Generally Impressed With Riffs
[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 …
[Cover artwork by Luca “Zeero” Zironi] There was always something uniquely charming about Konquest’s brand of traditional heavy metal—an almost whimsical breeziness that still felt like a near perfect balance of playful and substantive. A long-lost Italian cousin to Sweden’s …
[Cover art by Beyond Art] There are bad musical moods, and then there’s Mylingar. Over the course of the last decade this group of anonymous Swedes has concocted the type of ill-meaning black/death that makes Diocletian seem like a Care …
Originally written by Ramar Pittance Maybe we’re at odds with these sounds because we’re not sure where they come from. Maybe we think we know, though. Maybe we hear the decades of refinement in guitarist …
Listening to Midnight’s full length debut Satanic Royalty was like getting beaten in the temple with King Diamond’s old bone mic and loving every skull-crunching delivery. Plain and simple: The album rocked. ROCKED. The Venömhead …
In some ways (perhaps in many), it may seem equal parts obvious and absurd, over-reaching and lazy to describe a band whose name contains the words “nuclear” and “death” as “apocalyptic,” and it’s at least …
Summon a forest in your mind. Walk in that forest for a long time, and feel the warmth. It’s a cold kind of warmth, the kind that never seems to rise up much past the …
Rarely are my critical faculties so easily bamboozled as when it comes to black / industrial metal. Whether by virtue of some chromosomal defect or suppressed trauma or just general dumbness, there’s simply no genre …
Seems like everyone and their mutter is re-hashing classic Teutonic thrash metal these days. That’s just peachy, as I love In the Sign of Evil as much as the next guy, but a huge part …
To those who are familiar with Hypnosia, no introduction is needed. For those who aren’t, a brief one will have to do. Formed in Sweden in 1995 by some relative youngsters, they put out a …
It’s always nice when the one-man side project doesn’t end up sounding like a wafer-thin version of the full ensemble. Case in point: Cairn, the sole creation of Samu Rahn, guitarist in Chicago’s prog/doomster act …
