Happy Metal Boy

Atlas Cube is a German instrumental trio that recently followed me on here. They didn’t ask me to check their stuff out, but I noticed when I saw their page that they had a few projects out, the most recent of them being this EP,  The Rift , a quick, 18-minute prog session in a similar vein to bands like Scale the Summit or Polyphia. The EP is only 5 tracks in total, and 3 of them are 2-minute buffer tracks to space out the 2 larger songs on here, my favorite of which being the mood-shifting “Nimbus Nomad”, which transitions to and from sweet, meditative prog rock licks to more sinister minor scale guitar passages. The album is characterized, though, more generally by the tasty pull-off motifs and subtle psychedelia of the tempered instrumental intricacy, and it has certainly served as a good break from the sonic extreme I spend so much time in. Like a lot of metalheads, I do love plenty of prog rock, and this is right up that ally I like to go down to lounge a little bit and just...

As with any Attila project, it’s probably easiest to separately discuss the instrumental facet of the music apart from the douchy bravado of frontman Chris Fronzack that often carries it. Attila has never really been anything special for deathcore from an instrumental standpoint, but they’ve at least been decent enough at keeping up with the advances in production that have proven to bring the most out of bands playing in that genre. For the past two or three years, it has seemed that the optimal stylistic and production-related approach to deathcore has been discovered and made wide use of, and Attila do use it here too. The nu metal-influenced simplicity of Attila’s approach to deathcore has been made all the more muscular by the increased thickness of the bass tones, the crunchy clarity of the down-tuned guitars, and thunderous booming of the drums all mixed into deathcore’s optimized presets. What it highlights though, is how dependent Attila are on their production, and when they...

It feels like it was just yesterday that I was venting my frustrations with Overkill’s 18th studio album,  The Grinding Wheel . But like clockwork, like Old Faithful, the AC/DC of thrash metal have returned with album number 19, and surprise surprise, there are no surprises to be had. I know that expecting Overkill to switch it up, given their track record, is not a realistic expectation. But I still can’t get past the frustration of the unaltered repetition of the same formula to churn out mid-tier thrash like an AI. I’m not asking them to get trendy or anything like that; in fact I am actually grateful for at least their consistency in contributing to a genre within metal that I hold very dear. In fact, I quite appreciate a band that can cling very tightly to and focus solely on what they know they do best. But it’s the fact that there has always been room for improvement in Overkill’s formula, and it’s that lack of any desire to better themselves that frustrates me. The band ...

It has been interesting seeing Rotting Christ ascend from being one of your neighborhood kvlt bands through the ranks of black metal gradually as they’ve honed their sound, and a huge part of that has come through the realization of their where their strengths lie, which are more within the slower, more liturgical side of black metal rather than the basic, traditionally speedy approach of the genre. The band had been improving gradually since  AEALO , but their greatest stride forward came with 2016’s  Rituals , which leaned heavily into the more meticulously produced side of the genre, incorporating choral vocals and orchestral elements to supplement the slower grooves of the crunchy guitars and thunderously pounding drums, similar to how Batushka famously did on  Litourgiya . It was great to hear Rotting Christ finally sounding like they had found their place and what worked best for them on that album, and I was eager to see what kind of material they would make in th...

Another year, another Primitive Man split, though when I think of bands who are constantly doing split releases or collaborations, I tend to not think quite as positively as I do when I think of Primitive Man. Their split with Unearthly Trance last year was pretty sick, and I’m pretty psyched to see them teaming up with a band I discovered in 2017, Hell, whose terrifying blend of cavernous black metal and apocalyptic doom makes their name well-deserved. As surprised as I was to see these two together, their presence on one record is just and fitting; much of what I loved about the self-titled Hell album in 2017 I also loved about Primitive Man’s  Caustic  from that same year. Both artists take an overwhelmingly bleak, abusive approach to metal and through different angles, Primitive Man the more violently assertive and Hell the more subtly suggestive, push their audiences toward the same kind of realm of hopeless nihilism. Why spend time in that kind of depressive musical rea...

Swallow the Sun have been nourishing the ecosystem of death/doom with the nutrition that the genre has needed since Anathema and Katatonia moved on the different musical ventures, providing the kind of heavy melancholy in line with albums like Katatonia’s  Brave Murder Day  or  Viva Emptiness , occasionally dipping into the more  down-tuned side death/doom. This album certainly leans more heavily on the serenely melancholic than on heaviness. Mostly drifting through ambient sections of guitar echoes and smooth, gentle percussion, the sections of heaviness that do arrive are either so short and underdeveloped when they are suddenly introduced, or they are so minimal and gradually worked up to that the payoff just isn’t worth the time. I do enjoy death/doom and melancholic ambient music, but this album really feels like such an underwritten and unbalanced integration of the two. The bulk of the seven-minute opening title track is essentially just introductory mood...

I honestly did not expect another Soen album so soon after  Lykaia , especially with the bar the band had set for themselves to live up to with that album. But hey, now Soen has just as many studio albums under their belt as the band they’re so regularly compared with who just can’t seem to get that fifth album finished. I’m still hoping and staying optimistic about finally getting that new Tool album this year; it honestly doesn’t eat away at my soul the way at lot of die-hard Tool fans at least act like it does, but I’d still love to hear it after the decade of teasing. And even then, there’s a part of me that just thinks about just how funny it would be if Soen managed to get their fifth album out first and surpass the size and length of Tool’s studio album discography in half the time we’ve all been waiting for Tool to get their shit together. But Tool and their artistic/logistic troubles are beside the point; this is about Soen’s fourth album,  Lotus . I feel like grow...

Okay, wow. I didnt think was going to be getting another pop-infused metal album so soon after Bring Me the Horizon’s  amo , a premise I must again clarify that I have nothing against. I enjoyed a lot of the passionate performances on  amo  even amid the sugary sweet trendy pop elements and basic formats, because they were well-tempered and written and performed with tangible passion at heart. But  Resist  on the other hand… Wow, this album is such a confused and largely ineffective mess! The band had stated before the delayed release of the album that it was something they wanted to try blending some pop elements of their sound with without losing the visceral bombast of their symphonic glory, and it seems like they kind of tried to do that, but moreso kept their original sound from overpowering the pop elements being introduced. Consequently, the band’s symphonic edge both takes a bit of a back seat and actually ends up highlighting the worst aspects of the...

After another year of incredible curation from Profound Lore last year, I was excited to finally hear some new music from one of the most reliable labels in the metal underground right now. They announced in late 2018 the impending release of the second album from the super-studio-pair that comprises Vanum, a duo I had not heard before then, but the vibrant and fiery artwork gracing their sophomore release (and their association with a label I trust well) was enough to pique my interest in their upcoming album. Apparently the two-piece recording project expanded into a complete four-piece band for this six-track release, doubling the creative musical energy capacity and the original members’ investment in their joint project. Clocking in at just under 41 minutes, the newly bolstered group’s sophomore album is a rather average-length record for its style, and one that embodies the average of said style a little more than I was hoping it would. Before and since  Ageless Fire ’s re...

Two more songs from the satirical anti-bedroom-reich project, which has become increasingly infamous more for its mastermind’s obnoxiousness on Twitter than for anything related to the band’s music. While campaigning against and doing part to maintain the overall societal aversion to fascism is a noble cause, much of what Neckbeard Deathcamp and the anti-fascist social circles they’re in do is largely overzealous and borderline counterproductive, weakening the position of their cause by attributing fascist sympathies where they aren’t and extrapolating Nazism through bounding leaps in reasoning. Again, I appreciate the gung-ho attitude to give the proper shame to the side of metal that does promote fascism, but it’s become almost a witch crusade with the attempts to stamp out fascism where it isn’t, which is fortunate in a way because that subculture in metal is thankfully a very small one. When I reviewed the breakout debut album last year, I appreciated the mockery through imitati...

Even though I had heard quite a bit of hype about this album’s soulful and ethereal sonic beauty, I had also heard a lot of tempering of that hype by critics hushing the murmur around the band’s eponymous sophomore LP by pointing out the lack of originality of what they saw as just an average piece of post-metal. And after listening to this album quite a few times (I think it’s been a dozen now), I can really see both sides of the coin of perspectives surrounding it. On one hand, my first few listens had me more in line with the less amused critics, hearing not really anything inhadnt heard before, and not really moved much by what the band was putting forth. But the more I listened, and found myself wanting to come back to it the more I began to find myself pulled in by the album’s beauty as it revealed its simple shine to me with each listen. Indeed, Astronoid is no groundbreaking album for post-metal, and it’s not trying to be something it isn’t. The album crafts its appeal through...