“While avoiding the bookend records (Suck On This and Antipop) completely, Primus pulled together a set tailor-made to please the devout and focused on fan favorites like “Eleven,” “Pudding Time,” “Golden Boy” and “Southbound Pachyderm” rather than reaching for any “Wynona” or “My Name Is Mud”-sized brass rings (“Jerry Was A Racecar Driver” represented the only bonafide hit in the set) or throwing any curiosity-seeker that may have been in attendance a bone.”

Bill Adams reviews the July 27th Toronto performance by the reuinited PRIMUS. TOM FUN ORCHESTRA opened the show.

While the practice of genre blending is nothing new to the world of metal, few bands have taken it to the extremes that Chicago band Nachtmystium have. Built on a strong foundation of second wave black metal, that band have evolved progressively into a psychedelic, industrial and post punk fueled black metal behemoth, culminating in their latest concoction, Addicts: Black Meddle Part II. Lead singer, guitarist and band mastermind Blake Judd weighs in on the band’s directional shifts and his growth as a musician in this exclusive interview with Hellbound’s Dave Sanders.

Addicts is one of the most diverse albums to be released in a long while and one that would be a crying shame to miss. Nachtmystium have become masters at pushing their genre to new and unexplored limits. Expect imitators, but don’t accept imitations.

Could it be that after three decades as metal musician Fischer has found his voice after playing with so many different styles? Eparistera Daimones is not that different from Monotheist, but that’s not a detriment when following an album that revived your career and reputation. Triptykon’s debut is a worthy piece in Fischer’s enigmatic but always provocative musical career.

Like the rodents they are named after, The White Mice are an elusive target. Here are the known facts; the band is from Providence, R.I. They released the wonderfully twisted Ganjahovadose via 20 Buck Spin last year. They’ve recorded a slew of splits and EPs with titles like Mouse of Mendes and Do They Know It’s Christmice? Their symbol is a rodent’s face scrawled on a pentagram. The music? Bass, distortion pedal and drums with liberal electronic effects and samples where applicable. They’ve been categorized as industrial, noise, art rock and noisegrind. Perhaps a better description would be unclassifiable.

For this album, thirteen musicians weren’t just handed a single song and asked to artfully adorn it with electronics, they were handed as much source material from The Melvins’ songbook as they wanted and asked to get as creative as they wanted in creating something new from their source material selections; essentially being asked to create a series of sound collages from any and as much Melvins material as they liked.

Gaza’s He Is Never Coming Back is a tumultuous collection of powerful, almost too emotional songs that are heavy – not for simply being dudes from Salt Lake City who want to show who has the biggest balls on the block, but simply because they have something very powerful to day.

A little bit of background information: the record is a collaborative project between two Mikes — Mike Mare and Mike Gallager (of Isis fame). Amigos is a 40-plus minute single-track of ambient guitar textures and carefully pieced-together layers of sound that, just as they are on the verge of overstaying their welcome, shifts gears so as to keep things from getting too boring.