Evergrey – A Heartless Portrait (The Orphean Testament) (Album Review)
By all accounts, Swedish metallers Evergrey have been on a roll for the last decade, boasting an absolutely unparalleled winning streak four albums deep. “Hymns…
Graham Bonnet Band – Day Out In Nowhere (Album Review)
A destination set to somewhere. Some might cling to the notion that old dogs can’t learn new tricks, but if Graham Bonnet’s career over the…
Misery Index – Complete Control (Album Review)
Not all chains are physical. Subtlety and nuance may seem counterintuitive in an extreme metal context, but that’s the niche that has been routinely explored…
Windwaker – Love Language (Album Review)
Okay, let’s make one thing clear straight off the bat… there is a huge party happening over here, and I promise that you’ll be kicking…
Ibaraki – Rashomon (Album Review)
What do Ihsahn (Emperor), Adam “Nergal” Darski (Behemoth, Me and That Man), and Gerard Way (My Chemical Romance) have in common? Aside from being musical…
Watain – The Agony & Ecstasy Of Watain (Album Review)
Cold burns the pitch blackness. Perhaps the ultimate test of a band’s greatness can be measured in the extreme reaction that they can invoke in…
Udo Dirkschneider – My Way (Album Review)
A present-oriented reminiscence unfolds. Given it’s more than 50 year history, it could be rightly stipulated that heavy metal is entering its golden years, at…
Ronnie Romero – Raised on Radio (Album Review)
At this point, we are fairly old friends with Ronnie Romero at Sonic Perspectives. He is comforting and familiar, like your favorite jeans, or football…
Ann Wilson – Fierce Bliss (Album Review)
Next year will see the 50th Anniversary of Heart, conjuring fond memories of classics like “Barracuda”, “Dog and Butterfly” and “Crazy On You”. Many casual…
Wolf – Shadowland (Album Review)
A world wreathed in perpetual darkness. Though the halls of metal fame are replete with bands that brought their craft to the world when the…
Joe Satriani – The Elephants Of Mars (Album Review)
It’s hard to believe that it’s been 35 years since so many listeners first encountered the surfing alien that catapulted Joe Satriani to fame -…
Andy Timmons – Electric Truth (Album Review)
Melodic, diverse, emotional, masterful – these are qualities that lead to a satisfying guitar-oriented album. Although “Electric Truth” has a couple of guest vocals on…
Northlane – Obsidian (Album Review)
Whoever you are, whatever you’re doing, get ready to drop everything and have a damn good time because Northlane’s 6th studio album “Obsidian” is upon us.…
Destruction – Diabolical (Album Review)
A sinister conspiracy exposed via old school excellence. In many respects, the past two years have amounted to a prison sentence for most of the…
Black Swan – Generation Mind (Album Review)
When the Black Swan was hatched in 2020, the debut of this super-group for the new decade made some real waves. Schenker vocalist Robin McAuley…
Veonity – Elements Of Power (Album Review)
A storm of sheer power emerges. Ascending the heights of the European power metal scene with less than a decade under their proverbial belts, Swedish…
Deserted Fear – Doomsday (Album Review)
Chaos prevails at the end of days. Sometimes even the most straightforward of presentations can also come off as highly original, particularly if a certain…
Evil Invaders – Shattering Reflection (Album Review)
Evil sounds of the 80s re-emerge. Opinions may vary as to what sub-genre of metal can claim to be the most intense, but there is…
Guild Of Others – Guild Of Others (Album Review)
There is a unique emotion when you discover a band during the period that surrounds its debut album. With countless musical proposals being released every…
Trench – Encased In Chrome (EP Review)
Did you hear about that massive earthquake in Canada recently? It was caused by Trench dropping their latest EP “Encased In Chrome”. It’s a superbly…
Michael Romeo – War Of The Worlds, Pt. II (Album Review)
Way back in the summer of 2018, we were visited unexpectedly by an otherworldly invasion of symphonic prog-metal. When we asked to be taken to…
Dark Funeral – We Are The Apocalypse (Album Review)
Let the end times rage! It might be said that a style that cleaves to an established orthodoxy will eventually go stale like unsealed bread,…
Pattern-Seeking Animals – Only Passing Through (Album Review)
Does “third time’s a charm” still hold true if the first and second times were damn good, too? Maybe “hat trick” would be the more…
Ghost – Impera (Album Review)
Tobias Forge is a seer. A prophet. A diviner. I know. That’s quite a statement from a protestant pastor (that would be me) when talking…
Sanhedrin – Lights On (Album Review)
The ugly truth has been illuminated. There is no shortage of inspiration of late for those seeking to paint a bleak musical picture of the…
Scorpions – Rock Believer (Album Review)
I was just a kid in 8th grade when I wrote my first music review for my school newspaper in the very metal town of…
Kublai Khan TX – Lowest Form Of Animal (EP Review)
It took me a while to figure out how to start this review. It was hard to decide how I could best describe the absolute…
Sabaton – The War To End All Wars (Album Review)
The War is too great for a single episode. Some stories, be they historical or fictional, are just too large to be contained in a…
Marillion – An Hour Before It’s Dark (Album Review)
Few bands have morphed as successfully as Marillion. No one in their right mind would have guessed that a band that began life as Genesis-wannabe…
Hammerfall – Hammer Of Dawn (Album Review)
A killer winged knight descends. Though seemingly tied to a bygone era, the revolution of high impact speed metal and melodic heroism that came roaring…
Girish and the Chronicles – Hail to the Heroes (Album Review)
In early 2020, when the whole world seemed to be going crazy (not the current flavor of crazy, mind you), we almost nearly had an…
Knight Area – D-Day II: The Final Chapter (Album Review)
Three years ago, the Dutch band Knight Area came out with a remarkable album called D-Day. It marked the 75th anniversary of that crucial action…
The Flower Kings – By Royal Decree (Album Review)
When Roine Stolt’s The Flower King released “Manifesto of An Alchemist” in 2017, it was uncertain what that meant for the potential of a full…
Death Dealer – Fuel Injected Suicide Machine (EP Review)
Fury road revisited. There’s a very plausible school of thought out there that once one hits a streak, the best course of action is to…
Peter Jones’ Tiger Moth Tales – A Song of Spring (Album Review)
Spring arrives early this year thanks to Peter Jones and his wonderful Tiger Moth Tales. Following in the vein of 2017’s “The Depths of Winter”,…
Theandric – Flight Among The Tombs (Album Review)
The eternal dove compels the cemetery ravens. Though now a fairly commonplace concept, back in the mid-2000s the notion of an American band resurrecting the…
