Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Cover artwork by Old Hag] When I initially realized that Arckanum’s first album after a long hiatus—and, technically, its breakup—would be released on All Hallows’ Eve, I devised this rather cutesy and far-fetched idea to compare the entire album to …
[Album artwork / art direction by Joseph Niet / The Creative Corporation] Offering up a textbook definition of “holy crap, time flies,” Black Sabbath’s swan song, 13, was released 13 years ago, on June 7th, 2013. In a curious move, …
If you’re just now catching up, well, we’re just now catching up. Seth Buttnam and I (plus one uninvited guest) are rounding up some of our favoritest grindcore (or grind-adjacent) releases of the past however many months, since we (read: …
[Album artwork by Truls Espedal] It’s 17 albums for Enslaved now, comprising a discography I find exceptionally challenging to wrap my arms around. What’s going on here? Does anyone else forget that the relatively rote and by-the-numbers Frost is actually …
Friends, here is an incomplete list of things for which I have a wafer-thin patience: – Fascist apologetics – The patriarchy – Typos and grammatical errors on businesses and in ad copy – Anthrax (the …
Someone needs to write an open letter to metal artists letting them know that albums simply don’t need to be longer than 48 minutes. When you have bands like Black Anvil reducing their typical run-time …
Hi everyone! I know I haven’t been writing a whole lot these past few years. I hope all of that is about to change and I know I’m the only one who can change it. …
If you’re a baseball fan (which I am), you’re likely celebrating pitchers and catchers reporting to spring training this week. We’re excited to see stars return, just as in metal we’re all aflutter to welcome …
Having only a two-song, seemingly one-note EP (Le Jour Se Lève) to go on, you can imagine the surprise at hearing the diversity of sounds, the mellowness, the near desert rock-like atmospheric touches across French black …
The year is 1985 and your parents are pissed. Your grades slipped again. It’s not that you aren’t smart. It’s that you can’t focus. Because Overkill just released Feel the Fire and it’s changing your …
The difficulty of discussing Arrayed Claws, the new 38-minute “EP” from Lorn, is not necessarily describing the individual elements. After all, most passages of the album, when taken in a silo, sound pretty familiar. The …
For years, on these pages and in myriad (often one-sided) conversations, I’ve opined that Overkill’s 90s and early 2000s forays into the then-modern trend of groove weren’t as embarrassingly off-base as those of most of …
