SLIPKNOT – The End, So Far (Album Review)
Few bands have left an imprint on the world in the way that Slipknot has. Since 1999, Slipknot’s music has been violently grabbing the throat…
Stratovarius – Survive (Album Review)
I had a torrid but brief love affair with power metal in the late 90s. Like most flings one has in their late teens and…
Counterparts – A Eulogy For Those Still Here (Album Review)
7 albums in, and lack of energy is most certainly not a problem for Counterparts. The Canadian quintet have knuckled down and dropped a huge…
Red Bazar – Inverted Reality (Album Review)
Although the name Peter Jones may fly under the radar of many – or be confused with the Haken keyboardist of the same name -…
Iron Savior – Reforged: Ironbound (Album Review)
The savior of iron seeks its past among the stars. Revisiting the past seems to be inevitable for the aging elite of the metal world,…
Megadeth – The Sick, The Dying… And the Dead! (Album Review)
You just can’t keep a good Vic down. Few things are as satisfying as an underdog defying the odds and coming home with the gold,…
Blind Guardian – The God Machine (Album Review)
An older legacy rises anew. Nothing tests the mettle of a musical movement like adversity, and following a massive crash in popular interest in the…
King’s X – Three Sides of One (Album Review)
They’re baaaaaaack! The band that everybody loves but nobody buys has (finally) put out a new slab of their unique blend of rock, funk, metal,…
Brymir – Voices In The Sky (Album Review)
A roaring voice descends from the stormy skies. The subject of Norse mythology and the historic pursuits of the Viking age have been a common…
Cosmograf – Heroic Materials (Album Review)
The early 90s saw Jon Anderson pleading “Change We Must”, Robert Plant issuing his own missive with “Fate Of Nations” and countless others throughout the…
Soilwork – Overgivenheten (Album Review)
Superior ambition begets new horizons. The ongoing relationship between the melodic death metal style originally spearheaded by the Gothenburg scene and their younger metalcore cousins…
Sigh – Shiki (Album Review)
Japan is a land of astonishing contrast, from its peaceful and distinctive moss gardens to its elaborate Kabuki drama’s all the way through to the…
Collective Soul – Vibrating (Album Review)
Collective Soul are on a roll, jumping from one success to another as their studio albums continue to impress. Many bands who made it big…
Spirit Adrift – 20 Centuries Gone (EP Review)
A formative past remembered. Originally entering the metal scene in the mid-2010s as a traditionally-tinged doom metal project after the mold of modern purveyors with…
The Halo Effect – Days of the Lost (Album Review)
Former In Flames members and stars from across the melodeath scene come together once again under The Halo Effect’s banner to produce a compelling album…
Hammer King – Kingdemonium (Album Review)
The masked king ushers in the apocalypse. It is stipulated that when a band puts forth a recurring hammer-wielding mascot that bears an uncanny resemblance…
Dave Kerzner – The Traveler (Album Review)
Where progressive rock and Sci-Fi meet, you’ll find Dave Kerzner. First launching into the prog-rock stratosphere with Simon Collins in Sound of Contact, Kerzner has…
Sunstorm – Brothers In Arms (Album Review)
To AOR heaven, we shall ascend. Sunstorm is a name that has come to embody consistency, which may seem counterintuitive when considering that the persons…
Arch Enemy – Deceivers (Album Review)
Deception has never been so honest. A discussion of the melodic death metal craze that swept northern Europe during the 90s and flourished into the…
Psycroptic – Divine Council (Album Review)
Austrian tech-death merchants Psycroptic have been pumping out high-octane, no holes barred collisions of extreme technicality and unrelenting death metal for two decades in what…
My Sleeping Karma – Atma (Album Review)
Dreams of existential sorrow emerge. Cultures have a tendency of being appropriated with the passage of time, be it the adoption of a modified Greek…
Long Distance Calling – Eraser (Album Review)
German post-rock (or should that be post-metal?) band Long Distance Calling (hereafter referred to as LDC) return with their 8th studio album, “Eraser”. As with…
Amon Amarth – The Great Heathen Army (Album Review)
Battalions of the Norse assemble! For the better part of 30 years, the metal institution that is Amon Amarth has been a stalwart standard bearer…
Sweet Freedom – According To Jörgen Schelander (Album Review)
Prog rock goes to Broadway. Breaking new ground is not necessarily reserved to the newcomer, and though some might argue that progressive rock has seemingly…
Ryo Okumoto – The Myth of Mostrophus (Album Review)
Legends rise and they fall. Sometimes those legends are monsters like the great Mostrophus who seem to disappear – even for one hundred thousand years…
A-Z – A-Z (Album Review)
Full disclosure: I am not a fan of 80s AOR, 80s hard rock, or the 80s retro pastiche that briefly birthed the unwelcome return of…
Fame on Fire – Welcome to the Chaos (Album Review)
It’s easy to think nu-metal is dead, the days of baseball cap wearing young men rapping away with turntables and thick guitars chugging away in…
Stick To Your Guns – Spectre (Album Review)
Stick To Your Guns are back. You heard that right. It’s been 5 long years since the Orange County 5-piece have put out an LP,…
God Is An Astronaut – The Beginning Of The End (Album Review)
Enter the cosmic Mobius strip. The exact point where a band goes from being a newcomer outfit to a fold of seasoned veterans has a…
Greg Puciato – Mirrorcell (Album Review)
The mirror reflects a broader horizon. It could be said that every artist lives within his or her own world, and in the particular case…
Oceans of Slumber – Starlight and Ash (Album Review)
Houston’s Oceans of Slumber have carefully broadened their sound with each record and have reliably crafted some of the most exciting and forward thinking extreme…
Alestorm – Seventh Rum Of A Seventh Rum (Album Review)
Ahoy and avast, matey; there be symphonic power metal ahead of ye in this here review. Scotland’s favorite controversial pirate power metallers Alestorm are back…
Telekinetic Yeti – Primordial (Album Review)
Fuzzy guitars, trudging riffs and more history than you could shake a proverbial stick at, doom metal is the home of metal music, yet so…
Vomit Forth – Seething Malevolence (Album Review)
Death metal can be a surprisingly malleable genre, able to be mixed with all sorts of influences and still come out sounding cohesive and inimitably…
Grey Daze – The Phoenix (Album Review)
When Chester Bennington passed away back in 2017, the rock and metal world was left in shock and mourning, a man who so often gave…
Municipal Waste – Electrified Brain (Album Review)
Pure kinetic thrash mayhem manifested. While the metal community often enjoys chiding less aggressive musical genres for lacking spine, occasionally a band comes along that…
