Since I am slightly allergic to the overcrowded Metalcore-scene (specifically caused by infantile and puerile nonsense), I wasn’t really looking forward to review this August Burns Red album. It’s a collection of regular and predictable stuff, compiled to annoy my sensitive ear drums for sure, or a sadistic outburst of this website’s Big Boss to irritate me, I guess.
German band “The New Black” have been rocking the scene since 2009. Since then they have been making music that they themselves describe in a very fun way,
“...This is our kind of party: Black Label Society bring the booze, Pantera spice it up, Thin Lizzy add some taste, and Alter Bridge smooth it over before Metallica turn it black... And you can be there, too”.
Doomed To Destroy Destined To Die is a pure old school metal album, but it is not only inspired by the thrash death scene (Testament, Kreator, Morbid Angel) from the Eighties. The album also has a strong Entombed touch and parallels to early Suicidal Tendencies and DRI are unavoidable. All the tracks are SS-20 pieces of thrash crossover metal/hardcore and shows how a thrash death core song has to be constructed.
It may be true that it is nowadays rather hard to produce something entirely innovative in the heavy sludge genre, but some bands still deserve some special attention. As in the case of Palehorse, a UK band that has been around for over a decade. A major thing that sets Palehorse apart from the majority of genre bands is use of no axe guitars whatsoever, but instead they ad two four stringers..
The name should already point into the right direction. Normally I'm not responsible for writing black metal reviews because I'm not the biggest fan of this music and that’s an understatement. But From The Vastland from Iran certainly can claim to be very different from other bands in that genre.
Coming close to their twentieth anniversary, Italian Goth Wavers Camerata Mediolanense return with full length album number four, which is the main part of their Petrarca Project concept, based on the life (and his poetry more specifically) of Francesco Petrarca. This personality lived in the 14th century and is known as poet, writer, humanist and philosopher.
Grot are an extreme act from the British Islands, consisting of Warpath / Cold War vocalist Eoin Broughal, guitarist / bassist John Roche (of Gamma Bomb-fame), and on drums the well-known Kevin Talley - think Hate Eternal, Six Feet Under, Decrepit Birth, Dying Fetus and Misery Index amongst others.
Their debut mini-album ‘Malva’, released in 2011 seems to have been a stoner album. This new, full record however has more than stoner to it. There’s also a dose of what I’d dare to call grunge mixed in, as well as some progressive metal.
Already the fifth studio album for this Norwegian band, but I admit never before having heard of them, I guess the stream of bands/albums etc. is just getting too big to be able to follow them all. I got a bit scared when I put this album on, and it started with some flamenco guitar and handclap, but that was just the intro.
Ritual Death Metal is the sixth album by Finnish band Deathchain, and the whole was produced, engineered and mixed at the famous Necromorbus Studio by Tore Stjerna (think: Zombiefication, Portrait, Funeral Mist, Merrimack, Jess And The Ancient Ones and many, many more). When it comes to the latter, JATAO: both guitar players share both bands, by the way.
