I haven’t been keeping track of Venom for a good while now, but I know they went through some sort of fracture or split of some sort that has now produced two incarnations of the band: Venom, with Cronos, and Venom Inc. with Tony Dolan and Jeff Dunn. When I saw that Venom had a new album slated for the end of the year, I figured I’d give it a shot, and I also figured that I may as well do my homework and check out what the other head of the proto-trash hydra had created last year. Venom Inc.’s album was undoubtedly flawed, but I was pleasantly surprised with the energy and the groove the supposed B-team brought to the table. The album needed some trimming and some more imaginative songwriting, but it at least made an attempt to modernize the long-prototypic sound the band had been playing with and showed some potential for future improvement (if things go rather ideally). I hadn’t listened to a full Venom album past Possessed , getting only unconvincing snippets from their pr...
I was pretty pleased with the thoroughness with which I covered the output of metal in this blog’s first year last year, all other obstacles that popped up considered. This year has already been better; I’ve covered more music and in more depth, and I’ve had less in my way this year it seems. I was trying to do this piece in a more extensive series, or just one monster post, around June. But metal had a substantially prolific mid-year and my own academic obligations of course reared their head again, so after pushing it out again and again, I decided to just trim it down to one regular post. These are just a few albums from last year that I either didn’t hear or just didn’t didn’t get around to writing about. Steel Panther - Lower the Bar I was kinda-sorta planning on giving the album a listen. I had always respected Steel Panther for their commitment to their very comedic act of satirizing one of metal’s most widely acknowledged embarrassments (80′s hair metal), but I ne...
After the widely appreciated return to their traditional black metal roots on their 2016 album, Arctic Thunder , Fenriz and Nocturno Culto are back with another, different kind of throwback this year with Old Star . Famed second wave black metal pioneers Darkthrone have managed to keep their output prolific in the new millennium by introducing elements of crust punk into their sound on several of their late-stage albums, much to the dismay of purist fans obsessed with Transylvanian Hunger , but for those appreciating of the band’s willingness to try new things while not taking themselves too seriously, albums like The Cult is Alive and Circle the Wagons are a bit of good fun that the genre definitely needs to increase its dosing of. While Arctic Thunder found the duo proving they could still harness their more traditional sound, Old Star finds them going back a little further into heavy metal’s history rather than just t...
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