Category: Reviews
Arstidir Lifsins – Aldafoðr Ok Munka Dróttinn Review
How effective is narrative art if one can’t follow the narrative? For music as richly textual as Arstidir Lifsins’s, the question is hardly academic. On the (mostly) German band’s third album, passages of sweeping, majestic …
Hammer King – Kingdom Of The Hammer King Review
Once upon a time, hundreds of thousands of years ago in the 80s, Hell and heavy metal announced an exceedingly prosperous union with the hammer. It was a risky move, really, as the hammer had …
Acid Witch – Midnight Movies Review
In the 1980s, heavy metal was straight from the mouth of the devil. If you asked any decent upstanding citizen or church-going housewife, they’d tell you that heavy metal music promoted an explicit agenda of …
Blind Guardian – Beyond the Red Mirror Review
Sometimes, a review represents a battle between the writer and the band/album. Other times, it is between a writer and himself. At other times still, it becomes a three-way dance. The latter only works in …
Terveet Kadet – Lapin Helvetti Review
The lead singer and only consistent member of Finland’s Terveet Kädet is named Läjä Äijälä. That’s five umlauts. Count ‘em. Five. How much more metal could you be than having five umlauts in your name? …
Manilla Road – The Blessed Curse Review
At one point during the guitar solo in “Tomes of Clay,” something big but obvious occurred to me. Granted, it was nothing that I hadn’t thought of while listening to any of Manilla Road’s 15 …
Judicator – At The Expense Of Humanity Review
JUDICATOR AND THE DURABILITY OF HEAVY METAL Anyone who has ever read a statement from a media outlet making a claim of [BAND X] “saving heavy metal” hopefully knows to 1) immediately disregard everything the …
Pyramids – A Northern Meadow Review
On Pyramids‘s self-titled debut album from 2008, the Texas-based band sounded like a photo-negative version of Blut Aus Nord‘s mind-bending MoRT album, all blown-out brightness and brittle dream-pop shards colored ominously by black metal echoes. …