Generally Impressed With Riffs
It’s a magical corner of the musical world where a band can combine an infectious nature with extreme oddness, and it’s in that corner that Idaho’s Seven Chains makes their home. Make no mistake about it, third album Swollen, In …
[Cover art by Claudio Elias Scialabba] Italy’s Into Darkness has been a band for approximately 15 years but is just now releasing its first full length album, Route to the Other Side, but all that time has been greatly beneficial …
[Cover art by David Preissel] The sounds of Neurosis’ “Locust Star” emanate from a desktop speaker wired to an iPod Nano via ⅛-inch cable “Hey maaaan … is that Ponderous Post Metal?” “Yeah maaan …” “Well turn it up MAAAN!!” …
[Artwork by Vicky “Liddo” Morales] In a soak-your-underwear sweaty, tetanus-to-the-touch warehouse in the middle of Skid Row, Raw Addict played its first show. Weeks earlier, drummer Isaac made the irresistible sales pitch, stating that the multinational band connecting grind lifers …
If you were to plant a seed in hopes of producing a Oak Tree for future generations, that tree would grow slowly. Through diligent watering, staking the tree to keep it vertical and lots and …
Battle Royal is back and more unfair than ever! In the first installment, we cruelly pitted Metallica against Slayer based ONLY on their 80s output. The result was a dirty tie amongst the LR crew …
Mithras. I mean, damn. Mithras. I heard Mithras years ago when this site was still MetalReview and even then thought “for all the familiarity of this music, this is something completely else.” So in my …
Avast, ye scurvy dogs. It’s been almost two months since Running Wild released Rapid Foray to the world, and just a little bit longer since I heard it for the first time. After an initial …
There was a time, and it doesn’t seem like that long ago, when the combination of death metal and a boss heavy metal pedal would set my heart aflutter. Sadly, that time has passed. In …
Fear. And more specifically, fear of the unknown. That’s the big one. The single heaviest emotion that drives people to hide, drink, weep, not sleep, “see the light,” or, in a best case scenario, soldier …
New Jersey’s Helcaraxe was already one of the US’ most promising (and least heralded) death metal acts when they dropped Red Dragon in 2012, but that album’s masterful melding of the melodic and the muscular …
The sheer number of metal albums out there just being produced today means that Standing Out is quite the challenge. Sure, talent, originality, market demand, networking… that all works, sometimes, but you also just might …
