This is my first of the three Temperance reviews, starting with the debut. This Italian band consists of five members, including a very genuine, rich, warm and powerful sometimes operatic female vocalist, Chiara Tricarico. Chiara provides most vocals but there are some supporting male vocals (both growls and cleans) from Marco Pastorino. While most of…
Fields of Mildew is one of the most haunting, beautiful, and sorrow-filled musical encounters that I have experienced lately. The very first track, "Fields", made the hair on my sloppy arms stand up. I kid you not! So, what exactly is Fields of Mildew and what are we dealing with, musically and lyrically speaking? Well,…
Faustian Dripfeed (Kickass name!) hails from Norway, and these guys play a mix between old-school and melodic death metal like there’s no tomorrow. Heavy, groovy and catchy, in the vain of bands like Carcass, Death and Cannibal Corpse, I’m smiling just thinking about it, this is without a doubt my kind of death metal. Add…
A while ago Hate Eternal released the album "Fury & Flames". It was an insanely brutal slab of death metal. Until now. Keraphorous are three guys from Angelcorpse (translation: they are from the US of A) who decided to evidently create THE most extreme metal ever, blurring the lines of black, death, grindcore, sludge, thrash…
After listening intensely to a whole bunch of other Russian black metal bands these past few weeks, I was eager to hear what VTTA would bring to the table. The band has released three EPs previous to this brand new one, but I must admit that "On the Vortex…" is my first actual encounter with…
Chris Black is the mastermind behind High Spirits. Writing all the songs and performing all the instruments/vocals in a studio setting, he’s been able to recruit a talented lineup in his Chicago stomping grounds to deliver his ideas on live stages in Europe and North America. His NWOBHM-oriented melodic metal band returns for "Motivator", a…
Atmospheric extreme metal from Mexico that blurs the line between death and black. Truly evil, tar-like, intense yet catchy material reminiscent of The Chasm, Morbid Angel and that foreboding climate of the debut Aevangelist. Very original sounding riffs and good song writing. The two tracks are brutal yet catchy and engaging but it could all…
Face of Oblivion on their sophomore album "Cataclysmic Desolation" continue a tech-death metal assault for all senses. Blitzing across your speakers in 12 tracks and 35 minutes, songs such as "Embracing Damnation", "Walls of Flesh" and relatively controlled "Descent" showcase the quintet’s versatility amidst all the frantic riffs, deep growls, and spirited blast mania. Suffocation…
Coming from the statistically happiest country in the world, Denmark, the epic doom quintet does not let on that fact as their music is angry and sad at the same time. Mik Mentor’s vocals have that same melancholy that Nick Holmes (Paradise Lost) has, as if life was not worth living, howbeit perfect for the…
The eighth studio platter for Dutch symphonic power metal band Epica "The Holographic Principle" is another sprawling 12 track, 72-minute platter that embodies a more is more emphasis – pushing parameters in terms of choirs, keyboards, and extremity while adding in some fresh exotic nuances. As a six-piece, the ability to paint aural pictures in…
What Peter Tägtgren (Hypocrisy) presents on the new Pain album has got to be a joke. The good news is that the songs are not all cut out from the same cloth. With some fillers (A Wanna Be, Pain In The Ass (we’ll get to that one), Black Night Satellite, Natural Born Idiot), most of…
Затемно is yet another quality band hailing from the frozen plains of Russia. I might as well admit that I have a thing for Russian black metal in that many bands from that particular region of the world have a knack for conjuring up inhumanly cold, moody, and haunting music. They simply have this unique…
The Russian black metal combo that lurks about in the underground and sports the name Rotting Heaven released this gem of an EP late last year via Death Knell Productions, and it is well worth checking out if morose (orthodox) black metal turns you on. Truth be told, it is one of the most interesting…
No boundaries… no limitations. That’s a very apt summation of what to expect from Swedish band Kayser on their fourth full-length studio record, "IV: Beyond the Reef of Sanity". Forming in 2004, ex-Spiritual Beggars vocalist Christian ‘Spice’ Sjöstrand along with guitarist Mattias ‘Swaney’ Svensson and drummer Bob Ruben started the group – rounded out with…
Serpent Ascending is a Finnish (Helsinki) project of a one man, Jarno Nurmi. Even if it were not, if it were a quartet or a quintet it would have been already impressive but the fact that it is a one man creation deserves special accolades. Nurmi handles all instruments while Tommi Grönqvist’s production and Patrick…
I ran into Indespair’s rhythm guitarist Daniel Bartosik by accident on facebook as he was presenting one of the songs from Indespair’s recent EP, "Sign of Raven", and, immediately impressed with the track, being in mutual love with melodeath, I contacted Daniel for a chat in our native Polish. As a result, he presented me…
Progressive metal Canadians Fractal Cypher from Montreal, Québec, are newcomers, having released only three singles thus far all of which are featured on this full length. The album is long, 64 minutes and 54 seconds, no problem, provided that the music is interesting enough to demand 60 minute + attention span. Fractal Cypher right away…
Tiebreaker’s debut album, the one entitled «We Come From the Mountains», was a great slab of dirty and bluesy (hard) rock with an insane load of melancholic and morose undertones to it. Naturally, I was eager to see and hear what this cool quintet from the small town of Odda would come up with next,…
A glam hard rock/ metal trio from Barcelona, Spain, Stop Stop are up to album three with "Barceloningham", a 12 song affair sure to be the life of any party. Sleazy, primal, and addictive – you feel a lot of Faster Pussycat, Poison, and Skid Row if given a little Jane’s Addiction transformation when it…
Slugging away in Rome, Italy since 2005, Reapter is a progressive thrash oriented metal band that also has a number of classic nuances on this second full-length "Cymatics" – the title based on a Hans Henry term used to describe the acoustic effects of sound wave phenomena. Given this is my first exposure to the…
