Generally Impressed With Riffs
[Cover art by Mister Curse] Stack Overflow In Corpse Pile Interface. Stack Overflow in…Corpse Pile Interface? “What’s in a name? That which we call a corpse pile, by any other word would smell as putrid” – billy shakes Forgive my …
[Cover art by Jef Whitehead] Cognizance’s In Light, No Shape serves as a useful reminder that when it comes to our musical preferences, our whats are subservient to our whys. If, for example, you are a fan of the early …
[Cover artwork by Michael Cloutier] Prog, of course, is known for technical musicianship and songwriting complexity above all else, a reputation well-earned by the early giants of the genre and happily maintained by their progeny ever since. It’s also true …
[Cover artwork by Timbul Cahyono] In the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that I’ve always found the concept of the split to be flawed. It works best when there’s a shared theme or the band’s involved cover each …
Germany’s Mindflair has been lurking around the grindcore scene since 1994, issuing a series of splits over the course of nearly a decade before releasing their first full-length in 2002’s Green Bakery. That one was …
Murg is from Sweden. Murg shows a real dedication to black and white cover art. Based on just these facts, one can make a pretty good guess what Murg brings to the table. If you …
It’s hard to write about a show when you’ve worked up such expectations of it that your head wants to explode. No, wait, I’m doing this all in medias res. Let’s start from the beginning. I …
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 …
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 …
Because you demanded it! Well, not really. But, we had to do something. You know the routine: writers are deluged with albums, most of which we can barely even listen to, let alone write a …
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 …
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 …
