Happy Metal Boy

Apart from the finally realizing release of Tool’s exasperatingly long-teased fifth album next month and arguably Rammstein’s ten-year-awaited self-titled album, Slipknot’s  We Are Not Your Kind  is and was always going to be 2019′s biggest metal release, and since its release its chart success has fulfilled that prophecy.  Every new Slipknot release is quite the momentous and fixating occasion for the metal community, both for fans of the band their detractors, and part of these new releases feeling like such a big occasion is because they don’t come often. Despite the band blowing up in no modest sense of the phrase at the turn of the millennium with the one-two punches of their iconic self-titled debut and its successor,  Iowa , the band have only released four more albums (including this one) in the nearly two decades since their sophomore album in 2001. And despite the motifs of brotherhood the band make a notable part of their image, the tight-knittedness am...

Uboa is an experimental and rather prolific noise project began by Xandra Metcalfe in 2010. I caught wind of this album here a few weeks ago through a few people comparing it to Lingua Ignota’s work, and while I can indeed see the similarity in the album’s harsher, shouted segments and the candid lyrical content, this album doesn’t quite take that dive into the neo-classical that Lingua Ignota often does. If anything, I find myself more frequently reminded of the funeral soundtracking melancholy of Anna von Hausswolff by the uniquely meditative instrumentation used on this album to conjure it’s dark ambiance. But comparisons to contemporaries aside,  The Origin of My Depression  is an album that can certainly serve as potent dark ambient noise to scratch that itch, but with caution, as a more meditative look into this album and a focus on its lyrical content will reveal a potentially disturbing and tragically relatable expression of its creator’s titular mindset that shapes t...

Even though I started this blog in 2017 and was pretty busy with writing about new music on it from the get go, I still wrote about two albums from the previous year. One was Gojira’s  Magma , my favorite album of 2016, which I consider perfect for my sense of the word, and one that I have yet to hear a more recent album better than (though Khemmis came close last year). The other album was Volbeat’s  Seal the Deal & Let’s Boogie , which I considered to be the most disappointing album of 2016. For as much shit as they got from the detractors that accompanied their meteoric rise in notoriety, Volbeat truly were bringing something fresh, exciting, and downright fun with their ardent combination of energetic rock ‘n’ roll, thrash, rockabilly, and classic heavy metal on albums like  Guitar Gangsters and Cadillac Blood  and  Rock the Rebel / Metal the Devil . The smooth and seemingly effortless blending of the distant genres’ elements through the modernizat...

I won’t lie, Skillet was a small part of my musical adolescence; I liked the uplifting, Linkin-Park-inspired alternative metal heaviness of  Collide  and the parts of  Comatose  that came closest to that. But since  Awake , the band have just been on such a downward trajectory as their radio rock success has cornered them into reproducing the same formulaic Christian hard rock into oblivion. 2013′s  Rise  was chocked full of stale attempts at recapturing of the essence of “Hero” and “Awake and Alive” from the previous album due to their chart-topping success, and that was the last time I listened to a new Skillet album. I didn’t have any desire to listen to  Unleashed  when it came out in 2016, but I figured I’d check back in this year and see what Skillet were up to with their tenth studio album,  Victorious , and God I wish I hadn’t. I have said on here before that I think the offensiveness of Imagine Dragons’ meteoric success ...

I have stated my distaste for the overdone try-hard edginess of the dark carnival aesthetic in film and television (and separating the band Avatar from that aesthetic has been a necessary task for me to prepare myself for their music), but something about applying it to the self-aware campiness of metal had me kind of intrigued to see what the exaggerated horror of metal could do for the often butchered scary circus aesthetic. I mentioned not too long ago that metal has always had its foot in parody through excess, and after all, isn’t the whole carnival thing supposed to be excessively cartoonish itself too? Maybe it could work. And that seems to be the hypothesis by which Pensées Nocturnes have approached this album. Pensées Nocturnes are a french band who have been rather prolific over the past decade,  Grand Guignol Orchestra  being the group’s sixth full-length album over the course of their decade-long existence. And the band have consistently sought to tinker and ...

Carnifex have been contributing to anchoring deathcore to its death metal roots for over a decade now, and I have appreciated their earnestness in their drive to bring the most brutal out of deathcore without resorting to the typical hardcore tactics of their contemporaries. They’re not making it more difficult than it has to be, and their catalog is a relatively simple one to sort through and order in terms of favorites. They have albums that are more vibrant and vital than others; I personally enjoyed their previous LP in 2016,  Slow Death , as well as 2010′s  Hell Chose Me  and 2014′s  Die Without Hope . And with that up-and-down discography has come the possibility of a simply less impactful offering of deathcore right after one of their best, which is the unfortunate, yet not too surprising reality of World War X: an album that by no means defiles Carnifex’s name or sinks their career into abysmal depths, but one that just isn’t as ripe with potent cuts as it...

Russian Circles are not a complicated band to understand. Their approach to post-metal has always been a pretty holistic one, and as the band have honed their sound, their natural flow and chemistry has only become more infectious through their music. The band started with some proggy, math-rock-ish tendencies, and a little heavier of a leaning toward ambient post-rock, but since  Empros  (and on a few songs from the albums preceding it), the band have focused their energy on establishing these infectious grooves and guiding them through their most natural path through the post-metal fields, rather than jerking them by the leash through disjointed attempts at instrumental prog. And it has made them all the more exciting to listen to. The band showed their ability to inject versatility into their naturalistic, groove-focused approach on my favorite album in their catalog, 2013′s  Memorial , and while their following album in 2016,  Guidanc e, wasn’t as full of twis...