June 2010
2 posts
May 2010
2 posts
3 tags
2 tags
Hayaino Daisuki's Speed Metal Dojo
Any band that substitutes a picture of a bunch of chicks imitating the back cover of “Reign in Blood” for an actual photo of the band in their liner notes probably has their hearts in the right place.
Hayaino Daisuki (“we love speed” in Japanese) is a living love letter to ’80s Japanese thrash and speed metal put together when Jon Chang and Takafumi Matsubara aren’t doing Gridlink. So far,...
March 2010
1 post
2 tags
February 2010
5 posts
2 tags
Torche: Meanderthal
Get your happiness out of my metal!
There are times when I become acutely aware of just how inappropriate the machine-gun bursts of blastbeat aggression that make up so much of my music collection are for what’s happening. This happens to me quite often when I’m walking my dog on warm days. There we are: man and beast pushing our way through a pleasantly overgrown field. The sun is up,...
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Live Review: Nile/Immolation/Krisiun/Dreaming...
Nile, Immolation, Krisiun. What a line-up! Needless to say, I was giddy with anticipation for this monster of a death metal show. I’m happy to report that it somehow managed to exceed my sky-high expectations.
(pictured: Krisiun)
The show started with a couple of forgettable performances from a local band and a deathcore group. However, the next group to play, Dreaming Dead, annihilated...
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Katatonia: Brave Murder Day
I can’t divorce my views on “Brave Murder Day” from vivid memories of my high school years. This album was for the times when the tenuous nature of social connections loomed like a threatening shadow and drove me to seek obscurity. It was for the times when reflexive smiles, forced laughs, protocol, and little power struggles waged on the scorched earth of polite conversation...
January 2010
7 posts
2 tags
Vektor: Black Future
Vektor are the absolute best fucking thrash band from Arizona.
Ripping tech thrash! 2009! Fuck?
Ok, that’s not completely unheard of. Revocation are whiplashing like mad in the 21st. Vektor trades in Revocation’s “death/” for a grittier production and a taste for Voivodian alien epic.
Traditional thrash hammering gets contorted into tremolo picked, warbling dissonance and drawn out onto...
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Demilich: Nespithe
Listening to “Nespithe” evokes in one’s mind the experience of being kidnapped by a gaggle of grotesquely deformed hillfolk, shoved into the windowless back of a van, force fed hallucinogens, and released into a pitch black labyrinth to grope aimlessly along dampened walls while being tormented by otherworldly visions conjured in an addled brain. We all know what that feels like, am...
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Robin Trower: Bridge of Sighs
“Bridge of Sighs” is considered by many to be Mr. Trower’s magnum opus, and it is a monster of a riff-infested, blues-injected 1970s rock album. Trower’s guitar white-knuckles the helm of this ship and steers it back and forth between mournful depths and more sunny and uplifting climes. His guitar sound is lean and muscular, delivering massive crunch just as readily as atmospheric...
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Rwake: Voices of Omens
Seek this album out with a painful urgency. Play the album. Close your eyes and allow yourself to be completely subjugated by the potent morass seeping from your speakers. Follow the lead of your restless mind. A grizzled, hoary prophet in tattered robes wanders the backwoods of Arkansas. With a feral gleam in his eyes he screeches dire diatribes on the certain doom wrought by the folly of man....