Reviews
Valknacht - Le Sacrifice D'Ymir
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Pagan black metal can tend to be pretty hit or miss with me. You have your bands that excel at the craft and make fantastic releases (hi there Drudkh and Kawir), and then ones that only offer up your typical "hail Odin/I love trees" redundancy, and offer an equally dismissible delivery with their music. Quebecers Valknacht sit somewhere in the middle
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Reviews
Sonata Arctica - Pariah's Child
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Sonata Arctica are back with a new album that, at least externally, relives the glory of the past times. A new album with the flavour of the old: old logo, old artwork style and old wolves' theme are back. What about the inside?
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Reviews
Twilight - III: Beneath Trident's Tomb
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When I heard tell of Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore joining a black metal band, I was naturally curious and anxious to hear the results. Now… I'm not quite sure what I was expecting, because this sounds exactly like Sonic Youth playing black metal to me, and it sounds just as lame as I should have thought.
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Reviews
Hail Of Bullets - III: The Rommel Chronicles
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A concept album about Generalfeldmarschall Erwin Rommel? Count me in! I'm always up to get down with the Desert Fox.
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Reviews
Vanden Plas - Chronicles Of The Immortals: Netherworld (Path 1)
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The masters of heavy rock operas are back. Vanden Plas, from the city of Kaiserslautern, Germany, have been steadily grabbing dully deserved attention of late with their unique theatrical approach to music applied to progressive power metal. It has been 4 years already since they released the addictive concept album The Seraphic Clockwork. They took things even a notch farther in terms of theater performance by teaming up with fantasy writer Wolfgang Hohlbein to interpret his Netherworld novels on stage in the form of a rock opera for a few selected shows in Germany. With the bombastic title of Chronicles of the Immortals: Netherworld (Path I), this is the studio recording of the first half of those songs.
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Reviews
The Distorting Glass - The Germ.
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For starters, The Distorting Glass are not a metal band. Nope. Nosirree Bob.
So why am I reviewing them on a metal site?
Well, they fall under that "music that might be of interest to metal fans" clause that we've used in the past. One of the members of The Distorting Glass, Tom Granica, was formerly with Tacoma Narrows Bridge Disaster, a band whose last release was found by many on this site to be an utterly fantastic post-metal release.
So what, exactly, are The Distorting Glass? I'm not entirely sure myself, to be honest. They have dubbed themselves a "heavy art rock" band. Ok, I can get behind that. It's not particularly post-rock, not straight forward rawk a la Clutch, nor some overly-pretentious art rock band that makes me want to start smashing band members err things with a claw hammer.
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Reviews
Corpsessed - Abysmal Thresholds
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Every once in a while, you come across a band for whom the label "death metal" is an understatement. Corpsessed's debut album is more like "slavering jaws of the supreme ravenous death beast metal."
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Reviews
Shattered Hope - Waters Of Lethe
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I've put off reviewing for a bit. This is partially because of the MS Awards work, but largely because this marks my 200th review for Metal Storm and I was hoping to get something special to review.
Lo and behold… enter Shattered Hope.
Way back when, when I had just four posted reviews under my belt for MS, Hellenic purveyor of doom, Shattered Hope were the very first band to ever contact me and ask me to review their works. Enjoyed the promo and really enjoyed their debut, Absence.
So when I found out they were putting out a new release, Waters Of Lethe, I was giddy as a 14yo at a Justin Bieber concert. Or as giddy as my bitter self would be if we deported his ass back to Canada. Or better yet, Somalia.
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Reviews
Descend - Wither
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In the Roman year of MMXIV, Sweden's Descend are here to show us that originality is certainly not always the ultimate decider of good music.
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Reviews
Silent Force - Rising From Ashes
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Have you ever wondered what would have turned out if Def Leppard played power metal? In the name of your mental sanity, I hope not. Anyway, the result would have been Silent Force.
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Reviews
Manowar - Kings Of Metal MMXIV
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I'll level with you guys. I wrote a review for Kings Of Metal MMXIV back in November 2013, based purely on the Battle Hymns MMXI abomination and the seconds-long clip of the "Kingdom Come" vocal track. I knew exactly what this would sound like; I was only waiting for the album's release to confirm my suspicions. Well, you know what? It's WORSE.
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Reviews
Tortorum - Katabasis
Reviews
Hell - Curse And Chapter
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If that freaking genius that was Edgar Allan Poe lived in these days, he would have listened to Hell. Their crazy, obscure and disquieting traits would have allowed them to get along well.
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Reviews
Descend Into Despair - The Bearer Of All Storms
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Funeral doom can tend to feel like melodic death metal in the sense that the style often seems to get redundant, composed mostly of a sea of stale fish with a few shining gems lurking deep within its waters. Thankfully, Romania's Descend Into Despair are one such gem, stepping outside some of the typical tendencies of their style with The Bearer Of All Storms, and offering us one of the first great debuts of 2014.
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Reviews
Slough Feg - Digital Resistance
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Slough Feg's take on heavy metal never sounds out of time or place. Their sound is something which borrows from tradition but they always remain relevant and continually inventive, and after a four year silence I'm pleased to say that this is still very much the case with their ninth set of cleverly constructed tunes, boldly entitled Digital Resistance.
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Reviews
Skull Fist - Chasing The Dream
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Gee whiz, I thought speed metal was dead - subsumed by thrash on the darker side and power metal on the more glorious side. Evidently, Skull Fist are doing their absolute darndest to prove me wrong.
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