Happy Metal Boy

Hissing have been developing a reputation for noisy, harsh, thrilling death metal within the underground and building quite the anticipation for their debut LP. And here it is,  Permanent Destitution , a short, but dense and intriguingly dynamic album that has definitely made good on the implicit promises the band had made. An abyssal blizzard full of nihilistic black metal-tinged death metal arranged in a ceaselessly transforming fashion, Hissing’s debut lives up to its underground hype and does well to set itself apart from the rest of the crop. The opening track, “Backwards Descent”, sets the album’s tone immediately with thunderous tom-driven and blast-beat drumming, hazy cacophonies of dissonant guitar distortion, and rumbling growls that all swirl around in noisy anarchy. Yet the band still feel very much in control, incorporating an effective and sinister guitar riff near the beginning of the song. And the album really doesn’t divert too far away from this established f...

This is a tough one. Not to write, well kind of. Like a sucker punch to the gut after trying to quell a bar fight. Disturbed were one of the big reasons I got into heavy music in my adolescence, and even looking back, I still enjoy a lot of my favorite deep cuts from albums like  Believe  and, my personal favorite,  Indestructible . For a long time, Disturbed has been the bane of frustrated criticism from much of the metal community for having a rather homogeneous and formulaic writing style, which they do to some degree. But for a long time I stood my ground in my appreciation of what they did with the style they transitioned to immediately after their nu metal debut album put them on the map. Even though they did largely abide by a common formula, they music didn’t really FEEL formulaic. The band played with what seemed to be a pretty convincing vigor, with David Draiman’s strong and well-controlled singing voice a major factor of it, and the rest of the band’s c...

Thrash metal’s insistently weird philosophical contemplators, Voivod, come off their 2016 EP of technology-focused musings about the disintegration of human society with an hour-long offering of more of their reliable brand of quirky progressive thrash metal.  The Wake  is the Canadian band’s fourteenth studio album, and at this stage in their career, it’s almost easy to take Voivod for granted given their consistent dedication to their singular sound and their continuous ambition throughout their various ventures into other styles throughout their career and their vision as of late of making some of the most head-turning thrash metal out there. But (relatively) recent albums like  Infini  and  Target Earth  that have found the band returning to their thrash roots with a renewed progressive inspiration have highlighted at the very least how unique Voivod’s voice within metal is (quite literally, given Denis Bélanger’s ever-odd presence behind the microphon...

Coming hot off their collaborative album with Keiji Haino earlier this year (the quality of which took me by surprise after hearing so many half-assed collabs between other bands), Sumac continue their expressive sludge metal experimentation with their third full-length album,  Love in Shadow . Following up their sophomore effort,  What One Becomes , from 2016 (the album that got me into Sumac),  Love in Shadow  doesn’t really divert too far away from the band’s simple appeal of super heavy marches through the valley of the shadow of doom. However, the simplicity of the appeal of the band’s work says nothing about the quality of the material on  Love in Shadow . Comprised of only four (very lengthy) songs,  Love in Shadow  doesn’t simply rely on its thick, immersive production to carry them clumsily through a haze of heavy guitars and crunchy bass. No, Sumac bring grooves and they bring riffs with them to this album, and it keeps the 66-minute affair ...

So covering this album is kind of a difficult feat simply due to my relative unfamiliarity with the broader realm of indie folk to which this album is connected and my limited ability to talk about it in the context of metal. Not that I’m going to be trying to shoehorn this album into an analysis of its content through the metalhead’s lens, nor conversely that there is no discussion of the album’s metallic elements to be had. Rather, most of what is here can be attributed to a genre with which I have much less familiarity with than metal, but there’s some metal here, so I’ll definitely be getting into that while doing my best to address the other “indie-er” aspects of the album. I had the pleasure of catching Emma Ruth Rundle live last year, yet in my infinite business, stupidity, and forgetfulness, I didn’t get around to checking out her studio work more fully, but this album is very in line with what I heard at the concert, which I imagine is rather representative of her catalog. ...

Multinational music group Skyharbor (who originated from India and eventually incorporated American members) released their third full length offering of melodic progressive metal:  Sunshine Dust , their first with new Bennington-esque singer, Eric Emery, after Daniel Tomkins’ return to TesseracT. That tie to one of prog metal’s most prominent names in the past few years does end up haunting the album though and overshadowing the performances the band pull off here. Taking quite a similar melodic vocal approach and atmospheric prog approach, the band didn’t really make much of an effort to distance themselves from the mighty TesseracT. At the very least, the band show themselves to be able to do on paper what TesseracT do. Indeed, the band’s instrumental performances are tight and dynamic, and Emery makes a pretty strong display of his vocal ability across the album, only marred by its lack of much major character. Where the album falls short is its writing, not departing too far ...

If you’re going to make some asshat claim that your band invented metalcore to get publicity for your upcoming album, that album should probably at least sound like more than generic, band-wagoning alternative metal with a dash of melodic metalcore. That post I made last week about genres being important was partly inspired by the idiotic comment Atreyu’s Alex Varkatzas made about being the inventors of metalcore. The ploy of making bold public statements for the sake of headlines surrounding an upcoming release is an old tactic that I and most metalheads are probably used to at this point, even if it’s still groan-inducing a lot of the time. But the asinine claim Varkatzas made were based on warping the understanding of genres, basically intentionally trying to break a tool the metal community uses to discuss music. And of course people were quick to let the band know this, pointing to metallic hardcore’ s progenitors like Converge and Botch, as well as melodic metalcore’s well-ackno...

After making a rather emphatic reestablishment of their continued presence as a survivor of the 90′s rock rise and fall with 2015′s  Psychic Warfare , Clutch return to the groovy, funky, bluesy middle ground between hard rock and classic heavy metal with their twelfth studio album,  Book of Bad Decisions , and it’s an album that finds the band both consistent in their channeling of swagger and stylistic confidence, but also not quite backing that confidence up with sufficiently consistent writing. The writing isn’t necessarily poor, it’s just kind of dime-a-dozen, even if the band’s energetic performances keep them above water for most of the album. What had me especially peeved about my first listens to the album was the major front-loading of the track list,mainly for getting my hopes up for a consistently thrilling Clutch album. The album does have some stunning highlights, however; the political cynicism of “How to Shake Hands” is done with such tight composition...

I was turned onto this album a few weeks ago by the recommendation of the one and only Randy Blythe, not like we spoke personally at all and he told me alone about this album. No, he posted a picture on Instagram with a caption speaking to the album’s vast beauty,and I decided to check it out. Death Spells  is Holy Fawn’s second album following a shorter 2015 release,  Realms , and a one-off single, “Reykur”, in 2016. This album’s cover and the band’s short Bandcamp bio, give very apparent insight into their appreciation of and reverence for the natural world. And the shoegaze-y ambiance and ambient black metal across  Death Spells  certainly encapsulate the spirit of nature much in the way more overtly black metal-focused groups like Wolves in the Throne Room do as they consciously channel their surrounding natural environment through their music. Weaving soothing and ethereally angelic clean vocals (often in an unusually indie styling for this form of mus...

Man I have been itching to talk about this one for a long time now. Ever since hearing the pulverizing storm of thick guitars, blast beats, and cavernous vocls “Crusher of the Seed” about a month or so before this album’s release, I was excited for this thing. I had never heard of Infernal Coil before, and as it turns out, that’s because the duo (who go by Folús and Blight) had only released one EP ( Burning Prayer of Infinite Hatred ) back in 2016, which presented a bold and rather close to fully-fledged sound that quickly got them signed to Profound Lore to release their debut full-length,  Within a World Forgotten . Their EP presented a confident portrait of a band who knew exactly what they wanted to do with death metal. Offering up a thick, but spacious blend of death metal, sludge, and grindcore, Infernal Coil made very clear of their disinterest in balancing their extremity with too much melody of groove to make it more digestible, channeling the deathly sludge of Primitive...