This is Cancer Bats’ debut for Metal Blade Records and their fourth album overall. The press release describes this as a mixture of Thrash and Hardcore. Outside of the vocals, I don’t really hear the Hardcore influences very much. The Thrash bits are more apparent in the faster tracks, but even then I don’t think Dead Set on Living is hugely influenced by what I would consider “Thrash.” For me, Thrash is Exodus, Possessed, Slayer and Cliff Burton-era Metallica. Hardcore for me is Sick of It All, The Exploited, Extreme Noise Terror, Crass, Discharge, Agnostic Front and Minor Threat. Cancer Bats is nothing like any of those bands. These guys are more Mallcore than Hardcore and more mainstream Rock than Metal. The production here is really slick and polished. From a purely technical perspective, this is a very well produced album. I wish more Metal albums sounded this good. Musically, though, this doesn’t really do much for me. The songs that the accompanying press release described as “focus tracks” were pretty generic and really don’t stand out from the rest of the album. Usually, you want your “hit single” to be the best track on the record. “Old Blood” and “Road Sick” don’t qualify as hit singles simply because they aren’t any different from the rest of the tracks. They don’t stick out, and unless someone told you that they were focus tracks, you’d never think of them that way. This album is lacking in several things. The first one that I immediately noticed was that there are no catchy riffs at all. The closest we get is on the second song, “Bricks and Mortar,” which blatantly sounds like Rob Zombie until the vocalist starts screaming. The second thing that I noticed was that the songs don’t have any hooks or choruses. On top of that, none of the tracks have the least bit of melody in them, either musically or vocally. The net result is an album that is essentially a polished turd. Dead Set on Living is superbly produced, but musically crap. Maybe these guys kick ass live, but this album is a loser in my book.

Reviewing a new Katatonia record is never an easy task for yours truly. They are, in my opinion, easily the greatest band of all time, and it seems unfair to rate these Godz among men on any mortal grading system. For me, the Katatonia scale would start at 10, as even a disappointing album from them would be five points higher than a perfect effort from some pedestrian outfit. It’s also a bit of a stretch pretending that anyone who doesn’t already worship at the altar of these Swedes deserves to breathe air, but I digress. It is worth noting that, amazingly, Dead End Kings did not blow me away at first. As is my common ritual for new Katatonia material, I shut everything else down and spent a solid 48 hours just listening on repeat. But nothing stuck! Never in my 18 years of adoration and exaltation —from the Blackened Doom past to the Depressive Rock present— had this occurred, and I began to wonder if this was the katastrophe the Mayans foresaw. Befuddled and concerned, I took a break for a few days. During this period, the grand alchemy of the masters came to fruition. Every morning I’d wake with a different song stuck in my head. At first it was the chorus of “The Parting,” the opener that picks up right where Night Is the New Day left off. Next it was the soothing “eh-he-ay-he-ya” from “The One You Are Looking for Is Not Here,” with guest choral assistance by The Gathering’s Silje Wergeland (the first Katatonia song to feature female vocals, not counting Mikael Akerfeldt). Then the chorus from “The Racing Heart,” then the Great Cold Distance-like “Ambitions” and the Viva Emptiness-reminiscent “First Prayer,” then the swirling Toolisms of “Dead Letters,” and so on. Before long, this entire, flawless body of work had supplanted itself into my subconscious. I will never doubt again. If there’s one minor complaint, it’s the absence of a singular suicidal anthem. No “Departer.” No “Journey Through Pressure.” No “Evidence.” Yet it’s the mournful grace of Jonas Renkse’s beautiful voice and his brilliant patternization of wordplay that carries the album to perfection. Every song is an ingenious exercise in light and shade, quiet and loud, hope and despair. Rest assured, any negative review you see of this subtle masterpiece was hastily submitted by someone who didn’t take the proper time to realize its magnificence. I nearly made the same mistake.
Note: As of press time, I’m still waiting on the $978 deluxe edition —which contains two bonus tracks, 47 10” vinyls, a War & Peace-sized booklet, two lightsabers, a Toro weedeater, and a plaster caste of Anders Nystrom’s scrotum— so the bonus material was not factored in. But who am I kidding? It’s a 10 either way.

I knew this Swedish hyper-Grind outfit was dangerous when I first heard their split with Relevant Few back in 2007. Their hard-to-find releases since then have unfortunately eluded my grasp, so there was no one more thrilled than myself to learn of their signing with the solid Willowtip. A very fitting home, indeed, as the Pennsylvanian label tends to cater to the most extreme side of the spectrum and, quite frankly, Grindcore doesn’t get more extreme than Afgrund. Inevitable comparisons to Nasum, Gadget, and Rotten Sound will be forthwith and justifiably so, but could someone please tell me how that’s a bad thing? To have one band in a lifetime kick that much rectal padding is something special. How is it anything less than extraordinary that we are allowed four? Obviously this is just how the Swedes do it, and when it comes to Grindcore, Swedes do it better. The Age of Dumb boasts 18 power-packed, full-force, high intensity songs that play like one raging 26-minute anthem. With a band that plays this fast and ferocious, it’s the little things that produce eargasmic heart palpitations. Little things like varying gears of blastbeat speed (“Life and Death of a Broiler”), a slower Hardcore riff thrown in to make the speed speedier (“HAARPY,” “The Carrier”), letting the drums go solo at key points in the song (“Repaint the Truth”) and great use of samples within those key points (“Le Grand Illusion”), a thuggish breakdown capable of causing multiple circle pit fatalities (“An Aggression of Misfortune”), and enough Napalm Death and Terrorizer-worthy riffs for Shane Embury to shake a vegan sausage link at. If my sources are correct, this is also the first Afgrund material to feature English lyrics. Just another added morsel to an already-overflowing plate of Grindy goodness. The lack-of-originality argument is the only thing that keeps this from a perfect score (and I may very well regret that decision later).

I don’t know very much about this band. The review copy/download was lacking in information and actually had the band’s name spelled wrong, so it took some Internet research to even figure out who this is. What little I initially knew about them came from the music itself. The best way to describe Deathronation, who I would eventually discover are Bavarian, is to say that they play slow-to-mid-paced Death Metal in the older Florida style. This is a compilation of demo material, with the first six tracks from 2010’s demo, also titled Exorchrism. (Or is this a reissue of that demo with bonus tracks? Is there a difference?) The next five songs are from A Soil Forsaken, which was released in 2006. Even without this information, you can easily tell the two sections apart. The songs on Exorchrism are longer and the sound is definitely better. It still sounds like a demo recording (mostly owing to the “recorded underwater” drum sound), but compared to A Soil Forsaken, everything’s clearer. Oddly, I liked the songs on A Soil Forsaken better, though. They were shorter and more to the point. It didn’t meander as much as Exorchrism did. These guys learned to play their instruments better and wanted to show that they could write better songs with more interesting guitar-work. The net effect was that they lost a chunk of their memorability. There’s still plenty to like on this album, though. It has enough brutality to make your head bang and it doesn’t get overly technical. It’s straight-out Death Metal that delivers the goods where the goods need to be delivered.

Very impressive Hardcore with Grindcore tendencies and occasional melodic genius. It may surprise many a Metalhead that Enabler features drummer Andrew Hurley from Pop sensations Fall Out Boy (“…I’m goin’ down, down on a guy named Jim Brown / and brotha his fuckin’ dick’s swingin’ / I’ll be your number one with a bullet / I’m gonna take my cock out, stroke it and pull it…”), but Hardcore lifers won’t bat an eyelash as the Straight Edge anarcho-primitivist cut his teeth in many a Hardcore/Punk band before hitting it big. He provides an exceptional performance here, working well-timed Nasumesque blasts and unbridled double-bass fury into a traditional, fast Hardcore style (see “Save Yourself”). Elsewhere, big mid-paced riffs such as those found on “Speechless” and “Fuck Today” add a dynamic contrast to the frantic, Crust-like vibe that permeates throughout. Frenzied ragers like “The Heathens,” “False Profit,” and “Funeral Dirge” are sure to give Converge fans a healthy collective boner, while deeper cuts like the otherwise Slayer-worshipping title track, the melody-laced “True Love” and “Trust,” and the Doomy “They Live, We Sleep” hint at a despondent sensibility often elusive to bands of this ilk. Most tracks check in at the two to three-minute mark, making the subtle stylistic shifts all the more effective and palatable. Is it just me, or is Southern Lord slowly but surely turning into a Hardcore label? No complaints, guys. I’ll take the venomous ferocity and infectious bite of Black Breath and Enabler over bands that sound like radio static any day.

This is a four-track EP (two songs, an intro and an outro - roughly 13 minutes of total playing time) so getting your head around where these guys are going is a bit tough. Things get off to a slow start right away. I don’t know why bands do this, but there was at least thirty seconds of dead silence before the intro became audible. Worse, the intro didn’t seem to go anywhere even after you could start hearing the Ambient effects. Given the “spacey” nature of the intro and outro, I guess that there is some “cosmic” theme going through their songs. Musically, this band is atmospheric Doom/Death Metal in the vein of Thergothon or maybe Chorus of Ruin (how’s that for an obscure reference…). They have the ability to create some atmospheric music, that’s for sure. What really hinders them is the rather uneven songwriting. The first actual song, “En Void,” goes off without a hitch. Everything sounds okay. The guitars could have been a little heavier or a bit louder, but in general the sound was fine as far as being able to hear everything. The other song, “Syntaxis Ecliptica,” starts off with fast and furious drumming, which is always a bad thing for a band like this. Their style is slow, not fast. Worse, the drumming drowns out everything else. Once the song gets going, though, things are better and the sound improves to the point where we’re almost at the same level as the first song in terms of clarity. Why they decided to have the drumming be so intense for the first minute or so of “Syntaxis Ecliptica” is a mystery. It doesn’t fit the band’s style and it doesn’t do anything for the song. It seems so out of place that it just leaves you wondering what they were thinking. To me, that’s a clear sign that a band isn’t ready for the big leagues. They have the right idea for the most part, but there are still some areas that need to be worked on. Almagest has the potential to be great. When I researched the band, I found that this was their first release. For a debut, this isn’t bad. The songwriting needs to improve, but it isn’t something that can’t be fixed. I’d recommend a lot more rehearsal time and definitely some peer review before releasing anything else.

Well, it’s official. Prog is the new Deathcore. Breakdowns, blast beats, and growls have been traded in for 40-minute fretless bass scales, saxophone solos, and big words that no human being has ever used in their daily lives…ever. Every album will be a concept album. Every vocalist will either sound like John Denver or the guy from Dream Theater. Thanks. I saw this coming on the last Faceless record (Planetary Duality), which was significantly more head-up-ass than the solid, brutality-drenched debut that preceded it (Akeldama). When bands start going crazy with a vocoder, it’s a sure sign they’re already bored and shit’s about to get weird. With Autotheism, they’ve almost completely checked out. Their sound retains only enough Death Metal to justify a huge headlining tour with other Death Metal bands. Rest assured with forthcoming releases —assuming the band doesn’t just throw in the towel and join a monastery— the Metallic extremity will become more and more scant until they reach their ultimate flaccid goal of ukulele, tambourine, that flute Kenny G played, and yodeling. The vocalist —I’m not going to look up his name because I don’t care; I assume he’s the front-and-center pretty girl wearing the Nine Inch Nails shirt in Sumerian’s latest ad— sings clean about half the time now, and his clean voice is terrible. Imagine a soulless Mike Patton fronting a Power Metal band from Nebraska. As is usually the case with Progressive Metal releases, there’s about 10-15 minutes of solid music here, but no working class Metalhead with a shred of libido remaining has the time nor the patience to sift through the 30-45 minutes of noodling space travel and advanced calculus problems. I listened to this album beginning to end three times. All I remember is a Stephen Hawking soundbite and the urge to listen to the entire Ramones discography while jacking off to every porn with Belladonna in it that I own.

People have accused me of being misogynist in the past, which makes no sense to me whatsoever as I’ve always been nice to cunts. I kid, I kid! Truth is, women have always wanted to be treated as equals in the workplace, and deservedly so, the Death Metal genre being no different. So, it seems the most sexist thing I could do would be to automatically heap praise on something merely due to the parties involved being female. Take for instance this debut album from Old School Death/Doom unit Derketa which took an amazing pair of decades to see the light of the day. I could say it’s the most awesome thing ever recorded just because I find the ovulating all-star quartet responsible —Mary Bielich (ex-Mythic, ex-November’s Doom) on guitar, Sharon Bascovsky (ex-Eviscium) on guitar/vocals, Robin Mazen (ex-Demonomacy, ex-Impure) on bass, and Terri Lewis (ex-Mythic) on drums— to be an eyeful. I’m not going to do that, it simply isn’t fair. Truth is, In Death We Meet is average at best. It’s average now and would’ve been average in 1988 when the band originally formed. The slow, plodding riffs that accompany every indistinguishable, drawn-out song are uninspiring to say the least. The station-to-station drumming is uninteresting throughout, and for me to say that Bascovsky’s passable-yet-mediocre Death growl is just as good as any dude’s passable-yet-mediocre Death growl… well, I don’t see how that’s a compliment. It’s an A for effort, and a steadfast lesson in perseverance, but at the end of the day, it’s just an unmemorable Death/Doom album… with boobies.

I see that the practice of hiring the mentally challenged to work in the music industry has once again brought us a new album to rip to shreds. I say that because And One is less Metal than the last Miley Cyrus CD. That’s right, folks. Miley Cyrus rocks harder than this gang of fairy princesses does. When your biggest selling point is that your album has songs that are “sometimes quite reminiscent of ‘80s ‘Tears for Fears’ harmonies,” we’re going to tear you a couple of new orifices that you probably didn’t want. When you send out promotional copies of your latest release to a site called Metal Curse, maybe you should check to see if the release is… well… Metal. That way, we don’t hurt the band’s fragile little feelings by comparing their music to what comes out of our asses on fajitas night at El Cucaracha’s. Maybe Synthetic Symphony should check to see if The Advocate has a music review section because that would probably be a better place for this kind of music. To be fair, I did listen to this the whole way through, which is about six songs from And One more than I ever wanted to hear. Technically, that’s four songs and two remixes, but the fact that two of the tracks are remixes doesn’t help the band’s cause here. Shouts of Joy is an oddball in that it’s essentially a New Wave album being released in an era where nobody listens to that shit and there’s no push to revive it. The New Wave movement of the ’80s was essentially a second wave of gay dudes trying to resurrect the rotting, violated, disease-ridden corpse of Disco. If there was one aspect of the ’80s that I wanted to forget, it was the fact that bands like Spandau Ballet ever got airplay outside of gay bath houses. New Wave is an abomination that deserves to rot in the same fetid septic system that the Twilight saga is destined to be cast into. There’s a reason that nobody listens to New Wave anymore. It sucked, and like every bad decision, we want to forget about it as quickly as possible. That’s why Butt Rock legends like Bret Michaels and Motley Crue can still go out on tour and sell out a small arena, but Tears for Fears can’t even get a one-off gig at the gay bar down the street. And One obviously never got the memo. Playing New Wave music in 2012 shows that you’re defective and can’t take a hint. If I had my way, I’d rate Shouts of Joy in negative numbers because not only do I want back the 25 minutes of my life that I wasted listening to this abortion, I’m also about ready to go to the World Court to see if I can get Synthetic Symphony and SPV put up on charges of crimes against humanity for releasing this crap in the first place. The best thing that And One can do as a follow-up to this release is to break up and never have anything to do with music again.