You just have to love a woman like Cadaveria. It’s not often you find a woman with a nice set of tits and who is willing to show them to you on every occasion. She did it on practically every Opera IX album and she does it here on her newest project. The advertisements for this album bill this as Horror Metal, but for me that’s Necrophagia. This honestly sounds different enough that I can’t really pinpoint one major influence. This has elements of many different styles of Metal mixed together with some Classical elements. The Classical elements give this sort of a “soundtrack” feel but this predominantly sounds like a Traditional Metal album in terms of listenability. This has some great riffing and the soloing is pretty kick-ass too. The keyboards are more of a garnish on this album and this prevents the Mystic Cradle of Dimmu Borgir feeling from dominating their style. After viewing the band photos, I was seriously afraid that The Shadows’ Madame was going to be a trip into what Cadaveria fantasizes Dani Filth’s basement torture chamber is like. This is nowhere close to that and for that, I tip my hat to this band. This is a solid album that will definitely get repeated listens.

I think this is Birdflesh’s first full-length studio album, after several EPs, and it’s about time! For all its intensity, this Grind is just weird enough to be sort of easy to remember. But not too strange. It’s a hard line to walk, but somehow they manage.

I don’t know a whole lot about this band except that they are from Minnesota and that they are a three-piece (only two of them participated in the recording of this MCD, however) band that plays Black Metal. I’m not sure they are in with the NSBM scene, though the cover art suggests it. The cover art shows a picture of what appears to be some kind of swastika turned inverted cross kind of thing and the whole picture is pretty lame looking. It essentially looks like some kid’s art project from high school. Musically, this band is in serious need of a good engineer, as the sound on Obdurate is horrible. The bass is muffled and almost inaudible, the vocals are muffled and almost inaudible and the drumming is muffled and though it is audible, it is partially buried by the incredibly noisy guitars. Actually, I take that back. Only one of the guitars is incredibly noisy. The other one is muffled and almost inaudible. The noisy guitar sounds like a distorted chainsaw with all the bass taken out, and it is also the loudest thing on this MCD. I think there may be some kind of a Burzum thing going on behind the wall of white noise but it is hard to tell for sure. This could have sounded fairly good if someone at the studio knew what the fuck they were doing. My guess is that the band decided they wanted to sound “cult” and that sounding “cult” meant that their music had to sound like shit. The extremely noisy sound on that one guitar makes this MCD almost unlistenable. This band is now apparently signed to the Moribund Cult so hopefully this means that their next release will show how good this band really is. As it stands, this MCD just doesn’t do that.

This is my first encounter with this band, and I really like what I’m hearing. I was expecting Black Metal, but that’s not the case. Try to imagine, if you can, a faster, Thrashier version of old Paradise Lost. I know that sounds crazy, but there is a surprising abundance of Doomy melody interspersed with the double bass-fueled Old School rage that is the soul of this opus. Vocally we have a mid-range, gruff style that is very understandable and patterned around the riffs, almost like a Glen Benton with less depth. Lyrically there seems to be a theme of racism, but I can’t tell if it’s objective or subjective. Doesn’t really matter to me. Everything here is done well, and I’m definitely making it a priority to check out this band’s back catalog. Favorites: “Quelling the Simian Surge,” “Heirs to Perdition,” and “Hereditary Taint.”

I’m certainly no expert when it comes to ambient, experimental music, but I can say that what Arcana is doing is elegant, graceful, and downright soothing. Not very far removed from what little Dead Can Dance and Black Tape for a Blue Girl I’ve heard. Definitely not something I could listen to exclusively, but you could not set a better tone for relaxation and/or mourning.

This band really doesn’t impress me much for some reason. Maybe it’s because the main riffs from their songs are rehashed from other bands or derivatives thereof. The first song had me thinking Mayhem and the next one was Darkthrone. Can you see where this is going? Their Blackened Death Metal style is very derivative and essentially speaking, this is not all that different from any number of bands doing something similar. Their sound is kind of bass heavy with the guitars being very much on the thin side. In a way, this is good because the heavy bass action makes up for the lack of lower end in the guitars. The vocals are kind of buried in the middle of all of this and though the singer’s Black Metal screaming is audible most of the time, it sort of degenerates into background noise. You can hear him, you just can’t make out a damn thing he’s saying - not that you could have if he was louder but still… Their best material is the slower stuff as their sound isn’t all that conductive to faster playing. The faster the band plays the more muddled their riffs become. The song becomes a ball of chaotic noise that only gets orderly when things slow down again. Add to the fact that a lot of their songs sound the same and you get something that is mediocre at best.

This album is not pretty. I don’t mean that in a good way, either. Do any of you remember the episode of Cosmos (yep, the show on PBS) where Carl Sagan imitates whale songs? Do you remember how gay it not only looked but sounded? Now imagine, if you will, the same audio gayness (the sounds of some stupid motherfucker attempting to sound like a fucking humpback whale) set to some droning wannabe organ music (it’s done on a synth - a bad one) mixed with strange distorted moaning and whispering. Now stretch that mish-mash of droning “Dark Ambient” “music” over six tracks that average about ten minutes each. It’s boring, it’s repetitive and you can leave the room for five minutes and not a thing will have changed while you were gone. Your best hope - should you somehow get this CD foisted on you somehow - is to try to get some stupid motherfucker to buy it from you on eBay.

Once again the DNA of Metal and Opera have been unnaturally spliced to create a hideous, useless abomination, much like the four-assed monkey.

Accept was one of the first bands I ever really got into when I was a kid, and I’ve been a big fan ever since. With that in mind… First up here is the 1985 documentary/concert video, Staying a Life. Unfortunatley, the show was edited for the video release, and is missing six or seven songs that are on the CD version (released in 1990). Worse yet, the show is occasionally interrupted with the documentary voice-over and/or footage. It’s not that the documentary isn’t interesting, but it should have been a seperate feature, and we should have gotten to see the entire, unedited, show. The CD version of Staying a Life is one of my all-time favorite live albums, so I must admit being a little disappointed that I don’t finally get to see the entire show. That would have made this an easy 10, even without any bonuns features. Still, what’s here is pretty fucking awesome. Admittedly, the video quality is not flawless, but this was recorded a million years ago in 1985. The audio also isn’t 5.1, but I wouldn’t expect it to be. Where this really shines is with the wealth of bonus material. It’s got seven video clips (including “Balls to the Wall,” of course), a three-song live show from 1993 Bulgarian TV (not exactly of the highest video/audio quality, unfortuantley), plus “behind the scenes” footage, a career-spanning photo gallery, compelte band discography, biogrpahy, and even audio samples from every one of the band’s albums. And although not branded a DualDisc, this is a DVD one one side and a CD on the other. The CD side nine previously unreleased songs! Well… okay, while that’s technically true, only two of the songs are really previously unheard. The rest consists of demo versions, an acoustic version and a Japan-only bonus track. For fans of Accept and/or main-man Udo, this disc is an absolute must. For non-fans (if such a thing exists!) a better introduction would be the aforementioned 1990 Staying a Life live album.