Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Album artwork by Harshanand Singh] The third album is in some ways a litmus test for a band’s longevity. Three albums is a sufficient sample size—you can generally tell where a band is headed, whether they’ll last, whether they speak …
[Pre]-historically speaking, the boys, Nocturno Culto and Fenriz, have always been influenced by the likes of Celtic Frost, Bathory, and all things ‘80s. In fact, they don’t shy away from the fact that it’s always been about that era. After …
[Cover art by Quinn Henderson] You’re familiar with the term, “unc,” right? If not, it generally refers to a washed up older feller whose personality in large part revolves around extravagantly performing confusion and/or displeasure at the mere notion of …
[Artwork by Caroline Harrison] “Nonsense” opens with a slow fade-in of distorted guitars and seismic drums — the chaos before the swarm. It’s a trick of the trade, the extreme metal equivalent of a camera operator calling out “speed” before …
When a band’s influences are on the stranger side, can that band still claim to be strange, or are they just pulling from the weirdos that came before? Well, in the case of the Texas …
The one and only concession I will make to any Cradle of Filth haters out there in the course of this review is that a pretty decent burn on Dani Filth’s get-up in the promo …
There’s an old Cherokee proverb my grandma used to paraphrase: Inside each of us, there are two wolves. One is evil, representing anger, envy, greed, arrogance, resentment, lies, and ego. The other is good, representing …
[Cover artwork by Loni Gillum of Minerva’s Menagerie and RWAKE] There are lyrics in “The Return of Magik,” the title track of Rwake’s sixth album and first in almost 14 years, with variable payloads. Two …
[Cover artwork by Jared Fleming] “One of the great things about New York is that if you ever need dead baby eels, you can get them here. Also, there is opera.” – Dave Barry Full …
When was the last time you felt powerful? I’m not talking about anything grandiose or world-historical; think of a time you opened the pickle jar on the first try, or a time when you did …
Absolutes are dangerous. The rhetorical logic of “all or nothing” is a violent assault on the beautiful heterogeneity of the world. Taking any position to its extreme endpoint risks gross oversimplification and infantilizing generalization. That …
Welcome, dear friends, to another edition of Staff Infections, wherein the staff here at Last Rites share what they’ve been listening to for the past month. Everything is still terrible here in the U.S.A., so …
