All Reviews Posts
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: The HAARP Machine – Disclosure
Named after a secretive U.S. military research program, this Sumerian-signed band packs a political message into its Meshuggah-esque sound. But these themes are overshadowed by the music–complex riffs, odd meters, and even sitar interludes make for a lively 34 minutes on the UK progressive metal quartet’s debut album. The record’s best moments are usually its [...]
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 [...]
Review: God Seed – I Begin
Finally, the two ex-Gorgoroth firebrands behind the biggest black-metal feud of the past decade can say they have closure. This long-storied album has been in the works since frontman Gaahl and bassist King split from the embittered Norwegian blasters in 2008—with speed bumps arising when Gaahl “retired” from metal and King hired Dimmu Borgir’s Shagrath [...]
Review: Doro – Raise Your Fist
On her 12th solo album, German metal maiden Doro Pesch sounds more assured than ever, particularly as a songwriter on these 13 taut, Teutonic tunes. Doro and her band are particularly effective in thrash mode here, blazing through headbanging maelstroms such as “Rock Till Death,” “Take No Prisoners,” and “Revenge,” while Ozzy guitarist Gus G [...]
Review: Between the Buried and Me – The Parallax ll: Future Sequence
With this, the full-length follow-up to its 2011 EP, The Parallax: Hypersleep Dialogues, the North Carolina progressive-metal quintet crafts a 72-minute concept album that includes some of its freshest material yet, but also some of its dullest. “Lay Your Ghosts to Rest” is an epic piece that showcases the band’s trademark sonic diversity, and concludes [...]
Review: Steve Harris – British Lion
After somehow mustering the willpower to remain tight-lipped about this solo project for decades (literally!), Iron Maiden founder and bassist Steve Harris seemingly dropped this hard-rock heavy hitter from the heavens. Musically, the group has little in common with the operatic, prog-metal epics of Harris’ main band, and, in fact, British Lion might surprise longtime Ed [...]
Review: Enslaved – Riitiir
On their 12th full-length album, Norway’s favorite spacey black metallers bring plenty of strange pagan flavor to eight tracks of mid-paced dissonance, with electronic thumpings and eerie flute sections scattered throughout the howling guitars and snarled vocals. Unfortunately, every song ends up sounding too similar, even as the band breaks, as always, from black metal’s [...]
Review: Papa Roach – The Connection
Nu-metal survivors Papa Roach’s sixth full-length is an exhilarating return to form. The tracks are grittier and crunchier, akin to their breakout albums Infest and lovehatetragedy, while incorporating the more radio-friendly elements of their later records. Vocalist Jacoby Shaddix is ballsy enough to even resurrect rapping, and with surprisingly strong results on standout tracks “Not [...]
