Best Of 2023 – Last Rites Combined Staff Top 25
“HEY, WHERE THE HELL IS [INSERT ALBUM TITLE], YOU EMPTY-HEADED MONSTERS” We go through this every year, no? You see the Best Of lists begin to drop from all the usual suspects, and the first …
Best Of 2023 – Top 10ish EPs & Demos
Keep It Short, Stupid. Get in; get out; get gone. Hit it and quit it. Whichever old axiom you choose, they all mean more or less the same thing: Sometimes brevity is key. Sometimes less …
Best Of 2023 – Our Album Art Favorites
There’s a symbiotic relationship that occurs between the cover art and the music within. Obviously, we’ve all been deceived before by an elegantly adorned record sleeve only to find the music within to be a …
Melissa Is Still With Us: A Classic Turns 40
[Cover artwork by Thomas Holm] Many, many moons ago, on a notably cold night in late October, two teenage friends who’d recently had a falling out decided to bury the hatchet by hitting a haunted …
A Devil’s Dozen – Defeated Sanity
Germany’s Defeated Sanity remains one of the heaviest and most brutal death metal acts currently lingering on our pissed off planet. As such, I wish I had a dramatic story to unfurl concerning my first …
Missing Pieces: The Best Of What We Missed In 2023 So Far, Pt. 3
And so we’ve come to the end of the road, and still we can’t let go… So here is the third and final installment of all the wonderful heavy records that snuck by us in …
Missing Pieces: The Best Of What We Missed In 2023 So Far, Pt. 2
It’s time for Part 2 of our yearly round-up of all the great records we didn’t manage to cover in the first six months of the year. If you also missed Part 1, it’s available …
Missing Pieces: The Best Of What We Missed In 2023 So Far, Pt. 1
Have you ever noticed how much music just rules? (Well, most of it, anyway.) We here at Last Rites World Headquarters And Lawnmower Repair Emporium certainly have. We’ve dedicated our every waking moment to listening …