Happy Metal Boy

Goddamnit, this month really needs to cool it with all the stellar and addictive album releases; it’s fucking up my rhythm. How am I supposed to get immersed in all these albums when they all make me just want to indulge in them uninhibitedly? Why can’t some more of them just suck so that I don’t have to want to ever go back to them after giving them their fair chance? Woe is me! Today’s culprit in this recent string of frustratingly awesome albums is the Spirit Adrift, a relatively young quartet from the sweaty natural sauna of Phoenix, Arizona whose sophomore album in 2017 I missed because I had homework to do. But I sure as hell am going to be checking out that album and their debut after hearing this thing because, again, goddamn! I know this is probably a very rambly and unprofessional intro that’s giving away my main feeling on the album right at the start, but I’m not professional, so let my stream of musically infatuated consciousness be. Where was I? Spirit Adrift. I’d ne...

It takes quite a legacy to be able to release your third full-length record to the high anticipation  Revelations of Oblivion  garnered over three decades after your previous two, and Possessed have the prominence of death metal (arguably pioneered by their 1985 debut album,  Seven Churches ) in today’s metal landscape to thank for their being able to come back into the fold after such a lengthy absence. Having just dealt with the embarrassing new Saint Vitus album for the past few days, I was quite relieved with  Revelations of Oblivion  being such a pleasantly surprisingly well updated death metal offering from the genre’s progenitors. Indeed, the only real semblance of their old-school thrash-infused style is singer Jeff Becerra’s grovelly and just slightly growly vocal technique. Aside from keeping the original vocal style though (which is not a detriment at all, if anything, a good calling card to signify the return of the genre’s godfathers), Possessed ...

Since starting this amateurish blog about two years ago, one of the metal subgenres I have opened up to the most has been doom metal in its more modern and old-school forms and its neighboring subgenres like stoner metal. It’s not that I was ever vehemently opposed to doom metal or anything. It just hadn’t been a subgenre I would go to as frequently as I do now thanks to abundance of it in the underground that I feel intrigued by and drawn to. But what I had generally found to be a significant issue for me with doom metal was the amount of unabashed Black Sabbath copy-cattery, maybe not note for note, but so many bands playing the style have had such a comfortability with simply harping on the metal godfathers’ style to a point where it became distracting and came across less as tribute and more as rip-off. There are certainly bands that have channelled Sabbath their whole careers and done it mostly very well; Candlemass with their recent output comes to mind. But there are also bands...

Fresh off the release of what, I think, was their unprecedented masterpiece at the very beginning of the year, the Australian quintet, Deadspace, just couldn’t stay quiet while in such great form and dropped this four-track EP at the beginning of April to get the most out of their exceptional creative vibrance at the moment. With the more viscerally menacing vocal delivery from  Dirge  earlier this year being brought forth onto these songs in tandem with some of the band’s more blackgaze tendencies,  Libido Dominandi  is a fine offering of tracks that do quite well on their own and fit better outside the context of  Dirge . The ripping speed of the opening title track combines the bleakest elements of the band’s sound (including some anguished mourning wails) with some brief glimmers of some of their more ambient style. The second of the four tracks, “52”, returns a bit more fully to the band’s older, depressive black metal ambience, incorporating piano int...

When I saw the cover of this thing earlier before its release, I thought that Profound Lore was possibly dipping its toes into curating some alternative metal (it just has a certain mid-2000’s alternative metal look to it to me, and maybe that’s just me), which I was kind of intrigued by, and although the record itself does fall more in line with the label’s usual tastes for bleak, black doom (among other things), it does not fail to be an interesting and unique project in its own right. The intriguing prospect of a mid-2000’s style alternative metal album somehow fitting for Profound Lore’s roster was a fleeting and hypothetical one, so after getting over it and into what  Emergence  actually is, it became no trouble at all to see why the label picked it up. The album is Dreadnought’s fourth, and one that clearly shows the band comfortable in and capable with their style, expressing a freedom with the unique, gothic, and even eccentric/proggy approach they take to the type...

I remember almost a decade ago when the formation of this supergroup with members of Anthrax, Alkaline Trio, Every Time I Did, and Fall Out Boy was announced and that thinking at the time what an odd team that made. In hindsight, they weren’t the most unlikely of figures to link up for a collaborative side project, but I was torn between my favor for Anthrax and Alkaline Trio and my displeasure for Fall Out Boy. And my hesitation to check their debut album out, even though I knew it deserved my fair chance at a listen through it, eventually led to me never getting around to it. (Edit: My memory of the band’s original and second phase line-ups failed me. Dan Andriano of Alkaline Trio was not part of the original line-up; he joined earlier this year. I was most likely confusing my intrigue about The Damned Things around the time of that announcement and my budding interest in Alkaline Trio around the same time nine years ago with the more recent announcement of The Damned Things’ reac...

I have always respected Amon Amarth for their consistent dedication to serving their niche within metal and appreciated that dedication to making something no one else on or near their reputable level is making. Granted, I’m sure their reliability and refusal to part ways with their sound even momentarily have been part of what has kept potential challengers for their place at bay or from even bothering to enter their territory to begin with. Even though their releases have grown only more and more predictable as they stack atop one another, I’m still glad Amon Amarth are doing their thing because, again, there’s not really anyone else out there ready to pick up their torch if they set it down. That being said, Amon Amarth definitely don’t just get all the necessary points just for showing up, and their last few albums have certainly felt creatively fatigued, which is natural for a band that has kept to one style and one central lyrical theme throughout their career. But just beca...

Channelling the likes of Emperor, Mayhem, and even Behemoth in the most ambitious stages of their respective careers, Gardsghastr make an ambitious surge for the symphonic black metal crown of the coming decade with their stylistically grand debut,  Slit Throat Requiem . With harrowingly spiralling tremolo-picked chord progressions over tempests of high-speed blast beat and fill-laden drumming, incantations of angelic choirs, and ethereal echoes of string orchestras to provide a fittingly expansive backdrop to the blackened instrumentation at the forefront, the band definitely set their sites on a claim for the void left by Emperor after their dissolution. Having clearly studied the masters before them and learned their craft, Gardsghastr enter the ring well equipped to take the throne that none have really been able to pry the Emperor’s skeleton away from, and their debut album is certainly an exhibition of their own ability to match their forefathers’ blackened symphonic mag...

Nope, not a new release from this year, but rather one from 2016 that I have just felt compelled to write about for awhile now, and after finding a splendid deal for a physical copy a couple of weeks ago and listening to it again recently, I just couldn’t help but carve out some time for this album. I think most of us have at least one or several of those albums that garnered very little critical praise for predictable reasons, yet we can’t deny our love for them. For me, Hellyeah’s  Unden!able  is one of those albums, and I think it’s worth going into some brief personal context surrounding my love for it (it’s just my musical experience with the album, not gonna be unpacking any big traumas or anything). For some reason I have always distinctly remembered my first time listening to the album. It came out the same day (if my memory serves me correctly) as Volbeat’s  Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie , which I was more excited for given Volbeat’s run of good form leadin...

Hailing from Brooklyn, Vaura’s experimental and shoegazy approach to post-metal and black metal on their debut LP in 2012,  Selenelion , offered to be black metal’s answer to My Bloody Valentine, before Deafheaven’s  Sunbather  blow the lid off the entire premise a year later.  Selenelion , though, did quickly get Vaura signed to Profound Lore to release the band’s sophomore album,  The Missing , that very next year, a satisfactory confirmation of their artistic credence with the style they had set themselves toward. But as Deafheaven grew into a widely revered name and twisted through their own style over two more full-length releases, Vaura sat quiet, until now. Sables  is the band’s third album and one that sees them subtly, but noticeably side-stepping the thick metallic swells of atmosphere they started their career on, leaning more on electronic rock and ambient elements than on anything metallic to drive the energy of their sound this time around....