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 …
Hellhammer begat Blasphemy begat Angelcorpse begat Nuclearhammer. Goodbye, cruel world. If the idea of having your reality ravaged and flattened to soot by music yanks your crank, Serpentine Hermetic Lucifer is your ticket to ride …
It has been a long time since Sepultura has had any real relevance to the underground metal community, or whatever you want to call this particular sphere we inhabit. To the band’s credit it has …
When the brothers Cavalera reunited under the Cavalera Conspiracy name a few years back, some fans held out hope that this would represent a return to the Sepultura glory of old. While Inflikted and Blunt …
It has been over five years since the last Obituary album, 2009’s Darkest Day, and the band has gone through many changes in that time. Long-time bassist Frank Watkins experienced some kind of mid-life crisis …
One of the key reasons a number of us writers remain in a game that’s bloated to obesity with enough metal blogs to choke nearly every horse currently galloping this green Earth is because every …
In January of 2012, the metal world lost a giant when Riot guitarist and mainstay Mark Reale passed away after a long struggle with Crohn’s disease. Reale had been Riot’s sole consistent member through the …
Originally written by Chris Redar This year has seen its fair share of genre-defying noise. Tiger Flowers and Jar’d Loose both put out excellent albums that only remained tied to any kind of ‘extreme’ genre …
In the spectrum of heaviness, there’s heavy. And there’s heavy. And there’s Godflesh. Other bands have been faster, louder, angrier, more chaotic, but none has better embodied the empty, numbing, noisy desolation of the industrialized …
