This album is literally painful to listen to. I don’t even know if I can call this garbage music. This is “experimental” music, apparently. At least, that is what the band wants us to think. I find that the “experimental” tag is put on any form of music that is essentially unlistenable, placed there by talentless hacks who want to be snobbishly highbrow. If there are any song structures or coherent playing on this entire album, I would be seriously surprised. This is a mish-mash of random guitar playing by someone who is tone-deaf, gurgling Swamp Thing vocals, a drum machine set to “blast” speeds and assorted other weirdness that is best described as headache inducing. I sat through five “songs” of this horrid noise before I couldn’t take anymore. This utter shit makes Anal Cunt sound like fucking Uli Roth in comparison. Cultus Enim Satanas should come with a case of 40 oz. bottles of malt liquor and some horse tranquilizer because that’s what it would take to get through the entire thing - and it’s only twenty-two minutes long. Avoid this like it was plague-infested. I rated this a one, but even that seems too high. It’s records like this that make me wish we were able to give ratings in negative numbers, because there is literally nothing redeeming about this album.

We’ve all waited in line at the drive-thru of our favorite carcinogenic fast food chain, eagerly awaiting our deep-fried death, only to get it home and realize that those abominations of gene pool disintegration forgot a vital part of the order. Most likely the one thing that you went there for in the first place. Well, I just stopped at Relapse Burger to get the new Devourment combo meal, and those bastards forgot my fucking slam! I specifically asked them to supersize the slam and add extra pit riff! I don’t know what this is, but it’s not my Devourment. Is it possible the folks at Relapse’s pressing plant accidentally switched Conceived in Sewage with whatever boring slab of regurgitated endurance test Misery Index is putting out this year? It sure sounds like it. It’s not like this is the worst Death Metal album ever made, it’s just a mind-numbingly boring one, and that’s never been the Devourment way. Considering the band’s pioneer status —influencing about 99.9% of today’s slam movement— it’s perplexing to me why the biggest album of their career in terms of label support is an exercise in going through the brutal motions. Thankfully the lyrics remain their trademark gore-drenched perversity, but Mike Majewksi’s vocals sound tame compared to past efforts, and musically the band is on Suffocation clone autopilot. I can’t even tell these songs apart. This doesn’t sound like the same band who just four years ago unleashed the carnivore, let alone butchered the weak or molested the decapitated. Production from Erik Rutan ensures that the dullness sounds terrific, but it’s all just lipstick on a corpse, really. If you blindfolded me and forced me to guess who this was, I’d probably say “brutal Death Metal band #4976.” Exactly the same kind of mundane mediocrity that Devourment used to put to shame with breakneck groove so irresistible it could get a paraplegic moshing. It could be that by trying to distance themselves from their crop of clones, they’ve lost the very thing that made them so imitable in the first place. Here’s to hoping they regain that mojo before it’s too late.
Goddammit!! I said, “no lettuce!!”

This is the U.K. Abyssal, as opposed to the nearly twenty other groups out there that had the same name or a variation of it. For a band that has only been around since 2011, they have a very mature sound. When I first saw the cover art for this, I thought that it was going to be yet another generic Necro Black Metal album. This isn’t Necro Black Metal at all. In fact, it’s Doomy Black/Death Metal more than anything else. The guitars are heavy as fuck, and the vocals are low-pitched Death Growls instead of the standard raspy shriek. Abyssal has more in common with Imprecation or old Corpse Molestation than they do with Burzum or Darkthrone when it comes to heaviness and brutality. The song structures are still reminiscent of Black Metal, though. If Corpse Molestation played an album’s worth of Burzum covers at half-speed, they would sound quite a bit like what Abyssal is doing. Dissonant riffing and dark atmosphere are everywhere on Novit Enim Dominus Qui Sunt Eius. The music is churning and sometimes hypnotic in its delivery (hence the Burzum reference). It makes for a bit of an unsettling experience, but ultimately I found it far more satisfying and interesting than if they had stuck by the usual conventions regarding Death or Black Metal. I would have liked to see Abyssal incorporate more Dark Ambient into their style, though. The music is already dark, but I thought that the inclusion of more horror soundtrack elements could have added another layer of evil to their sound. The U.K. has been producing some criminally underrated Black and Death Metal bands lately, and Abyssal is one more that folks should definitely check out.

Someone once told me in an interview that the good trends ought to be referred to as movements, and when it comes to the current Converge-meets-Entombed Hardcore boom spearheaded by the likes of Trap Them and Black Breath, I couldn’t agree more. It seems this trend movement is unstoppable, now proven to have the long-range ballistic capability to pervade Mother Russia. Somehow Russian Hardcore just sounds more hardcore than any other type of Hardcore. You try doing the pick-up-change in one of those huge, furry coats! Given the genre-defying quirks and oddball nature that so many of Russia’s extreme music exports have had in the past, The Occult just might be the most focused and dead serious group of individuals that side of the pond since the KGB. The Deathwish and Southern Lord camps may want to take note: as far as addictive combinations go, The Occult’s pairing of Jane Doe and Wolverine Blues is right up there with cocaine and baking soda. It’d be downright foolish for anyone to deny the Converge influence abound on Omega. That crazed intensity is evident right off the bat on opener “Reflection,” with its relentless spasms of tension and release, jagged breakdowns, and feedback-drenched, zombified Sludge riffs. Fatal circle-pit histrionics ensue on the raging sneak-attack of “Blind Flock,” the angst-ridden groove of “Ode to Death,” the D-beatdown of “Love Is the Only Truth,” and the All Out War/Arkangel stomp of “Dead Hopes,” while “Path ov the Damned II,” “Iscariot,” and the title track serve as the slow(er)-burning Death ‘n’ Roll conduits for Entombed’s festering slime. It can be argued that Dima’s vocals are little more than a serviceable-yet-basic Jacob Bannon impersonation, but his go-negative-or-go-home lyrics are much better read than dead. With the nanosecond-long attention span of most folks today, this Swedeathcore uprising may already be old news, but The Occult do it as well as anyone.

Have you ever listened to an album where one track is so out of place that you just stop and say, “What the fuck happened here?” This is one of those albums. The first three tracks are pretty much what you would expect from a band called Frostbitten. It’s straight-forward Black Metal in the Darkthrone/Burzum vein. The guitars are a bit thicker and fuzzier, but stylistically this is by the numbers Black Metal with no surprises. Then track four, “Altar of Luna,” kicks in, and it’s… Stoner Doom, complete with Black Sabbath/Trouble inspired guitar playing and melodic clean vocals. After that, the album is pretty much back to being straight-forward Black Metal. That one track is so out of place that it makes you wonder what Frostbitten was thinking when it came time to put the LP together. Even the placement on the album is strange. It’s literally right in the middle, sandwiched between a bunch of Black Metal songs. I could have excused it if this had been a bonus track, but those generally come at the end of the album. Another thing about “Altar of Luna” is that it’s hands-down the best song here. That’s what makes it weirder. It’s well played, heavy and a hundred times more memorable than anything else on this whole LP. Personally, I think Frostbitten would be better off playing Stoner Doom instead of Black Metal because their attempts at Black Metal were pretty generic and essentially forgettable. When you consider that they have a considerable amount of releases in their back catalog, that’s not a good thing. This is their second album, and there are three EPs, and two demos out there, too. Maybe a name change and a different musical direction is in order.

I love it when bands take my advice. HA! Okay… in all seriousness, I don’t honestly have delusions of such grandeur, but if you recall my write-up on Epoch two years ago, you know that I proposed, in praise of the LP’s best track “Half-Light Eternal,” that “…the lighter, more mellow side of Fen… might just be the right direction for them to go in.” Well, I got my wish in the form of this UK outfit’s third full-length effort, and Dustwalker is all the better for it. That’s not to say they’ve trimmed all of the Black Metal aspects from their sound. On the contrary, opener “Consequence” sets the stage with embittered Blackened rage, while nearly all ten minutes of the aptly titled “The Black Sound” sizzle with slow-to-mid-tempo gloomy grimness. But the band’s somber, desolate, Post-Rock underpinnings are most responsible for what is remembered and ultimately what will bring the listener back for more. It’s the hopeless beauty of clean-vocal-dominated tracks like the epic-length “Hands of Dust,” with its suspended animation Shoegaze and slow-motion blizzard of wistful melodies, and “Spectre,” featuring an acoustic Alt-Rock sensibility that wouldn’t sound entirely out of place on a Fleet Foxes record, that truly steal the show. Again, these songs and others owe at least a little something to the euphoric feel of the ethereal “Half-Light Eternal.” Another Epoch carry-over is the grainy, unpolished, live-sounding production. While its organic nature does serve to complement the earthy concept and atmosphere of Dustwalker, I can’t help but wonder what magic a cleaner, bigger sound might reveal when it comes to all-pro songwriting of this caliber. For instance, Alcest certainly don’t use a shoebox and a series of extracted incandescent light bulb filaments to record their albums, and I think those results speak for themselves. My only other gripe —besides the Special Edition bonus track being an instrumental outro… cool, thanks— is the occasional awkward shouting or yelping. That shit ruins the moment worse than a whistling snot during a French kiss. Angry-in-traffic-meets-burn-victim yelling has absolutely no place whatsoever in music this graceful. It’s a small hindrance that can be overlooked, but big enough to keep this from total perfection. While the 2009 debut LP The Malediction Fields remains my personal Fen fave, Dustwalker easily takes the Silver.

This is not the Swedish Tiamat. This is a Russian band that is apparently unaware that the name Tiamat is already taken. In other words, they’ve been living under a rock since 1991. Honestly, a quick Google search is all it takes to discover that not only is there already a band out there called Tiamat, but they’ve been around for over twenty fucking years! As much as some people dislike Johan Edlund’s music these days, the Gothic Metal that the TRUE Tiamat is pumping out is ten million times better than this Russian pretender’s debut album. Sadness of Yggdrasil is horrible. The music is essentially generic Black Metal that is as bland and lifeless as you can get. I’ve heard every riff on this album somewhere before and none of said riffs get better after the hundredth time you hear them. Seriously, if I wanted to listen to recycled riffs from Under a Funeral Moon over and over again, I’d listen to Under a Funeral Moon. It’s not as if that album is out of print. The worst part is the vocals. Somewhere underneath layer upon layer of reverb is a howler monkey being tortured to death. It literally sounds like someone took a microphone into the monkey house at the fucking zoo and then added reverb. If this guy is saying any words, I’d be genuinely shocked. It’s incoherent animal noises as far as I’m concerned. And they’re annoyingly high pitched. Worse than that, the sheer amount of reverb has made the “vocals” so loud that they drown out the rest of the music. Add this to the boring lifelessness of the music itself and you get an album that just exists to irritate you. I wouldn’t even use this CD as a coaster because it’s unworthy of carrying the weight of a can of diet soda, let alone anything better.

It isn’t everyday that I get to hear a band from Iceland. It’s even rarer to hear a band like Kontinuum. Metal-archives.com has this group tagged as being Progressive Post-Black Metal, but as far as I’m concerned, Progressive Black Metal and Post-Black Metal are essentially the same thing. Let’s just say that they aren’t your typical Black Metal band. You can clearly tell that there is some Black and Viking/Folk Metal influence in Kontinuum’s music. It may not have the same feeling or aggression as Black or Viking/Folk Metal, but you can see the lineage. Earth Blood Magic is mostly straight-forward Metal without much of the weirdness that I usually associate with Progressive music. The song structures aren’t overly complicated, and for the most part, everything works. There are a couple tracks, “Red” being one of them, where things don’t go as well as they should. The best stuff comes early on, with the first half of the album being far more interesting than the second. The second half of Earth Blood Magic is slower and less Metal. The arrangements are more Classical and they don’t work as well. Being that this is the band’s debut album, I’m going to cut them some slack. The ideas they have are pretty ambitious. I’ll give them credit for trying and being different but still, this is a hit-or-miss affair.

My level of interest in Hatebreed has been on a slow-but-steady decline since their classic debut in 1997, and I think it’s becoming clear as to why. It certainly isn’t the quality of the music. Simplistic streetwise Hardcore doesn’t get more top shelf than this, and the band that put the ‘Core in the early ’00s Metalcore explosion deserves every bit of success they’ve earned. Look no further than the raging 2-minute opener “Put It to the Torch” for an anthemic example of how it’s done. Admittedly, The Divinity of Purpose is nowhere near the intensity and ferocity of the old days, but who among us thirty-and-forty-somethings is still going as HAM as they were in 1997? I know I’m not. Speaking of aging, Jamey Jasta’s voice is just about shot. A couple decades of pure, torn-throat yelling has taken its toll, as this is easily the least serrated his scream has ever sounded on Hatebreed wax. Check out tracks 6-11 to hear hints from a guy who’d rather be singing pretty. But Jasta’s deteriorating vocals aren’t really the problem, either. Even as a shell of his former self, he still does a serviceable job given the bare-knuckle bombast of the chugging backdrop. I think the problem is I keep getting older, but Jasta’s part-pep talk/part-fortune cookie lyrics stay the same age. Dude, love ya bro, but I’m not a troubled 13-year old girl. I’m a middle-aged working class nobody. Enough with the “when the going gets tough…” self-help jargon. I eat, sleep, shit, jack off, and work… okay, not particularly in that order, but PSA slogans like “Sometimes standing for what you believe means standing alone / Own your world, it’s in your hands / Tearing me down won’t ever raise you any higher / End the fight before the fight ends you” isn’t doing anything for someone whose life is essentially over. At this point, Jasta’s endless stream of positive rhetoric just makes me want to strangle puppies. At any moment, I’m expecting the next lines spouted to be: “GIVE A HOOT, DON’T POLLUTE!! A PENNY SAVED IS A PENNY EARNED!! DON’T COUNT YOUR CHICKENS BEFORE THEY HATCH!!” Seriously, man. I still have love for Hatebreed, probably always will. But at the end of the day, I am another “dead man breathing” whether I want to be or not, and I’ll be reaching for lyricists more willing to accept that fact instead.