Generally Impressed With Riffs
[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 …
[Cover art by Per Spjøtvold] Want a fun way to acknowledge your own mortality? Think about how many years you’ve been listening to certain bands or albums. Of course, you, a distinguished devotee of this publication, surely engage in this practice, …
A masked sky. An immeasurably vast landscape. One lone creature soaring above the earth, confused by the encroaching heavens and rumbling chaos from below. Shifting terrain scatters trees, beasts, life. A great spire of rock …
Israel’s Dukatalon is the latest entrant into the increasingly crowded field of vaguely sludgy stoner doom that this particular writer absolutely refuses to refer to as having anything to do with facial hair. Still, the …
2010 was a weird year. While there was a ton of heavy metal for the taking (the disparate lists of my colleagues will attest to this), I didn’t really have much time to digest it. …
Martolea is the one-man black metal project from Alin Drimus, known perhaps not by name but certainly by musical presence as the wooden flute and frula player on Negura Bunget’s already-legendary OM album. After releasing a …
Human Concept is the debut album from French brutal death metal act Offending, and it bears all the marks of a typical brutal affair: rampant blast beats, double bass and dozens of riffs per song. Offending, however, …
It’s albums such as Omega Wave that present the biggest scoring headaches for me. I can tell you directly off the bat that I’ve greatly enjoyed dipping back into the Forbidden pool with an hour’s …
Last year’s Passiondale put this Dutch death metal outfit back on my radar—that one was a damn solid slab of melodic World-War-One-themed metal; it was the best record God Dethroned had done in quite awhile …
Acid Witch, everyone’s favorite psychedelic / Satanic / horror / doom / death metal band, has brewed up another cauldron full of cavernous growls, spooky organ licks, wailing solos and anvil-heavy riffs. Though there has …
