Happy Metal Boy

It’s about time we got a new Impending Doom album; it’s been nearly five years since  Death Will Reign , and the Christian deathcore powerhouse has been unusually absent for the genre’s relatively quiet, but strong past year or two (last year being especially great for deathcore). But, better late than never, Impending Doom have come back to pick up right where they left off in 2013 with the slow honing of their sound their previous record helped accomplish. Focusing on monstrously deep growls that any deathcore or death metal fan can admire and groovy, drum-matched 8-string riffs that border on Meshuggah’s side of the djent sphere,  The Sin and Doom Vol. II  (the title a callback to the band’s 2005 demo tape) comes off noticeably rusty at some points, but is mostly a solid continuation of the band’s efforts from earlier in the decade nonetheless. Impending Doom has always been one of the most reliable acts and one that I consistently enjoy returning to, mostly during ...

After two EPs of similar length preceding it, Trent Reznor chose to label  Bad Witch  as a “full-length”, apparently to prevent it from being ignored on the marketing front. Considering the slew of short albums coming out from Kanye West lately, it’s not all that asinine to consider a 30-minute project a full-length. All of Nails’ LPs are shorter as well, the Full of Hell release last year was shorter, and the legendary  Reign in Blood  is shorter. It’s not really all that important to the music itself, it’s just a bit strange that this is the project they decide to label an LP, which usually signifies what an artist considers their committed artistic statement. And whether Nine Inch Nails are doing that here or not, it’s just a bit of an unusual and confusion distinction to make. As for the music, I found myself slightly disappointed with the uncertain direction of this project. I’ve never been against Trent Reznor’s more ambient and moodier ventures, but the...

Code Orange had a huge year last year, which bled into this year with the unprecedented Grammy nomination, touring with Meshuggah (and I was lucky enough to catch them on that tour), the release of their fantastically chaotic and melodic “Only One Way” single through Adult Swim, and now this surprise 3-track EP on which Corey Taylor is featured. Well it wasn’t much of a surprise for those who went through the weird cryptic puzzle on their website, which hinted at something of the sort. The two new songs on the album, “3 Knives”, and “The Hunt”, the latter of which features Corey Taylor continue the tend toward the more industrially glitchy side of Code Orange’s sound and production style. The songs still maintain the strong commitment to the strong metallic hardcore the band started with and came up on, but for all the visceral flair the industrial elements add to the band’s sound already, their greater prominence here feels like it is partly suffocating the organic ferocity that ...

Even though it had been in on their Bandcamp page since 2016, I was glad the more official release of Zeal & Ardor’s debut album,  Devil Is Fine , last year gave me the opportunity to talk about it (since I started this blog in 2017). Originally one of multiple solo music projects by creative eccentric Manuel Gagneux, inspired by a comical suggestion on 4Chan, Gagneux recruited ful-time members to form a complete performing band after the huge wave  Devil Is Fine  made, and I have been so pleased to see this project grow in its short time from the enthusiasm much of the metal community has shown for such an unorthodox artist. Devil Is Fine  was a short, but wildly diverse album (only 25 minutes) that blended the soulful blues of slave spirituals and other American folk with varyingly atmospheric black metal, a idea that could have gone terribly that fortunately went terrifically. While I loved  Devil Is Fine  and had it as one of my top top favorit...

Surprise, surprise! The Body is back at it with yet another half-ass collaborative effort, this time with Uniform. Just last month I was giving The Body praise for their new LP this year ( I Have Fought Against It, But I Can’t Any Longer ). They’ve always been a band that seems ready to to a split release or a collaborative project at the drop of the hat. And on one hand I admire their prolific output and eagerness to work with so many other artists, but on the other hand I wish they would slow down with the collaborations a bit because they do so many of them and it’s so clearly not their best work. A lot of the time it just feels like they’re just dumping their sound’s ingredients into a pot with another band’s ingredients and hoping for a stew that pleases company. It feels like The Body does these collaborative projects just for the sake of doing them at this point, and it really does just feel like a stew with a bunch of frozen ingredients tossed into a pan. I wish The Body wou...

Alien Weaponry are a young, very young, trio (still in their teenage years) from New Zealand who have been making a bit of a wave for themselves based on their youth and the impressive musicianship they have at their age. They’ve been releasing singles for about two years now, and it’s finally culminated in their debut album,   Tū . Their debut indeed shows them as a group seeking to compose outside the easy-level lines and incorporate a variety of styles and structures into their music. But it still comes with a bit of debut album struggle with not only finding a cohesive sonic identity, but also wielding the elements they integrate into their songs. I’m reminded a little bit of Ektomorf and Soulfly during the album’s more low-tuned groove sections, but occasionally of modernized thrash by the quick drum beats and the types of social commentary the band make. The first song I heard was the album’s first proper song after its introduction, “Rū Ana Te Whenua”, a son...

Say what you will about Deafheaven, but they’re still leagues ahead of so many of the bands making the kind of ethereal, non-suicidal brand of ambient black metal they helped put on the map. I’m not talking about the more DSBM-focused projects like Leviathan or Xasthur or Deadspace, I’m talking about the bands like Ghost Bath and Harakiri for the Sky making very unimaginative blackgaze a lot of the time. It’s hard to find bands working bright ambiance into black metal with the same emotional potency Deafheaven do, which is why I appreciate this album from Alrakis. It’s not that the bar has just been lowered by so many bands simply watering down some generic black metal with some generic echo-y guitars; there’s still bands like Deafheaven and Altar of Plagues to point to for high standards. But there’s still so much that I’ve heard that’s just disappointing and devoid of the immense feelings its trying so hard to convey, that this album is such a nice thing to hear, and it seems to s...

The phrase “scraping the bottom of the creative barrel” gets justifiably tossed around a lot regarding every subsequent Five Finger Death Punch album since  American Capitalist , but honestly, even  that  phrase is generous for what they are now. The Way of the Fist  was an honest-to-goodness groove metal effort full of genuine attitude, and even though the aforementioned phrase makes it seem like they’ve just been recycling that album, that would be much more preferable to what they do these days. When I hear the “bottom of the barrel” phrase, it’s usually regarding some band who made a bunch of classic albums in their early days who are trying to go back to that style and desperately and futilely recapture that lightning in a bottle that made their earlier work so revered. But to call what Five Finger Death Punch are doing “creative” is pretty laughable. They’re not trying to redo  The Way of the Fist  these days, and barely even pretend like the...

This one has been a real doozy to try to get through, not the way Therion’s recent album was as doozy (three hours of soulless, masturbatory, neoclassical meandering), but because it is still such a massive and intricate piece of progressive death metal. The German-based five-piece supergroup of sorts (featuring members formerly of the likes of Obscura, Necrophagist, and Aborted) made their first mark on progressive death metal in early 2015 with their album,  The Malkuth Grimoire , a 73-minute debut opus that took an immediate shot at grandeur in a genre already filled with such ambition. It was a tightly performed, intricately composed, epic opening statement for the band, but one that, after all the dust settled, seemed like more of just a way of throwing everything about the band out there in some form to make a wave. It was still full of fantastic pieces and shining moments, but despite the band’s members all coming from well-established and respected bands associated ...

Speaking from experience, music is so much better and more enjoyable when your mental health is better. I have been really really loving music lately. I mean, I always did, and I didn’t even think it was possible for me to love it more than I already did. But after some months of taking better care of myself physically and mentally, and getting out of something that was hurting me and my ability to care for myself on both of those fronts, I began to notice quite dramatically just how much every type of music I already loved has been even more amazing to me. I’ve covered a lot of dark, depressive, suicidal shit on here, a lot of which has come from places of genuine suffering of similar magnitude. While the tortured artist mentality has catalyzed a lot of great music, it is not only not as obligatory for the creation of genuine art as some claim it to be, but  feeling like the self-destructive or generally negative mindset of it is a necessary headspace to maintain to enjoy s...

When Gruesome’s debut’s comically gory album cover sparked my curiosity in 2015, I was both astonished and a little bit disturbed by what I was hearing. I knew Chuck Schuldiner was dead, but  Savage Land  made me swear for a moment that he had somehow risen from the grave to pick up right where he left off. On one hand, it’s impressive how pinpoint-accurate they have Death’s sound pinned down on every single song, but on the other, it’s almost creepy how goddamn close they sound to one of extreme metal’s most legendary and influential acts. Matt Harvey’s vocal performances are particularly uncannily identical to Schuldiner’s, and the compositions Harvey writes are just as convincing of him indeed being Chuck Schuldiner reincarnated. Yet this band’s about-perfect imitation is perhaps the biggest and most committed tribute to Schuldiner’s legacy, and at that, it succeeds in spades. While Death’s legendary status in metal came partly due to their pioneering of death metal, the...