Author Archive for Paige Camisasca
Review: Fall City Fall – Victus
Let’s face it: Metalcore has gotten a bit same old, same old lately. Yet Calgary, Canada’s Fall City Fall wield a big, heavy slap shot of creativity that shatters the monotony. While the dual-vocals of Nathan Zorn and Keenan Pylychaty echo the pained snarls of Rites of Spring, Ignition, and other Dischord-label innovators, the multifaceted [...]
Review: Incite – All Out War
This second album from Phoenix groove thrashers Incite—featuring Soulfly’s Max Cavalera’s stepson Richie Cavalera on vocals—is full of mean riffing and serious aggression. “Feel the Flames” hits like Pantera; “Retaliation” has a killer balance of melodies and intense thrash guitar work. Richie has Max’s sense of subtlety, meaning none whatsoever, and his band’s latest plows [...]
Review: Aeon – Aeons Black
Death metal is often described using the vocabulary of violence and war—some songs thrash and mangle, others tear and rip. But few albums truly evoke a sense of carnage like Aeons Black. These Swedish veterans have honed their take on Floridian-styled death metal into a monster of an album that rumbles and churns like a [...]
Review: Tiamat – The Scarred People
Tiamat might not play as ferociously as they did over 20 years ago when they started as a death-metal band, but the Swedes do sound fresh and invigorated. On this first album in four years, frontman Johan Edlund usually sings like the lovechild of Marilyn Manson and ’80s Bowie, while lush guitars and glowing keyboard [...]
Review: Motionless In White – Infamous
Living up to the “spooky core” tag way better than Coal Chamber, the band that came up with that descriptor nearly in the mid ’90s, Pennsylvania’s makeup-slathered Motionless in White manage to pull off the unlikely mashup of Manson-esque Halloween rock with burly, mosh pit-churning metalcore. Complete with black-metalish keyboard flourishes, Infamous lead single “Devil’s [...]
Review: Parkway Drive – Atlas
Album No. 4 finds this Australian quintet back at its old tricks. The 12 tracks here only occasionally stray from the now-patented metalcore formula, with plenty of gang vocals, melodic riffs, and uninspired mosh parts; headbangers tired of the standardization of metalcore will just find more reason to feel weary. But Parkway Drive do manage [...]
Review: Geoff Tate – Kings & Thieves
After splitting acrimoniously with his former Queensrÿche bandmates while on tour behind 2011’s much-maligned Dedicated to Chaos, singer Geoff Tate has not only struck out with his own new version of the band but also a new solo album. Sadly, on the latter, Tate isn’t exploiting his legendary pipes or prog-metal creativity. Kings & Thieves [...]
Review: Isis – Temporal
Post-metal pioneers Isis, who broke up in 2010, will be sorely missed, a fact they reinforce with Temporal, a posthumous double-disc (plus DVD) full of pristine demos and other rarities. Aficionados will love picking out the differences between these early takes and the final album mixes: “Ghost Key” is instrumental here and the chirpy keyboards [...]
Review: Flyleaf – New Horizons
Worshipping guitar almost as much as God, these devout Texan alt-rockers deliver a third full-length of mostly hits but a few misses. New Horizons puts recently departed frontwoman Lacey Sturm’s vocals center stage on songs ranging from the clean-riffed, Paramore-esque “Cage on the Ground” to the heavy-metal caterwaul “Green Heart,” their hardest song to date. [...]
Review: Dragged Into Sunlight – Widowmaker
To call Dragged Into Sunlight’s Widowmaker “black metal” does the album wrong. While the Liverpool quartet’s sophomore effort possesses much of the ominous atonality and despair of the subgenre, its three long-form tracks also contain the strung-out heartbreak of sludge, noise, and dark country. Opener “Part I” lacks distortion entirely, dragging its feet in a [...]
