This is hardly the same band I saw play the 2nd Annual (and apparently final) South Bend Metalfest with Decrepit Birth, Neuraxis, and The Faceless in 2008. Back then their claim to fame was a Symphonic Black Metal/Metalcore hybrid replete with hot babe keyboardist (who has since departed, as they all eventually do, for bigger dicks and more money, AKA: Cradle of Filth). What I’m hearing now is a completely different animal. Becoming immediately signals a shift in style and approach with 11-minute leadoff track “Ascension Sickness.” No more fast hooks and brutal breakdowns with big production and driving synths. Try lush atmospherics tangling with subtle blasting. A somber, depressive vibe seems to have taken the place of youthful exuberance. Still, the song is too damn long. Especially considering at about 6 minutes in, it dies completely, only to be reborn in a sea of incoherent voices and ambient noise. A return to structure with roughly three minutes to go is by now too little too late. The next two tracks, “Radiance” and “Elestial,” serve to be slightly more palatable. Both serviceable attempts at SDBM, albeit with somewhat anti-climactic finishes and beginnings that take a while to get off the ground. By the way, that’s a reoccurring theme with this album, taking a while to get off the ground. There’s a lot of time spent staggering through the frozen wilderness, wounded, leaving nearly half of the record feeling like an intro. “Infinite Fields of Mind” is 10 minutes of boredom. Again, a feeling of meandering… searching… where is the song at? “Three Days of Darkness” is just segue filler (thanks, just what the LP needed) that leads to the sadistically 17-minute closer, “Beyond the Veil.” That’s a pretty cruel length, guys. It’s especially unfair to subject a listener to a 17-minute epic from a band going through such a drastic stylistic transition. The song begins with violin, then slowly goes nowhere. Finally at about four minutes in we get a few somber melodies that eventually build up to some speedy Emperor worship. But then the song retreats again and we’re back to standing still. As someone who was familiar with the band in the past, but not really a fan, I have to wonder if the same audience used to getting pummeled is going to be receptive to being lulled to sleep by amateur dynamics night. I do like the direction Abigail Williams is headed in, but they’re not there yet. And I pity the son of a bitch driving behind them.

I don’t know if I like this because it sounds like De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas era Mayhem, or because it’s some sick-ass Black Fucking Metal. It’s probably a little of both, because I really loved De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas, and this is some sick-ass Black Fucking Metal. The thing is, this really, really sounds like old Mayhem to the point where you think you have the wrong CD in your player. The singer even sounds like Attila, especially on the first track. If the “new” Mayhem had continued in the same direction as De Mysteriis Dom Sathanas and retained Attila instead of going with Maniac, Wolf’s Lair Abyss would probably sound a lot like this does. The main point deductions here come from the lack of their own identity. When you listen to Open Hell, all you hear is Mayhem. The playing is good, the sound is a bit drum-heavy (but not to the point where you can’t hear the guitars), the atmosphere is dark and oppressive - all of which are net positives. I like the music and I think this band had a good influence. What they need, though, is to find their own musical identity. This is their first actual album (their previous releases were a demo and a rehearsal recording) so they have room to grow and to experiment. If they can come up with some way to differentiate themselves from “clone” status, they could be a serious force in the Black Metal scene.

Like a lot of Stoner Doom albums, To Solemn Ash has a strong Hard Rock/Heavy Metal vibe running through it. The music is pretty rocking and most of it is full of riffs that get your head banging. The vocalist isn’t the greatest, and that is the band’s main Achilles Heel. He isn’t really a good melodic singer and there are times where his style works against the band’s music. You have to give him credit for trying, though. What this band needs is a strong lead vocalist that can do something other than shout in a semi-melodic way. The music is definitely strong enough to put them up there with the better Stoner Doom bands out there, but with the current vocal situation, they just don’t cut it.

It’s nice to know that Ripper Owens (ex-Judas Priest vocalist) can still find work. Charred Walls of the Damned is a supergroup of sorts that also features Richard Christy (Iced Earth), Steve DiGiorgio (Sadus/Death/etc.), and Jason Suecof (Crotchduster), but unlike the average supergroup, Charred Walls of the Damned has a stable lineup. With the amount of talent in this band, two things are striking. The first thing is that there is a lack of wankerdom. The music is not overly technical, but it isn’t the average power chord-driven Metal. Most of the time, when a group of “name” players gets together to form a supergroup, there is a tremendous amount of ego and wankerdom on display. You’ve seen albums like this, I’m sure. Everyone gets to show off how well they play, and unless you’re a musician the music is essentially unlistenable. Charred Walls of the Damned doesn’t go there and that is a net positive for them. The second striking thing about this album is that it really lacks aggression. It’s just “blah.” The playing is good and the sound is great, but the music never grabs you by the throat. It kind of reminds me of Empire by Queensryche. After their awesome Operation Mindcrime album, Empire was too passive and it lacked all of the things that made Queensryche great - passion being the greatest commodity missing. With talent like this, you expect more and want more. This is a good album but I want a great album.

I was a fan of Vile back when they did the Vile-ation demo tape and Stench of the Deceased. They were a brutal Cannibal-Death Metal band (Cannibal-Death Metal = Cannibal Corpse worship) back then and they did it well. When you saw them live, they tore your fucking head off. After Juan Urteaga left the band to concentrate on running his recording studio, Vile slowly began changing their sound in a more technical direction. I kind of lost track of them after Depopulate (mostly because they don’t do live shows around here much anymore) so I was surprised to find out that they were still around and producing records. Their style has changed into a more straightforward Death Metal style that isn’t hyper-technical but it does have technical elements to it. They’re trying to evolve things into a more “mature” sound while still retaining their Death Metal style. The result is kind of a mixed bag, but it is mostly successful. The music and the playing have slowed down considerably and the guitars aren’t as tuned down or distorted. That allows you to hear what they’re playing more clearly. Listening to this clinically, I wanted the guitars to be a bit louder and the playing more forceful. I’m a Metalhead. I want it loud and ferocious. This was measured and focused delivery. When you consider Vile’s past, I was a bit disappointed that this album never kicked it into high gear and got fucking brutal. Still, it was well executed and had some interesting elements that you pick up on after multiple listens. If they can go for the throat on the next album, they’ll fucking kill.

Is that fucking cowbell that I hear? On a Death Metal album? What the fuck? Clearly, Parricide has a drum wanker behind the stool. The cowbell and the fact that he drowns out everyone else except for the vocalist makes this obvious. Drum wankers are rarer than guitar wankers, but they do exist. Hellhammer from Mayhem, for example, is a drum wanker. They’re technical drummers that want to hit you over the head with how well they can play. That means arranging things so that the drumming is hyper-technical and the album has to showcase that in some way. There are brutal, down-tuned guitars on this album, but making any sense of the riffing is impossible because the majority of the time, you can’t hear the guitars clearly behind the guttural vocals and the drummer blasting away. This is, to use a phrase I haven’t in a while, a blast-beat Rap record. It’s essentially all vocals and drums. If I wanted to listen to a Rap album, I’ll pull out AK-69’s The Red Magic . At least that intends to be all bass and vocals. And there isn’t any cowbell. There aren’t any stupid samples in what sounded like Polish/Russian/some Eastern European Slavic tongue either, which brings me to my second gripe. I don’t know if this is a concept album, but almost every other track was an interlude where some old lady was shrieking something and since I don’t understand Polish (or whatever it is - I assume it’s Polish because, according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, this band is from Poland), I have no idea what this is about or why it’s here. All I know is that it irritates me. I wanted to hit the stop button after the second track and listen to something else. I can’t imagine spending money on this album, particularly after listening to it. And the cover art… This release has “You don’t want to buy this” written all over it. I don’t think I’d even take it if the label gave it to me free for purchasing something else that was worthwhile. Skip this. You’re not missing anything. I have an addiction and that addiction requires more Metal, not more cowbell.

This demo occasionally seems to be little more than an excuse for guitarist (and bassist and singer) SL to call down the guitar solo thunder, and things can dissolve into somewhat of a blur at higher tempos. But his solos are generally interesting, which is no easy task, and when Wall slows down so that you may better appreciate the stylistic juxtapositions and weird dynamics, these songs can be impressive. There are some decidedly rough edges, and things often seem unfocused, but that’s to be expected when a band tries this many different ideas (every Extreme Metal style, and some not so Extreme, you can think of): not everything is going to always work out. It will be interesting to hear how Wall of the Eyeless evolves over the course of a few recordings. I can easily imagine them going all Prog Metal, but I hope they find another path. I was going to say that the recording and/or production can also be slightly unpolished at times, and then I pulled my head out of my ass and remembered that Sony didn’t give SL and Simon (drums) a dump truck full of money to record this; they had to do it themselves. It’s amazing to think back about what demos (tapes at the time) used to sound like when I first started Metal Curse in 1990. If I had heard Through Emptiness back then, my head would have exploded. Check out the song “Wall of the Eyeless” for perhaps the best realization of this band’s potential.

Exmortis main-man Brian Werking has suffered through lineup problems since this band’s inception. At one point, twenty years ago, the rest of the guys all mutinied and tried to take the name with them, eventually changing it to Horror of Horrors, but for a while there were two Exmortises. After a few tracks on tributes albums around the turn of the century and a pair of demo/rare tracks compilations earlier in 2011, Werking finally appeared to be ready to bring back Exmortis full time, and I could hardly wait to hear it. Once again, a stable lineup was apparently not possible, and from what I can tell, it seems as if Werking had to record everything himself for this short EP, and it sounds like it, with what appears to be a (well programmed) drum machine and no audible bass. Discounting the intro and outro, there’s really only about 14 minutes of music here, and that’s not much to go on. I don’t have any complaints about this long-awaited return of Exmortis’s decidedly Thrashy Death Metal, but even after 443556 listens, it isn’t really sticking with me after it’s over. A beefier production would have helped, but in any case, this EP feels more like a taste of things to come than anything else. Hopefully Werking can recruit a stable band to back him up and return soon with the very first full-length Exmortis album in the band’s nearly 25 year existence.

It has been a decade-and-a-half since the last Shub-Niggurath album, 1997’s amazing The Kinglike Celebration (Final Aeon on Earth). In the interim, there have been demo/EP compilations (actually, kind of the same one three times, with or without various bonus tracks), and two splits consisting of rehearsal songs from 1990. So, I had long ago assumed that this wretched world would never again know the majesty of any new material from the Mexican Death Metal masters. It feels good to be wrong sometimes! Julio Viterbo (The Chasm, ex-Cenotaph) has at long last reignited the black flame of this band, and brought original Shub drummer Paco back with him. I just don’t get good news like this every day, and was absolutely overjoyed to discover it. Admittedly, I was also slightly concerned that original vocalist Arturo “Transcosmic Blasphemizer” Alvarez had been replaced, but no one could ask for more than what the new screamer, Carlos Lopez (ex-Ancient Gods, Thy Only Forgotten), delivers with his tormented, raspy, roar. It so completely fits the ominous, eerie atmosphere of the music, that I almost want to say that he’s better than Arturo, but that hardly seems possible. And speaking of the music, there is the perfect amount of Black Metal influence, perhaps slightly more than before, to make this Death Metal onslaught unique, and instantly recognizable, to me at least. It sounds as if Julio has been perfecting these riffs for a decade, as there is not anything even slightly resembling a flaw to be found on this album. If, upon learning of its existence, you didn’t immediately feel the need to hear A Deadly Call from the Stars as soon as humanly possible, then you simply don’t matter.