Alexandria go all in on pop rock and arena rock in a way that I suppose constitutes a mild improvement, but not a justification for their doubling down. The band bit off way more than they could stylistically chew as they clumsily try to chameleon their way into several styles of pop rock. The class consciousness anthem “They Don’t Want What We Want (And They Don’t Care)” and the alternative metal power ballad “In My Blood” offer a brief glimmer of hope for some vital, conscious arena rock for the album, but the shitty motifs and writing decisions don’t take long to follow. With its gratingly annoying vocal riff, “Down to Hell” sounds like a rejected 2000’s Shinedown song (or a 2010’s Shinedown song). “I Don’t Need You” is a glam rock ballad brough to the 21st century with a knock-off-Halsey feature before “Take Some Time” comes through with more annoying vocal wooing. If not outright awful, Like a House on Fire is most often just aggravatingly wash-rinse-repeat boring and banking on current pop rock trends that Asking Alexandria don’t even have a great handle on. Danny Warsnop’s clean vocals and uncomfortable attempts at coming across sultry are especially hard to listen to, as are the completely out of place and unmeshed EDM elements that pop in and out of various tracks. I wasn’t the biggest fan of Bring Me the Horizon’s last album’s blatant pop campaigning, but holy shit at least they were competent and showed they could handle the variety of styles they implemented. Asking Alexandria are clearly trying a similar angle here but they’re not capable of mimicking Shinedown and Imagine Dragons better than either of those bands, and that’s saying something.

2/10

Revenge - Strike.Smother.Dehumanize

Coming up among all the great new grindcore I’ve been finding these past few months, Revenge bring a distinct blackened edge to the brutish force of grindcore and powerviolence. While a pretty effectively churning grind of manic drumming, chaotic bass lines, and jagged guitar galloping, Strike.Smother.Dehumanize is one of the more homogeneous grindcore records I’ve heard this year, spiced up mostly by the artificially low-rumbling toilet bowl growls (that do lose their novelty before the album’s finish) and the consistent individual flair brought by each members’ performances. But compositionally, the band doesn’t really abide by much more than the usual grindcore mantra of constant intensity, but at that it sure is successful.

7/10

Bleed from Within - Fracture

The fifth album from Glasgow’s Bleed from Within brings such a pedestrian and unambitious of a forty-two-minute offering of melodic metalcore as seemingly possible. It’s just like the definition of a baseline, C-grade performance with passable performances of predictable resortings to of metalcore’s most trodden out tropes; like I saw the opening track’s title, “The End of All We Know”, and I knew exactly how that chorus was gonna go before I even heard it. For its few sick breakdowns like those on “Pathfinder” and “Utopia”, there’s just so much more filler generic metalcore (and some completely unsatisfying breakdowns too) to get through. I’ll give Ali Richardson credit for coming through with some impressive double-bass syncopation that sometimes breaks from the metalcore mold to give the music som brief flashes of being more than ignorable metalcore, and I’ll acknowledge the considerable gusto of Scott Kennedy’s vocal performance across the album as its most consistent positive feature, but it’s not enough to make me eager to return to Fracture as a whole or even throw any tracks into my workout playlist.

5/10

Okkultokrati - La Ilden Lyse

In their prolific first decade or so of action, Okkultokrati have done a decent job injecting grimy hardcore crust punk and a head-turning variety of other styles into the kvlt black metal of their Oslo hometown. After nearly four years of crafting since their most aesthetically ambitious effort to date, Raspberry Dawn, La Ilden Lyse is a bit of a regressive and stylistically reductive letdown after its lush and fascinating predecessor. The production of the black metal elements is much cleaner now, but the trade-off isn’t worth it, especially given that the fuzzier production of the previous albums kind of partially contributed to the unique aesthetic the band cultivated. I don’t know what the point was of going more traditional/typical this time around, but the band certainly aren’t making a stronger case for themselves by blending in MORE with their contemporaries. I hope this is just a one-off and the band get back to making more interesting black metal again soon.

5/10

Alestorm - Curse of the Crystal Coconut

I said in my review of Alestorm’s previous album that I am continuously amazed at how the pirate metal masters are able to keep finding material in their super specific vein, especially with how fresh 2017’s No Grave But the Sea sounded while returning to the more “traditional” sound that characterized the band’s debut album. Somewhat unsurprisingly, Curse of the Crystal Coconut finds the band playing around with their sound a bit in a similar way to what they did on Sunset on the Golden Age, and I would say this year’s effort to grow their sound went a good bit better than it did on that aforementioned preceding album. The band are as irreverent in their wacky sea shanty storytelling as ever (and I wouldn’t have it any other way), though they bring a few “futuristic” (for pirates’ times) elements to the table here, which a folk metal purist could certainly argue are blasphemously out of place on a record about pirate life, but if you’re a purist like that I doubt you’re listening to a sixth Alestorm LP to begin with. I actually think the band did well to make these new elements a part constructive to the overall campy aesthetic of their sound. Opening the canon hatches is “Treasure Chest Party Quest” with a hedonistic schlock rock mission statement that sounds like if Kansas were a bunch of Viner douchebags, but moving into the melodic shanty “Fannybaws” right out of the gate reaffirms the band’s folk metal chops. But it’s the introduction of hip hop elements on “Tortuga” that shows Alestorm is here to sail pirate metal to the farthest corners of the seven seas as they can; the band’s foray into trap territory under the influence of this lighthearted and loveable ambition with Captain Yarrface on this track is honestly impressive. And the band’s experimentation doesn’t end there, with “Zombies Ate My Pirate Ship” also featuring the unexpectedly beautiful vocal feature from Patty Gurdy. All these modern music elements made me ponder the possibility of a modern, internet-pirate-themed Alestorm record; perhaps someday... Beyond just the introduction of electronic elements, the thrashy folk bangers like “Chomp Chomp” and “Pirate’s Scorn” are welcome shots of liquor to jolt the album into pirate eager mode while melodic folk metalcore bangers like he nonsensically gorgeous “Zombies Are My Pirate Ship” are surprisingly invigorating. The quick metaphoric jab at the band’s imitators (or detractors) on “Shit Boat (No Fans)” is a good bit of fighting pirate spirit breaking the fourth wall creatively. There’s also the ridiculously overly epic sequel to the fast-chanting nonsense track, “Wooden Leg”, from Sunset on the Golden Age, whose conclusion is so beautifully stupid *chef’s kiss*. Honestly, I needed this album so badly this year, and I’m glad Alestorm came through with such a fun expansion pack of pirate metal tunes.

8/10

Sorcerer - Lamenting of the Innocent

I don’t know what happened. I loved this album the first time I heard it, but my enjoyment with every subsequent listen since then has been significantly diminished. Perhaps I was just appreciative of the dose of classic heavy metal with tasteful modern production updates to liven up my repertoire of new albums to listen to. As grand, nostalgic, and even 2000’s-Maiden-esque as Sorcerer’s sixth album is, I can’t help but feel at least somewhat distracted by how heavily derivative it is of the NWOBHM, even as it takes some cues from Candlemass and Dream Theater to elevate its grandiosity through proggy, epic doom metal. Now all those influences do combine into a generally effective and exciting aesthetic, and I do think the core sound the band have tapped into is potent and worth chasing, as evidenced by songs like “Institoris” and “Dance with the Devil”, but that sound at its best doesn’t show up in full enough on this album. Lamenting of the Innocent is hampered so heavily by its length and the proportion of that length that is comprised of filler balladry like “Deliverance” or the just slightly too dragged out “Where Spirits Die” and unnecessary repetition that draws out even the better parts of the album like the title track. For all this nit-picking, I feel like I should at least emphasize that I do still quite like this album for its solid performances, especially Anders Engberg’s tactful operatic vocals and the distinctly NWOBHM-style duel-guitar soloing from Kristian Niemann and Peter Hallgren. I do hope that Sorcerer do continue to distill their sound down to its best elements because I could see them being a shining beacon for the continued reverence for the era of heavy metal they so heavily emulate.

7/10

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happymetalgirl · 4 years

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February 2020

After a slow, but solid, start to the new decade last month, February sure picked the pace back up with a ton more releases. As usual though, the early month has seen a few more filler albums pushed out without the bands’ labels stirring up much of hype around them, and for some of it, you can see why. We got several more solid projects though that have me excited for what else their associated record labels have in store for the rest of the year. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves here, there’s plenty to talk about for February, starting with Sepultura.

Sepultura - Quadra

Machine Messiah was the first album I reviewed for this blog, and in that review I made note of the silliness ongoing complaining about this Sepultura lineup not being the “real” Sepultura by fans who still clamor for Max to come back or for the current lineup to retire the Sepultura name. As the size of the Derek Green era discography gradually dwarfs the Max era catalog, Sepultura fans gradually come to accept that the past is the past and this is Sepultura now. And the mild contrast between Sepultura’s output as old late and Max’s creative output through Soulfly, Cavalera Conspiracy, and Killer Be Killed hasn’t really shown any major gulf in class between the estranged artists. Sepultura may not be putting out successive critically acclaimed masterpieces, but they sure have maintained a greater ambition for grander sounds and concepts than Max, who, by contrast, has come through with some solid projects himself, but has largely repeatedly retread the tribal nu metal ground of Roots and tried to give the death metal he practiced with Sepultura some modern updates, with mixed results. Machine Messiah found Sepultura weaving proggy and orchestral elements into their modern form of death metal with respectable success, and the band’s ninth album with Derek Green is a solid continuation of the styles and aesthetics that the band had been evolving into on and leading up to Machine Messiah. Quadra, though, I think just lacks a bit of that creative spark that its predecessor had. It splits the band’s compounded sonic evolution into its main parts by going through sections of thrashy songs, groovy songs, slightly experimental songs, and more moody melodic songs, and it makes for a nice flow to the album, but it feels like each part is missing some of the others while also not going all-in quite enough to make the splitting up of their stylistic components worth it. Again, it’s still solid, just not blowing me away.

6/10

Ihsahn - Telemark

Kind of an odd one here, just a quick five-track EP: three originals and two covers. The first of two EPs to come this year from the Emperor frontman and black metal progressive progenitor finds him largely continuing in short form the slightly blackened prog-rock he had going on on Ámr. The opening track, “Stridig”, rides this mostly continuous guitar rumble over a few intriguing proggy passages while Ihsahn snarls in classic fashion. On the vocal front, his style is raspy and distinctly black metal, but he keeps the roughness on his throat to a minimum to not overpower the instrumentation around him and to make more potent use of melody with his vocals. The second track, “Nord”, introduces a few little modern Opeth-isms and some subtle horn accents to up the prog factor as the EP gets a little lighter. The title track in the middle of the record really goes to prog town even more dramatically than the previous two and takes with the horns with it. With covers of Lenny Cravitz’ “Rock & Roll Is Dead” (which sounds like it wouldn’t be too far off from a Marilyn Manson cover if he also decided to cover the song) and “Wrathchild” by Iron Maiden rounding the album, Ihsahn continues his use of raspy vocal tones and meager black metal rasp over the rock and metal classics while giving the Maiden cut a sweet extra flair with the brilliant addition of a little horn section. It’s a splendid little addition to Ihsahn’s solo catalog and a continuation of his proggy vision for his brand of black metal.

7/10

Intronaut - Fluid Existential Interventions

I have kind of long seen Intronaut as the heir apparent to Isis, with their spacy, sludgy brand of post-metal taking that of the post-metal godfathers’ into more proggy territories, and the L.A.-based trio have gradually grown more into their skin over the past few records, taking , and with The Direction of Last Things having been released almost five years ago, I was starting to get a little worried about if they’d hung it up for some reason. The band shows that the longer break has not dampened their boldness or creativity as they pick up right where they left off with the marriage of gargantuan sludge heaviness and ethereal post-metal atmosphere. The band get a little Meshuggah-type jazz fusion going on in the song “The Cull” and keep that jazzy flow going on the spacy sections of “Contrapasso”, while getting infectiously headbangingly groovy on “Pangloss”. I love the ways the band finds to shift in so many different directions so smoothly. I’d say though that the repetition of smooth movements in similar directions from song to song continue to be the band’s Achilles heel, sometimes really needing some kind of X factor or some kind of compositional surprise to break their cycles in these songs so as to not feel so circlular. The groovy riffage on “Pangloss” is probably the closest the band comes to diverting from their post-metallic mould, and as much as I love it there, I wish there was more. It’s a strong effort from them nevertheless, but I hope the band don’t take so long to progress in this vein on their next album.

7/10

Napalm Death - Logic Ravaged by Brute Force

With a new record on the way this year, I’m sure happy to get a little appetizer from the grindcore legends in the form of this two-song EP. The first song, the titular “Logic Ravaged by Brute Force” kicks off on a melodic brooding note, but quickly ramps up into the band’s famous high grinding death gear. It’s a pretty solid track, just a bit lacking in aggressive pay-off during the choruses, the verses constantly bringing the tempo down. But it’s definitely the kind of Napalm Death song that fixated on its melodic brooding mood and its titular hook, not necessarily representative of the band’s whole catalog or the album to come. The second track of the two, the cover of Sonic Youth’s “White Kross”, is a bit more of a burner, but it fits quite well into that mould for that kind of Napalm Death track like “Omnipresent Knife in Your Back” that could work as an album closer as well.

It’s just two songs and you want a number? Come on./10

Anvil - Legal at Last

The long-running Canadian outfit’s previous album, Pounding the Pavement, served little more than a reminder of why they never ascended to the heights of thrash metal during that genre’s peak of cultural relevance, and I have not revisited that record since re-listening to it to figure out exactly where to place it on the year’s worst-of list. The bar has never been super high for Anvil, and Pounding the Pavement really made it seem like the only way to go was up. The corny cover art to this follow-up here, though, didn’t give me much hope, and it sure isn’t much of an improvement. As with any Anvil project, the lyrics on Legal at Last are malignantly atrocious, and any attempt to enjoy the album is going to have to overcome the serious hurdle of tuning out some of the dumbest lyrics that sound like they were lifted from a high-schooler’s math notebook. I, again, kind of went into the project not expecting much, and knew I was going to hear some truly cringy bars. The “Chemtrails” song, nevertheless, manages to astound me with its ridiculously stupid lyricism feeding into the titular conspiracy theory seemingly unironically. Nice one guys. I’ll say, the band at least kind of redeem themselves with their pointing out the obvious corruption surrounding the fossil fuel industry and government surveillance. Anyway, predictably shitty lyrics aside, the band channel the same Motörhead-esque proto-thrash they’ve channeled their whole career with similar compositional predictability and lack of imagination, and it tires really quickly. And there really isn’t much to say about it musically. The riffs here, I’d say, are marginally better than those on Pounding the Pavement, and this album at least slightly more tangibly fun than its even more bumbling predecessor.

4/10

Sylosis - Cycle of Suffering

For some reason I didn’t quite like this album when I first heard it, and what an idiot I was in that moment, because damn this album is solid! Blending thrash with some technical death metal much like Revocation and knowing when to inject a little metalcore rhythm, Sylosis have come through with a ferocious and pummeling, but melodically nimble record that channels pure thrash aggression in every direction it travels. The band works in rewarding thrash breakdowns in songs like “Arms Like a Noose” and gripping harsh vocal melodies on songs like “Idle Hands”, and all sorts of little touches that only make the compositions more and more intense; I think this may be their best effort yet!

8/10

God Dethroned - Illuminati

The trajectory of blackened death metal has really been impossible to separate from Behemoth’s highly influencial landmark album, The Satanist, with bands in the field all aware and taking cues from the Polish juggernauts on how to size up the already-mammoth-y style to biblical proportions. And while they still have their instinctive old-school death metal war-like brutishness showing through on songs like the title track, God Dethroned seem to be more willingly working in ethereal choirs and . Songs like “Spirit of Beelzebub”, “Eye of Horus”, and “Gabriel” show a clear Behemoth influence wrapping itself around the band; the intro of “Broken Halo” is perhaps the clearest tribute or rip-off of “Ov Fire and the Void” I have ever heard, and the song only continues to expound on the integration of Behemoth’s style into God Dethroned’s. As nice as the alternating mesh of old and new for the band is aesthetically, there are a few too many bland, filler cuts on here like “Book of Lies” and “Satan Spawn” weighing down the more excitingly volatile tracks with dragging performances that can only sound so good over such dry compositions.

6/10

Five Finger Death Punch - F8

Ivan Moody did a little phone interview with Loudwire prior to this album’s release and his assessment of his band’s recent output was actually pretty sober and realistic. Along with detailing the mental health benefits that have come with his newly committed sobriety (which I am genuinely happy about for him) Moody admitted that the band’s past two albums (And Justice for None and Got Your Six) have not been very special, and he’s right. He even said that the band’s double album pair was bloated and should have been trimmed down to one album, and he’s definitely right. He stated that he felt that the band has been in a rut for awhile and expressed a rejuvenated desire to make music that isn’t so here-today-gone-tomorrow, and he’s right about that. And he said that on this album, F8, the band really stepped it up and improved their craft to finally make something special again, and that’s where his hot streak of correctness ends. Don’t get me wrong, he’s partially right about F8 being better than the past two albums, but that’s not a very high bar to clear. I was very critical of And Justice for None when it came out in 2018 and I agree that it and Got Your Six are without a doubt the band’s worst albums, and that is saying something because they were on a downward slide for a long time and it wasn’t very surprising the way they bottomed out so badly on those two albums. While I don’t think the improvement was quite as dramatic as he made it out to be, I will say that I can see what Moody was talking about with the refined songwriting on F8, it really does seem like the band tried to inject a little more boldness into their writing and their performances have a bit more of a sense of purpose this time around. The band gives us a few glimpses of their younger selves with returns to The Way of the Fist heaviness on a couple songs, and even though they still don’t have the best track record for ballads, the few mellow tracks on F8 are certainly better than the past two albums’. On that subject, the track sequencing on F8 isn’t quite so disjointed and awkward as it was on And Justice for None. But again, the improvements still aren’t as dramatic as Ivan Moody might see them. The band still don’t really break out of their box too much; it’s not so much an album of them finally getting them out of their creative rut as it is an album of them slowly making their way out of that rut or getting them more capable in that rut. Again, it is a noteworthy enough improvement over the past two (or four even) albums’ drivel, but it’s not quite a full return to form. Hopefully this gets them back in the right direction though if it’s not too late.

4/10

Blaze of Perdition - The Harrowing of Hearts

The Polish quartet’s fifth full-length is another set of solid modern occult black metal with just enough of a sense of atmosphere and emotional rawness lifted from blackgaze. I certainly wouldn’t call this an atmospheric black metal album, but the band does venture into those more ethereal realms of black metal too. They do well to maintain their intensity throughout it too, as the atmospheric elements serve to create a more expansive and grand feel to the music rather than just breaking up and diluting the darker, heavier aspects.

7/10

Sightless Pit - Grave of a Dog

After a pretty big past few years for them, Lingua Ignota mastermind Kristen Hayter, The Body’s Lee Clifford, and Full of Hell frontman Dylan Walker teamed up for a seemingly casual dark-ambient-noise-venture to kick the decade off. I’m contrast to the extreme abrasiveness most of these artists peddle through their main projects, Grave of a Dog remains predominantly ambient until Dylan Walker’s distorted-noise-backed screams on “Drunk on Marrow” usher in the industrial noise of “Miles of Chain” and “Whom the Devil Long Sought to Strangle” being the standout exceptions. I enjoy Kristen Hayter’s ever-languishing operatic vocals across the album, especially on the minimal, piano-driven closing track and on “Violent Ruin”, on which the trio play with some autotune on her voice that actually comes out nicely. But for the most part, this album is so casually below all these artists’ punching weight, it’s no doubt just a quick bonus album project for all three of them that I’m sure pales in comparison to their past and future releases.

6/10

Insect Ark - The Vanishing

With clear influences from avant-garde elites like Sumac, Deathspell Omega, and Neurosis seeping through the pores of this album, Dana Schechter continues to refine Insect Ark’s spooky, psychedelic brand of instrumental doom metal with the help of newly-recruited drummer Andy Patterson’s well-tempered percussive accents to give the brooding songs more than just a steady anesthetized heartbeat, but also a newly percussive sense of punch. And the two gel in artistic partnership in such an seemingly innate way you would think they’d have been bandmates for years. The Vanishing, again, continues to hone the spacy, darkly ambient metallic psychedelia Insect Ark has carved out a niche for, floating from unnerving oppressive heaviness to eerie drones of dark, brassy ambiance with ease and confidence. I definitely respect and recommend this one highly.

8/10

Godthrymm - Reflections

Godthrymm is the offshoot project of a couple of former members of My Dying Bride, and Reflections is the trio’s first full length project together after a couple of EPs (from which a few songs on this album are pulled) that gave me mixed anticipations for this full-length. A Grand Reclamation in 2018 sounded very prototypic and derivative of Candlemass without the crucial bombast to back it up, but the band made some strides on 2019’s Dead in the Studio that clearly piqued Profound Lore’s interest, with much more melodically compelling songs like “We Are the Dead” and “Cursed Are the Many” making it into this LP. The band had a more I like the emotive Spirit-Adrift-esque guitar melodies that “The Sea as My Grave” incorporates and the more straightforward funeral dirge of “The Light of You”, and the band even improved the originally amateurish “The Grand Reclamation” from the first EP greatly with a more professional vocal performance and better drum accents. Still, much of the melody on here is not enough to really conjure any strong emotions and the grand doom the album shoots for isn’t quite as epic as it should be as a result. The band did well to improve upon their first efforts together, but I think they do still have a way to go.

6/10

The Amity Affliction - Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them

I didn’t totally hate The Amity Affliction’s pop-oriented direction on 2018′s Misery, but I didn’t like it much either (granted they’ve never really been my style), and I wonder if fans felt similarly about the stylistic drift because Everyone Loves You... Once You Leave Them is a definitive return to the band’s roots that, while still not entirely for me, I can definitely appreciate more than Misery. The band’s older sound that makes its way into this album is proportionally much more metalcore than the sound they trended toward on Misery, and even though I still don’t find the pop-punk-ish vocal style and melody writing to be a very fitting compliment to the early 2000’s metalcore the band rides instrumentally, I can much more clearly see the appeal this time around and enjoy a greater portion of the tracks here.

5/10

Kvelertak - Splid

Norwegian alchemists Kvelertak have been eccentrically fusing punk at varying degrees of hardcore and rock ‘n’ roll with black metal for four albums now and they’ve been pretty damn successful at it the whole time so at this point it’s a matter of what the band do with their established style, how far they can take what they already, and how much expanding they have to do to keep it sustainable. Splid shows that the band’s answer to all those questions is “yes, we can”. While much of the vibrant novelty of the self-titled debut and Meir has worn off, what’s left is a band showing that they are indeed more than an attention-grabbing novelty act and can keep their style going beyond that initial excitatory period. Stylistically Splid only occasionally draws from new-ish territory, occasionally going significantly light-spirited and even dancy, but otherwise it’s pretty much the Kvelertak we know and hopefully love, maybe some of that initial charm is a little worn and sensible through the compositional repetition, but sure as hell not to the point where it’s not a good time.

7/10

Frigoris - ...in Stille

Germany’s Frigoris continue to struggle to set themselves apart from the ambient black metal pack, which they present themselves as little more than a statistic in the growing homogeneity of the genre with all the baseline competence to pass but nothing stylistically or compositionally unique or forward-thinking.

5/10

殞煞 Vengeful Spectre - 殞煞 Vengeful Spectre

Blending ambient elements of traditional Chinese folk music into the atmosphere of Deafheaven-esque blackgaze (the vocals being some of the closest I have ever heard to George Clarke’s) this anomaly of a self-titled debut from 殞煞 Vengeful Spectre is a fantastic way to enter the fold for the Guangdong outfit, establishing a signature style early and with impressive genre-blending competence. I am eager to hear what this band has in store for the future.

8/10

Tombs - Monarchy of Shadows

A pretty sizeable EP from the Brooklyn-based four-piece, Monarchy of Shadows gives a pretty concise and tasty portrait of the band’s crushing Gorgoroth-esque black metal that sacrifices hardly any heaviness for its dissonant atmosphere. The compositions get a little repetitive as the EP draws on though, which does do a harsh number on the project’s otherwise consistently solid aesthetic. Luckily the more death metal-infused portions of the album like “The Dark Rift” and “Once Falls the Guillotine” kick some needed energy and compositional life into the project. I’d say it’s worth a go for anyone with a hankering for black metal with unrestrained distorted heaviness and occult vibes more than shoegazy ambianc; it’s not a mind-blower, but it’s a good quick dose of it.

7/10

Delain - Apocalypse and Chill

After being thoroughly disappointed by Within Temptation’s writer’s-block-ridden LP last year, I was honestly not in much of a mood for any more pop-oriented neoclassical symphonic metal this year, but after hearing a lot of praise for this new Delain project, I thought I’d give it a try, and Delain sure did change my appetite for the genre. The band sound so much more cathartically vibrant with their willingness to depart from the neoclassical norm into synthetic and other diverse stylistic territories, incorporating adrenaline-fueled downtuned guitar riffs, upward key shifts akin to alternative metal and power metal, and resounding melodic choruses into modern symphonies with big but tasteful production bolstering, and the Lacuna Coil-esque vocal trade-offs across it all are executed brilliantly. And even when the band go more traditional they show they can accomplish similarly invigorating results with a more bare production pallet, a truly impressive display of symphonic versatility and creative courage.

8/10

Suicide Silence - Become the Hunter

After the calamity that was their ill-fated attempt to branch out into Deftones-imitation and clean vocals on their self-titled album, Suicide Silence show that they thoroughly learned their lesson with their gruff, classically deathcore groovy sixth LP, Become the Hunter, which finds the band playing much more to their instrumental strengths and their signature style of deathcore chug (there is a lot of thicccc, delicious chug on this project), finds them taking their riff-writing style back a bit to The Cleansing and No Time the Bleed and feels more natural than what they were trying to do on the self-titled record. Eddie Hermida got the memo about his vocals on the self-titled; it’s all screams and growls here, not a “tee-hee” in sight. Unlike the aforementioned albums with Mitch Lucker behind the mic, Become the Hunter isn’t quite as productionally rough around the edges or as horror-movie eerie and menacingly evil. It’s all about the crunchy guitar rhythms all across the album, which finds the band repeating themselves a bit, but not so much that it feels more like derivative writing rather than convergent compositional tactics across the song. While it could certainly be seen as a run through the motions or a retreat to the band’s safe zone, this was definitely the return to form Suicide Silence needed after the misfire that was the previous record, and definitely a more exciting album for Hermida to showcase his deathcore vocal talent than You Can’t Stop Me. For me though, it’s definitely an improvement on the band’s meager first album with their new vocalist and its subsequent creative dry heave, and it sets a much more convincing tone for Suicide Silence going forward with Eddie Hermida.

8/10

Neaera - Neaera

Despite their fluctuating quality across the first run of their career, I was a surprised and disappointed when Neaera disbanded back in 2014, but equally enthralled to hear the band return to the fold thankfully not too long after. With this self-titled record being the German act’s first after returning from the grave, the band rose back up in the most emphatic way I can imagine. As self-titled albums are generally meant to, Neaera represents Neaera at their essence, blending Swedish melodic death metal with modern NWOAHM metalcore as they always have throughout their career. Indeed, the fascinating thing about this self-titled album is that it’s really not significantly stylistically different from the band’s previous efforts aside from some minor production tweaks. But Neaera really found the sweetest balance for themselves between the menacing blend of death metal urgency with a thrashy metalcore sense of rhythm and the cathartic guitar leads of melodic death metal, and I can’t honestly think of any other project that makes a better case for the intermingling of these styles than the case this album makes. While plenty of metalcore out there incorporates some elements of melodeath, Neaera’s brand that they crystallize on this album is the other way around, primarily melodic death metal but with the raw pounding drive of metalcore to provide a more punchy dynamic to a style that often finds itself in great need of it. And the band manages to mesh these genres in a manner that, rather than diluting them both, brings out the best in both of them. I could seriously sing this album’s praises for much longer, but I think I will leave it at it being the best album I’ve heard so far this year.

9/10

Ozzy Osbourne - Ordinary Man

I’ll admit that I don’t really follow the public life of the original Black Sabbath frontman too closely or intentionally, but it is pretty hard to avoid as well so it’s not like it’s even possible for me to be completely ignorant of how he’s doing. It goes without saying of course, but Ozzy Osbourne is a bonafide icon and singular figure for heavy metal that very very few, if anyone else, can compare to, and with his career and musical output kind of petering out over the past decade as his old age begins to get the better of him, there seems to be a greater sense of awareness in the metal world that we probably only have a few years more with Ozzy, if that. And it’s going to be a very profoundly somber day when the vocal godfather of heavy metal is gone. That being said, this is quite possibly the last album we will get from the prince of darkness and yet listening to it doesn’t quite feel that way. In the weeks leading up to the album, Ozzy’s supporting tour was postponed (or maybe just cancelled), and the man himself said that he does not have his health as is not happy. Yet the album sounds like a very stale, yet modern take on Ozzy’s doomy and classic heavy metal sounds with some modern rock production updates that honestly sound a few generations younger than its seventy-one year old apparent creator, and Ozzy himself sounds uncannily clear, coherent, and healthy. I saw a little bit of dismissal of this album as not being a profound conceptual contemplation of mortality like David Bowie’s, Leonard Cohen’s, or David Berman’s last albums, and while I definitely enjoy those artist’s swansong albums more than this and while I do feel like Ozzy deserves a proper album that better represents his importance to and impact on metal and culture at large, I don’t know if that’s the kind of album Ozzy wants to make. The man is struggling with Parkinson’s disease and based on his music leading up to this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if he just wants to make fun rock music therapeutically to get his mind off the pain rather than honing in on it and intensifying it. Going back to criticism of the album though, Ozzy still sounds so checked out in his performances despite his suspiciously healthy-sounding voice that I can’t help but wonder how touched up it is, the exception being the title track featuring Elton John on which Ozzy does get a little introspective about realizing his ambitions and cementing his legacy as a music legend. Ozzy also sounds more enthusiastic in his performance with Post Malone on the galloping, blood-pumping closing track “It’s a Raid”, but for the majority of the album, it really sounds like he doesn’t even want to be there, and I just hope this wasn’t something people around him pressured him into. I really do want to reiterate my utmost respect for Ozzy Osbourne and all that he has done for the music I love so much, and I would love to hear him round out his legendary career in a more fitting manner. But if he needs to end it here to rest and heal, which it really seems like he does, I won’t begrudge the man or take anything away from his legacy and what he’s accomplished for music. Thank you forever Ozzy, and whatever you do next, as always, go fucking crazy.

5/10

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