CD

More than twenty five years ago our beautifully smelly Earth got festered when Autopsy decided to exist. Through miscreants like Severed Survival and Acts Of The Unspeakable, the quartet injected the American Death Metal scene with their own vision of gore and terror, and undersigned was pleased. I saw it was good… Autopsy unfortunately disbanded in 1995 and some of the members continued under the moniker of Abscess, another great, and slightly comparable act with messages of love and peace, evidently.

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.

This new album by Visions Of Atlantis marks a change in their repertoire. Whereas before you could categorize the band as producing symphonic metal, this album is more going in the direction of classical heavy metal. 

There are still some symphonic elements of course, but in comparison to their previous album ‘Delta’ this album has more of an edge, by which I mean that the bombastic and operatic elements have been drastically reduced.

Since this band’s birth ten years ago, TesseracT created a very specific, own-faced vision on the progressive side of Metal Music. Personally I am not that much ‘into’ this kind of sonics, but when it comes to this band specifically, I cannot but express a modest form of appreciation.

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.

Singer Tim Lambesis, who is best known for his work as the front man of “As I Lay Dying” and “Austrian Death Machine” is back with even heavier music. He already has his own studio. So it didn’t take long for Ryan Glisan (Allegaeon) and Andy Godwin (ex-The Famine, Embodyment) to join the band and switch out ideas.

Short for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, this Italian band (current line-up consisting of singer Henry Guy, rhythm & lead guitarist Yorga, rhythm guitarist Jason, bassist Rob Star, and drummer Lancs – the latter apparently a later addition) from Grottammare (a suburb of coastal town San Benedetto del Tronto, itself situated at the Adriatic Sea, almost smack in between the larger town of Ancona in the North, and Pescara in the South) was formed in 2005.

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..

Norway’s progressive metal band Leprous were founded back in 2001 but they still manage to surprise with new ideas on every new album. Not satisfied by just sticking to a single musical style, Leprous from Norway decide to use ingredients from such different genres like black metal, screamo, jazz, industrial and progressive rock, and put it all together into their very own sonic universe.

The cover artwork hints at postblack metal, but you can expect much more. Many tracks use a black metal frame but generally allow for many other genres. Already the ingenious opener “Stillborn motivation” where you can find next to some post rock also a few shoegaze sounds, makes you hungry for more. This high quality level is maintained throughout the album, and the songs are splendidly filled with breaks. Symphonic arrangements, dramatic passages, ambient influences and some evil metal outbursts guarantee a multi-layered listening experience.