Metal Review's Latest Reviews

Murder Therapy - The Therapy

[3.5][4.0][4.5]

I have some kind of innate knack for selecting 11-minute records, this one being like my fourth in the last few months... Weird.

Italy's Murder Therapy is a by-the-numbers death metal band, but if you enjoy classic semi-technical death metal, then don't let their lack of innovation deter you. While they're squarely within the box, they do what they do well—certainly well enough to be worthy of some label attention, since they’re currently unsigned. The Therapy contains four songs of Deicide-styled pummeling, more old-school than the blast-happy wall-of-sound heaviness that too many bands go for these days.

Lyrically, what we have here is the usual suspects—sickness, madness, death—but the riffs are crisp and well-constructed, and the performance and production are both solid, if honestly perhaps just a bit too clean. Therein lies my biggest criticism, which is that I simply wish this slab of sickness-inspired death metal sounded sicker, dirtier, viler than it is. (I’d ratchet up the guitar tone a bit&mdas [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Jeremy Witt

© 2008 Metal Review

Asva - What You Don't Know Is Frontier

[5.0][4.0][4.5]

Bringing with them an impressive pedigree, including ties to Faith No More/Mr. Bungle, Goatsnake, Burning Witch, and drone masters Sunn 0))) and Earth, Asva makes use of many of the same ideals utilized by those last two bands. Asva is alternately crawling through gut-wrenching agonizing slothliness a la Sunn and drifting through a plodding cinematic beauty like the more (ahem) progressive work of recent Earth. In combining the downtuned and the dreamy, Asva have created a work of melancholic scope that stands tall in the ranks of droning goodness, although it does drag a bit at times. As one would likely imagine from the comparisons a few lines back, Asva utilizes crashing, plodding power chords, sparse drumming and distant vocals alongside sections of feedback-laden squeals, the occasional organ and keyboard work, and some delay-heavy clean guitars. It’s that latter element that adds the atmospheric element that makes this more than just tuned-down and slowed-down soul-crushing heaviness and g [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Jeremy Witt

© 2008 Metal Review

Banished From Inferno - Self Titled

[5.0][4.5][4.5]

Cadillac Escalades, Thigh Master's, pennies, nickels, whitening toothpaste, light beer, diet soda, fabric softener, aftershave lotion, toe rings, bear bells and The Club: just a smattering of things in our world I find to be nothing short of worthless. Nestling comfortably amongst such frivolities is the idea of further truncating an already short EP such as this with two tracks devoted to a musical intro and outro. And to make matters even more confounding, an additional 4:30 minutes here is spent delivering yet another indispensable cover of "Into the Crypt of Rays" (note to metal bands: at this point I'd rather hear a cover of "One In Their Pride" than anything else from pre '86 Celtic Frost). In other words, 10-minutes out of the full 23-minutes of this EP is tossable.

Despite this, and even despite the fact the track listing on the cd is also botched, I quite enjoy Banished From Inferno's debut EP. It's not just because they sound like a band that could've landed on Earache circa 1990 (back when you could blindly buy fro [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Michael Wuensch

© 2008 Metal Review

Soulfly - Conquer

[5.0][4.5][5.0]

So as I was driving into work the other day, Soulfly’s latest release calming my road rage-frazzled nerves, it suddenly occurred to me that I had been preparing for this review all wrong. It being their sixth album, the band doesn’t really require an in-depth analysis or critical dissection; their history pretty much speaks for itself at this point. Also, with two months having passed since the release, most of you have likely already formed an opinion. So, with that in mind, I will be looking to give a rudimentary analysis of Conquer, continue the discussion theme of multi-instrumentation addressed in my previous Soulfly reviews, and toss in a few random nuggets of thought along the way that may or may not include reactions to the pre-lashes.

Conquer in many ways is a continuation of the heavier, “Soulpultura” sound of Dark Ages, which saw the band discard many of the tribal/nu-metal elements in favor of straight-up heaviness. “Blood Fire War Hate,” for example, is every bit as he [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Dave Pirtle

© 2008 Metal Review

Retrodemon - Demonstration

[3.0][2.5][3.0]

This one’s a bit belated, this album having already been out for over a year, but it’s hard to come up with much to say about this stoner-y mix of Orange Goblin and FM-radio hooks. Retrodemon fall squarely between the goodness of bloozy pot-smokin’ swagger and the abominable simplistic catchiness of an awful nu-rock act like Chevelle, with neither the hazy appeal of the former nor the outright damnability of the latter. I’ll apologize to Retrodemon for the late review if they’ll apologize to me for being so damn middle-of-the-road.

What Demonstration gets right is a short list: it’s not the worst record I’ve heard this month. Some of the groovier smokier riffs are acceptable, though they still feel as if they were lifted wholesale from The Complete Idiot’s Guide To Writing Stoner Rock Songs. (Example: the chugging “Greybeard,” which is still the album’s best track by far.) The big-chorus vocal harmonies evoke King’s X, and that’s never a bad thing, [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Jeremy Witt

© 2008 Metal Review

Svarti Loghin - Empty World

[4.5][4.5][4.5]

Ultra bleak, depressing black metal is becoming peculiarly popular these days, as evidenced by the rise in prominence of bands like Xasthur and the steady stream of pale and frail individuals forming new bands in this vein all over the world. Maybe we just like hearing music by people who live shittier lives than we do, who knows. Regardless, I’ve found that the artistic merits of this particular brand of black metal are often unfulfilling, as many projects seem to rely too heavily on their image rather than creating the music to match.

But Svarti Loghin’s take on this style intrigues me. Rather than the intense existential agony displayed by some of their darker peers, Empty World reminds me of Alcest in that it seems inspired more by a sort of melancholy nostalgia. Also like Alcest, the riffs here are often quite bright and even uplifting, and sound far removed from the suicidal musings of a band like Silencer. Keeping things almost entirely at a mid-pace, the six tracks on this album are all basically cut fro [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Chris McDonald

© 2008 Metal Review

Sybreed - Antares

[5.5][4.5][5.0]

Fans of industrial metal, especially those that cut their teeth on the glorious, early-to-mid-90's output of Ministry and Fear Factory, have fallen on hard times. The dearth of quality acts spawned from these metallic spores has had a nearly-crippling effect on the once-promising subgenre. Cyber-disciples like Scorngrain and Kryoburn have failed to produce shockwaves powerful enough to be felt outside the confines of their mechanical enclave, largely due to a nu-metal hangover that has clouded their vision and skewed their equilibrium. Sybreed fell prey to similiar shortcomings on their debut album, 2004's Slave Design - an album aimed to take the token, requisite FF-isms and steer them down a futuristic path littered with Meshuggah-style chunk-heave. The album was a hit-or-miss affair, laden with more misses than need be mentioned. Antares, their second effort, completely eclipses their previous work; the growth and augmentation the band has undergone over the past few years has yielded impressive resu [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Jordan Campbell

© 2008 Metal Review

Gojira - The Way Of All Flesh

[6.0][4.5][6.0]

After all is said and done, The Way Of All Flesh is a good album. You should know. The entire album has been streaming for awhile now, and you've probably already picked which side you're on. I'm still on the fence. It's the outer-struggle that Gojira make with their brand of life-after-death-metal that painted such a beautiful picture in 2005, and it's making it difficult for me to readjust the scale. Said portrait, From Mars To Sirius, is an impactive, tidal wave of an album whose wrath of melody and homeopathic approach make for something seismic. The wide-open spaces, the choruses that climb mountains; it flows like a river runs through it. A collection of bridled emotion distributed in moderation that snowballed into the size of a planet, was packaged, and then shipped out, and has been talked about ever since. So ample time spent with Flesh squashed the question of "By what distance does it surpass their previous amalgamonster?", because in my opinion it doesn't. Now I'm left trying to figure [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Sasha Horn

© 2008 Metal Review

Intronaut - Prehistoricisms

[5.5][5.0][5.5]

Intronaut have always been a band on the peripheral for me. As impressive as their previous releases are, for some reason they haven’t stayed with me. I always felt these guys were capable of something more, that indefinable edge that truly separates a band from its peers. With Prehistoricisms, Intronaut have delivered on all that early promise and then some. The musical palette from which the band now draws is rich and diverse, and yet at the same time they’ve never sounded more focused and singular in terms of vision. This is Intronaut’s best effort to date.

After the tantalizing intro of “Primordial Soup”, Prehistoricisms kicks into gear with “The Literal Black Cloud”. The sludgy, earth-moving riffs are a devastating reminder of how much heaviness can be wrung from a single guitar string, and these are offset by beautiful aerial sections that fans of Panopticon will surely love. Intronaut have moved further away from conventional metal structures on this [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Michael Roberts

© 2008 Metal Review

Phazm - Cornerstone Of The Macabre

[4.0][4.0][4.5]

Dudes from Scarve and Yrkoon get together to play quirky metal that can’t decide if it wants to be from Sweden, Norway, or the bayou. Make sense to you? Me neither, but that’s Phazm’s schtick in a nutshell. These guys alternatively brand themselves “death’n’roll” (as in their previous album title, Antebellum Death’n’Roll) or “black’n’roll” (as in the song “Black’n’Roll” from that album), and their indecision on the matter reflects their somewhat schismatic sound. Like its predecessor, Cornerstone of the Macabre leans a little more towards the black metal side of things, but takes plenty of funky left turns along the way. It’s a fun, quirky metal record, but it suffers from its lack of focus and never really escapes “disposable” status.

On a song-by-song basis, Phazm can deliver in grand fashion. Opener “Love Me Rotten (Love Me True)” rollicks forth with needling but catchy riffs and a dis [Continue reading on Metal Review]

Written by: Doug Moore

© 2008 Metal Review