All Reviews Posts
Review: Anthrax – Anthems
While thrashers Anthrax have written their fair share of headbanging classics, their biggest hits, at least on international radio, have been covers of songs by Public Enemy, Joe Jackson, and Trust. So recording a mostly covers EP (plus a remix of their own song “Crawl”) makes perfect sense, and Anthrax do it with gusto on [...]
Review: Off with Their Heads – Home
Off with Their Heads recorded their latest album at The Blasting Room with Descendents drummer Bill Stevenson so it sounds great, but that wouldn’t matter if the songs themselves weren’t present. Luckily, Home is teeming with soaring sing-alongs (“Focus on Your Own Family”), Rancid-worthy riffage (“Seek Advice Elsewhere”), and, yes, even the occasional ballad (“Don’t [...]
Review: Warbeast – Destroy
Don’t mistake brutal Texas thrash band Warbeast with the cavalcade of groups that invaded with the dawn of Warbringer. Vocalist Bruce Corbitt was the original Rigor Mortis singer in the late ’80s and other members started out in Gammacide around the same time. As good as they were then, the players have only improved with [...]
Review: The Almost – Fear Inside Our Bones
“Don’t look to me for hope/I’m just like you,” croons The Almost frontman, and former Underoath, drummer Aaron Gillespie on the title track of the alt rockers’ third album. Candid lyrics like this paired with the band’s decision to record completely live make for its most raw and organic album yet. Fear Inside Our Bones [...]
Review: Nero Di Marte – Nero Di Marte
Like a gifted and talented love child of Leviathan-era Mastodon and latter-day Death, the Bologna, Italy, group paint a dark, dynamic, and ultimately melodic prog-metal canvas on this follow-up to 2011’s Malochian EP (recorded when they were Murder Therapy). “Convergence” comes together with fierce infectiousness as Sean Worrell’s feral-gatto vocals and jarring yet lyrical guitars [...]
Review: Intronaut – Habitual Levitations (Instilling Words With Tones)
Building upon 2010’s Valley of Smoke, Intronaut continue to own the prog-metal netherworld between the jazzy acrobatics of Cynic and the doomier textures of Baroness. Near-constant meter and rhythm shifts are an integral part of their new, fourth album, whether Intronaut are sawing and screaming or engaging in delicate arpeggios and melodic vocal harmonies. And [...]
Review: Inter Arma – Sky Burial
Richmond genre-benders Inter Arma like to go long: Many of the tracks on their second full-length, Sky Burial, clock in at 10-plus minutes apiece. But instead of boring us to death with variations on a theme, they essentially cram three songs from different subgenres into each. Acoustic ballad into epic space-rock jam into full-bore black-metal [...]
Review: The Color Morale – Know Hope
Metalcore sextet The Color Morale never strays too far from the tried-and-true tropes of their subgenre on full-length No. 3, but still manages to craft tunes that are passionate and memorable, mixing breakdown-fuelled mosh, noisy dissonance, and catchy choruses on wide-ranging tracks like “Learned Behavior.” Frontman Garrett Rapp’s vocals run the gamut from hardcore bellows [...]
Review: Clutch – Earth Rocker
Ten studio albums in, Clutch deliver here pretty much everything you’ve come to expect from them: bluesy rock, blustery but impressively precise riffage, beards, and story songs about robots. On their first record in almost four years, the band vacillates between old-school ’70s balladry (“Gone Cold”), mock horror film boogie woogie (“The Wolfman Kindly Requests…”), [...]
Review: RED – Release the Panic
Formed in 2004 in Nashville, Tennessee, RED are a band that has really grown and come into its own over the years. It seems like each album they release garners more hype than the last and comes out stronger than the previous. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that their fourth record, the newly released [...]
