The only thing you really need to know about this recording is that it features Neige from Alcest on vocals. Seriously, if you didn’t know that and you just read it, and you didn’t immediately go “add-to-cart” somewhere, then you’re a fucking loser. There is no other god, Neige killed him. Think of your favorite vocalist, right now, Metal or otherwise… Now, unless you thought of Jonas Renkse, realize he/she isn’t a tenth as good as Neige on a bad day. This is a treat on so many levels for the man’s following. Not only does it prominently feature his harsh, Blackened screams (much less often used for Alcest these days), but it’s also my first time hearing him sing in English as opposed to his native French. His hauntingly beautiful clean voice is present here as well, and Lantlos mastermind Herbst (guitars/bass/lyrics) uses it masterfully to elevate his meandering Post-Metal aesthetic to heights that the likes of Mastodon and Isis can’t even smell. Much less melodic and ethereal than Alcest, this German duo (Herbst and Felix Wylezik on drums) strive for a more brooding, downtrodden yet aggressive approach. The faster and slower arrangements always gravitate back toward the calm, mid-tempo sea of grey. Proof that Neige can conquer any atmosphere. I will admit that it’s difficult not to think about how mediocre this would likely be if it weren’t graced by his talents. Luckily for we mortals, it is, and therefore essential.

You know, I often wonder who writes press releases and promo literature for Metal bands. I read the press release for this album and the amount of shit information in it could have qualified it as Godzilla’s used toilet paper. “Violentor combines the speed and rawness of Motorhead with the dark and poisoning sound of Venom”? That’s a funny way of saying that Violentor sounds like Kill ‘em All era Metallica. When I hear “inspired by Motorhead and Venom,” I expect something bass-heavy and brutal. Both of those bands have very distinctive sounds, and to compare Violentor to them is deceptive. Having an audible bass guitar doesn’t turn you into Venom. This is not to say that Violentor sucks. They don’t. They just have someone clueless writing their press releases. This album actually blows by pretty quickly. Violentor starts off blazing fast and doesn’t really let up until the last song is over. The downside to this is that a lot of their songs sound the same. Half the time, I couldn’t tell where one song ended and the next one began. The fact that you couldn’t hear the guitars very well didn’t help. They have a loud bassist and a loud vocalist, but the guitarists are buried underneath somewhere. Maybe it’s to hide the fact that all of the audible riffs sound like they were rearranged parts from old Metallica songs. I spent a lot of time thinking, “Hey, that sounds like…” and the next thing you know, I’ve rattled off all of the song titles from Kill ‘em All and even a couple tracks from Megadeth’s Killing Is My Business… album. Violentor has some good influences, but they just need time to develop their own style and sound. Their hearts are in the right place, but they just don’t have the chops yet.

“Anaal nathrach, orth’ bhais’s bethad, do che’l de’nmha.
Anaal nathrach, orth’ bhais’s bethad, do che’l de’nmha.
Anaal nathrach, orth’ bhais’s bethad, do che’l de’nmha.
Anaal nathrach, orth’ bhais’s bethad, do che’l de’nmha.”
After 6(66) long years, Vore has returned! These Old School Death Metal wizards have always known the charm of making the most memorable riffs imaginable, and Gravehammer is simply exploding with them. I defy you to listen to more than nine seconds of this album and not start banging your head and violently thrashing around. Halfway through the first track I’d already annihilated everything in a two-mile radius! I would point out the strongest song here, but picking only one is impossible, although the combination of the title track and its follow-up, “The Claw Is the Law,” is perhaps the most potent one/two punch since Fat Man and Little Boy. And it’s not just the riffs that are malignant. The drumming is utterly flawless; intense when it should be, but otherwise giving the guitars and vocals the room they need to do their sinister work. Speaking of the vocals, Page’s somewhat understandable roar has always been the deadliest weapon in Vore’s unstoppable arsenal, and is brutally ferocious here. Gravehammer’s amazingly clear, powerful recording and production put it over the top as Vore’s crowning achievement thus far, cementing their place in the vaults of eternity.

Crossover is a strange band. They’ve been around forever (founded in 1997) and this is their latest full-length album, their third overall. The first half of this LP is absolutely unlistenable. It’s a giant ball of ideas that doesn’t mesh well. The song structures are all fucked up and it sounds like they threw everything up against the proverbial wall to see what would stick and then used everything. Once you get to the sixth track, though, things improve. The songs still have some problems, but nothing like the first five. “Proplasma of Bow” sounds like they wanted to be Cradle of Filth. “To Amasi of Egypt,” the seventh track, has an odd electronic intro bit that sounds horrible but otherwise continues the vibe of the previous song. The best track on this whole album had to be “Father North” [a translation of the actual Greek title -Editor], which was so much better than the rest of the songs that I would have scrapped the remainder of this and just released that one as a single. That song by itself is a ten. Everything else is crap, with the first half of this album being so bad that I rate it in negative numbers. This release has the worst case of schizophrenia that I’ve ever seen. It’s like they literally didn’t know what to be. “Father North” is a great song, but it isn’t worth buying this album just to get it. This is the reason so many people used Napster back in the day. They wanted one song and didn’t want to have to pay $20 for it. If you can download just this one song from iTunes, I’d say go for it and flush the rest of this album down the toilet with the rest of the shit.

This band is from Turkey, but if you just had the audio to go on, you’d swear that they’re German… Kreator/Destruction worship abounds as Thrashfire blazes through 12 songs of speedy Thrash that could have come straight off of a Teutonic Thrash tribute compilation. Did I say Thrash enough times there? I probably did. The thing is, that’s what Thrashfire is all about. If you’re looking for influences other than Thrash, you’re not going to find any here. One of the problems that Thrashfire has is that they operate primarily in the high speed realm. Most, if not all, of their songs sound similar. Outside of the different guitar solos, this could easily be twelve different versions of the same track. The main culprit is the drumming. When you’re blasting away through a dozen tracks, unless you do some serious tempo changes between them, it gets very hard to distinguish between songs. Some of the songs have stupid titles and lyrics, but given that the band is from Turkey and shamelessly aping German Thrash, I’d say that they’re going to get a free pass from me on that. My German is bad and my Turkish is worse. Unless you’re a native English speaker or you have some seriously homoerotic lyrics (accidentally, hopefully…), I’m generally not going to deduct for bad lyrics. I’ll give them credit for trying and for having some decent influences. Being a Thrash band from Turkey isn’t likely to be the easiest thing these days, particularly with the country slowly becoming more and more Islamic. The Sharia Police doesn’t take too kindly to Metalheads. Still, a band ultimately lives or dies by the quality of their music. This is good but not great. There is a ton of potential here but they just have to find their sound.

To say that Lamentations of the Ashen is boring and slow is like saying that Stalin might have killed a few people. It’s the understatement of the decade. If Varg from Burzum had decided that he wanted to do an album of his favorite Sunn O))) covers during the time period in which he recorded Hvis Lyset Tar Oss, this is pretty much what it would sound like. It has the same minimalistic characteristics of Burzum but at 1/10th the speed. Interest in the music is lost about five minutes into the second song. The first track, “…of Wraiths in White,” is just an intro (clocking in at a little over five minutes), so most listeners would suffer through that in hopes that things not only pick up but get better. Sadly, that doesn’t happen. It just continues to drone on and on and on. This album is about as exciting as being paralyzed from the neck down. I had to listen to this in chunks, taking in one song a day in hopes that the boredom generated by the music wouldn’t cause me to fall asleep in the middle of it. Even doing that, this was borderline torture to sit through.

For Zobibor’s first official release (the band’s only previous material is their Sodomatic Rape 2006 demo), this short (13 minutes) four-song EP has a fairly good sound. The guitars have a little more low-end in them than the average Black Metal band and they also have audible bass guitar on here too. Musically, this is fast and furious Punk-influenced Black Metal with some kick ass guitar soloing. I was never a big fan of guitar solos (I’m still not) but when a band does something well, I’m going to point it out. The soloing is pretty deadly. It hits hard, sounds well thought out and doesn’t degenerate into guitar wankery like so many solos do. I don’t know what took them five years to release new material, but this is enough to get me interested in hearing more from them. One of the problems with a short release is that there isn’t a whole lot to judge them on. I don’t have the demo (according to Encyclopaedia Metallum, it was limited to 50 copies) so I can’t say if they’ve progressed any since 2002, which is the listed year of their founding. This is short, tight, well-produced and it also serves the purpose it was probably intended: to get you interested in hearing more.

I must have done something to piss Ray off, because he has once again sent me something to review from Sleazy Rider. That label seems to have a knack for finding and releasing albums by the most raging homosexuals ever. Everything I’ve ever heard from this label has sucked Godzilla’s giant mutant reptile penis, and Monster 5 is no exception. For those of you who’ve never heard of Theodore Ziras before (and unless you’re an employee of Sleazy Rider, you probably haven’t), he’s one of those guys who is supposed to be an awesome guitar player, but all he ever produces is unlistenable, obnoxiously pretentious guitar wanker albums that only fags who like to masturbate with their seven-string, 24-fret penis extensions could enjoy. I had to suffer through eleven tracks of pretentious guitar wankery that made me want to kill every guitarist and burn every guitar ever made. Theodore Ziras made me listen to Japanese Gangsta Rap for three days straight because it was the furthest thing from a guitar album that I could find. I had to physically stop myself from booking a flight to Greece just to cut this guy’s hands off. Of course, knowing guitar wankers like I do, this loser would learn how to play guitar with his fucking feet and I’d have to make a second trip out there to cut those off, too. The only possible audience this might have is with other guitar wankers. For them, this album would be like buying the contents of a storage locker at an auction for $20 and finding a treasure trove of gay porn inside. For everyone else, this is a form of pain and suffering that even a Miley Cyrus / Jonas Brothers / Selina Gomez triple-bill couldn’t equal.

My first impression of On the Wings of Time is that there is a lot of groove on this album and they have a nice, thick, heavy guitar tone. In fact, the guitars are the loudest thing here. They drown out pretty much everything else. This is a guitar-based band so that isn’t actually bad. In fact, you’d want it to be that way. The thing is, when you have a bass solo (such as on the song “Darkness & Disguise”), it really sounds weird when the solo kicks in and it’s conspicuously quiet compared to the guitars. The vocals are also pretty low. This isn’t generally a problem, but there are times when you can’t understand the singing because the guitars drown it out. When you have a vocalist who is singing in a clean voice and in a way that you can generally understand what he’s saying, it distracts and unless you have a lyric sheet, the song sounds disjointed. You know he’s saying something, but you just don’t know what. Musically, this is very groove-laden. The riffing is memorable and it gets your head banging in time with the music. Still, even with that, the album is a bit overwhelming. The songs are almost all over five minutes each. One clocks in at about three minutes (“Weightless”) but there are two that clock in at over nine minutes (“Valley of the Kings” and “The Sleeping Prophet”). Taken in small doses, Black Skies is fairly deadly. Trying to listen to this album from beginning to end, though, is a pretty daunting task.