ALBUM REVIEWS
If you’re looking for aggregated album reviews from our seasoned music specialists, including our own score offering at a glance how the album fared, this is the right destination for you. Album reviews certainly still matter to artists, writers, and publicists, as they are the ones dealing with them every day, but does the average listener still pay attention? Well, we sincerely hope you do... Dive in!
Khemmis – Doomed Heavy Metal (EP Review)
The cool thing about discovering a band through an EP is that the listener gets a sneak peek into what really moves them. And with…
Paralydium – Worlds Beyond (Album Review)
In a burst of creative energy that swells with powerful melodic might, Sweden’s Paralydium delivers modern progressive metal with a serious taste of nostalgia. Their…
Lör – Edge of Eternity (Album Review)
Rarely does music from a long-favorite band simply fall out of the sky and into one’s lap, but the sweetness of surprise should not be…
Shape of Water – Great Illusions (Album Review)
The dissociative allure of neon at midnight is a dreamy wonder difficult to capture in sound alone, few aural sensations so distinct as bright streaks…
Fairyland – Osyrhianta (Album Review)
Osyrhia, before the ravaging wars. Though today France has become a competent rival to Italy in producing lofty symphonic power metal projects, fielding the likes…
Haken – Virus (Album Review)
The dramatic and abrupt ending of “A Cell Divides” from Haken’s last album “Vector” left listeners in limbo. Since then, devoted fans have been speculating…
Covet – Technicolor (Album Review)
Capturing a rainbow in sound alone may seem impossible, yet it is a feat achieved in the full vibrance of the sun by instrumental rock…
Paralysis – Mob Justice (Album Review)
Submit to the metallic mob. The meteoric revival of thrash metal has left no shortage of impressive craters since the mid-2000s, often retreading territory that…
Alestorm – Curse Of The Crystal Coconut (Album Review)
Black pearls give way to glittering fruit. Despite being roughly 14 years to the day that Alestorm (then known as Battleheart) first broke onto the…
Pyogenesis – A Silent Soul Screams Loud (Album Review)
When seeking a poster child for the successful transformation of stylistic identity, one needs look no further than Pyogenesis. Formed in 1989 as a doom…
Grave Digger – Fields Of Blood (Album Review)
The clans have risen yet again! It’s difficult to realize a great idea and then avoid returning to it, especially within a grand career that…
Vandenberg – 2020 (Album Review)
Almost forty years ago, the Dutch hard rock alchemists Vandenberg hit the waves with a sound that very much in line with the music of…
FM – Synchronized (Album Review)
The very first sentence of any good AOR album review should include a mention of Iron Maiden. Are you confused? Good. Still confused? Perfect. Way…
Henry Kane – Age Of The Idiot (Album Review)
When idiots rule the world. When reminiscing upon the golden age of punk rock, conversations will often include the noted players in New York, the…
Witchcraft – Black Metal (Album Review)
With an album title of “Black Metal,” the most that Witchcraft’s latest opus has in common with black metal is the entirely isolating nature of…
Sorcerer – Lamenting Of The Innocent (Album Review)
Metal and witchcraft have always gone hand in hand, a bond which is further reinforced through Sorcerer’s upcoming album “Lamenting of the Innocent.” A concept…
Cauldron Black Ram – Slaver (Album Review)
Metal has romanticised pirates much in the way it has romanticized the Vikings, leaving the genre to define historic victories and personalities with bright chords…
Triptykon – Requiem [Live At Roadburn 2019] (Album Review)
A night at the opera of woe. All too often there is a tendency to obsess over one isolated aspect of a trailblazing project’s history,…
Wolftooth – Valhalla (Album Review)
There’s a time and place for fiery battle hymns, and there’s a time and place for the long march to war. Metal often seems to…
Shaman Elephant – Wide Awake But Still Asleep (Album Review)
There’s something very satisfying about retro 60s/70s inspiration being thrust into an era of modern production and arrangement. When done tastefully and artfully, the results…
One Desire – Midnight Empire (Album Review)
Our friends at the record label Frontiers Music sank our hearts in April when a few choice album releases were pushed back due to the…
Die Kreatur – Panoptikum (Album Review)
Spurred by the imaginative depths of darkness and decades of musical experience, Die Kreatur emerges as the latest creative avenue for two well-established names in…
Neige Morte – IIII (Album Review)
When it comes to black metal, two points of reference have always been the quality of the production and the absolute discord that musicians are…
Firewind – Firewind (Album Review)
Just in case you are not feeling the full weight of your years today, just be reminded that the Greek power metal project known as…
Sinisthra – The Broad And Beaten Way (Album Review)
A specter reemerges from the woeful ether It’s a rare occasion when conversations regarding the drearier side of the metallic spectrum and abstract lyrical pursuits…
Mrs. Kite – Flickering Lights (Album Review)
Hailing from Germany, the curiously titled Mrs. Kite have won the “German rock & pop award” for “best progressive band” three times. This might explain…
Shrapnel – Palace For The Insane (Album Review)
Come to the mad thrashing palace. Though hailed as the de facto birth place of heavy metal and most prolific contributor of its second wave…
Voodoo Gods – The Divinity of Blood (Album Review)
Super-groups have the advantage of emerging from the realm of dreams fully-formed and prepared for execution, the weight of its member’s collective reputations fueling them…
Eric Gillette – A New Day (EP Review)
I’m only moderately familiar with Eric Gillette’s work as lead guitarist and singer for The Neal Morse Band. Consequently, I had no idea what to…
Green Carnation – Leaves of Yesteryear (Album Review)
This is it. This is the album I’ve waited nearly a decade and a half to hear, and an album I never thought would actually…
Winterfylleth – The Reckoning Dawn (Album Review)
After a detour that saw them toying with folk music for Ren Fair nerds, the British black metal quintet Winterfylleth have not so much returned…
Caligula’s Horse – Rise Radiant (Album Review)
“Rise Radiant,” the fifth full-length release by Australian prog-rock purveyors Caligula’s Horse, strikes the listener with a startling shocker of equaling and even exceeding everything…
Theosophy – Towers Of Dark Pantheon (Album Review)
There are few places on Earth that can so aptly channel the essence of black metal as the cold clutches of Siberia, with long winters…
Paradise Lost – Obsidian (Album Review)
Paradise Lost have made a musical career out of doing the unforeseen, while at the same time fronting the British death/doom/gothic metal scene since 1988.…
Todd Sucherman – Last Flight Home (Album Review)
Not every artist can thank Phil Collins for the inspiration of stepping out from behind the drum kit and giving it a go as a…
Vader – Solitude in Madness (Album Review)
Passion never goes out of style, and neither does the brutality of death metal bludgeoned with the relentless speed of thrash metal. The best of…