FOR THE LOVE OF METAL
It’s an eerily attractive package for those who appreciate agonized expressions, androgynous bodies, and the aesthetics of the damned. What it all sounds like is a graveyard chamber orchestra, complete with strings and horns performed by a long list of guest musicians and produced by John A. Rivers (Love and Rockets, Dead Can Dance, Buzzcocks).
Dimensional Bleedthrough is the sophomore effort from New York’s Krallice. Like the band’s debut, the record is generally steeped in the more recent “avant-garde” or “post-Black Metal” sound, but it offers enough of the little details that are recognizably the group’s own.
Jonathan Smith reviews the new Krallice album for Hellbound.ca
Whenever a veteran metal band undergoes radical changes, like in Amorphis’s case, a new lead singer and a more streamlined sound, even if that shift in direction is successful artistically commercially and artistically, there will always be the stubborn folks in the background bitching and moaning about how their favourite band just isn’t the same as it used to be. Well, if you’re one of those people who still gripe that Skyforger is a sellout and can’t hold a candle to Tales From the Thousand Lakes, first of all, you’re only half right, and secondly, you can give a listen to Finland’s newest supergroup, who approach Amorphis’s classic, folk-infused progressive doom sound as if nary a day has passed since 1994.
Adrien Begrand dissects the debut release by Finnish progressive death metal supergroup Barren Earth.
Well, isn’t this a surprise. A Taste of Extreme Divinity could well be the best offering from Mr Tägtgren’s Hypocrisy in years.
Year Zero really does live up to its name; it plays like a brand new band insofar as not playing it even a little bit safe at any point during the album – everyone just goes for broke.
No strangers to change, the nomadic Woods of Ypres have once again, redefined their sound with their fourth independent release IV – The Green Album. Initially a pure black metal band, mastermind David Gold and company (a variety of different musicians have come and gone through the years) have mixed elements of doom to their blackened sound with their 2nd and 3rd albums, and have continued the trend with their most focused and doom-laden effort to date.
Adam Wills dissects the brand new, upcoming fourth album by Ontario, Canada’s much beloved blackened doom outfit Woods of Ypres in an exclusive first published review.
With the band’s notable lack of corpse paint and the absence of beloved horror show theatrics in its sound, White Tomb emerges as a debut that contributes to a growing subset within the wider black metal sub-genre.
It took nineteen years but, in the opening guitar slashes of “Dark Horse,” listeners can almost hear the bandmembers collectively growl and then proceed to smash everyone listening over the head with thirteen of the strongest tracks this band has ever recorded; none of which fall into easy classification because Converge plays them all their own way, by their own rules.
If you want to hear passionate music played by dedicated musicians that have been reworked and reworked again and again into perfection (some of the tracks go back as far as 95), the final results are proof that this will be one of my absolute faves of 09 and possibly one of the greatest melodic doom metal albums of our time.
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.