FOR THE LOVE OF METAL
So, last Tuesday I was checking my emails before calling it a nite, when I noticed a message from John Gallo via the Hellride Music Forum. He said he wanted my Top 10 doom metal albums for issue number 2 of his zine, and that he had to have it by the end of the day…
For the uninitiated, OSI is a prog rock/metal side project band featuring Jim Matheos of Fates Warning and Kevin Moore (ex-Dream Theater). Their latest release Blood sees this project going forwards into a very modern prog rock/metal sound. It is a very compact sound that relies on the constant simple riffing of Matheos, underscored by Moore’s trippy keyboards.
England-based Xerath have released their first full-length album on Candlelight Records, and its an interesting wedding of groove metal with orchestral bombast. Right from the get-go I invokes the kind of Hollywood film scores reserved for bloated big budget science-fiction and post-apocalyptic films, as if a metal band had been asked to score a film by Roland Emmerich or Steven Spielberg.
Delving even further into the apocalyptic fury of mid-’80s thrash coupled with DRI-esque hardcore, Massive Aggressive finds Municipal Waste’s raw power becoming even stronger and more refined.
A tasty little 7″ slab o’ wax hot off the presses over at Chez Relapse, this split release features (what I assume to be) three new songs from Virginia grinders Agoraphobic Nosebleed and a handful of tracks from Toronto’s The Endless Blockade (perhaps that city’s best kept secret this side of Moe Panzer’s Deli up at Bathurst and Wilson – nah, actually way better than that).
Although I am writing this on the 30th, by the time I post this it will be July 31th and Hellbound will be on the final day of its second month. Hurrah! Not the most monumental achievement ever, but it feels like a major hurdle for me to have managed to update this website each weekday with new, fresh metal content for the past two months.
The closest thing to a stoner/doom festival we’ve had in Toronto was the 4/20 Sunday Stoner Rock Spectacular, a overambitious 10-band lineup put together by me and a buddy of mine. The lineup was all local, the attendance was mediocre, and the ElMo was pretty empty. Still, it was good times. So, when I heard that a similarly ambitious all-day ordeal was happening just across the border in Rochester, I made sure to confirm my attendance.
The Great Cessation is well-deserving of the focus and effort it asks of its listeners.
German power metal band Edguy returns with their second live album. Recorded live in Sao Paulo, Brazil in 2006 in front of 5,000 Edguy maniacs on the Rocket Ride tour, this fourteen track two cd set displays the full impact of this band.
Fitting eleven tracks into 52 minutes, Leeches of Lore is quite the mixed bag. It goes from fast-paced neo-thrash/NWOBHM riffing to heavy rock a la Big Business to mellow proggy noodling and Johnny Cash-era country
music—and that’s just within the first three songs!