I was kind of surprised to see Enslaved release an EP at this stage in their career. From what I’ve heard about this release, it was agreed to a long time ago but time and commitments prevented it from happening. Now, in 2011, they’ve finally gotten around to doing it. The Thorn EP consists of two completely new songs, “Disintigrator” and “Striker,” both of which are around five and a half minutes in length. Musically, this is keyboard-heavy Black/Viking Metal that stays pretty much in the mid-paced range. It’s kind of unadventurous, if you ask me, especially “Striker.” The snarling vocals are fairly restrained and the music is best described as sterile. Maybe it’s the production, but both tracks lack feeling. The vocals may snarl but there’s no musical bite here. The keyboards, which would have normally given the tracks a little atmosphere, are bland and lifeless. I would be a bit more forgiving if this had been a band’s first release, but how many albums has Enslaved done? How many years have they been around? This is a veteran band, not a bunch of 17 year-old kids putting out their first demo tape! Thorn might be one for the collectors, but if you’re looking for kick-ass Metal music, this isn’t it.

Exclusive interview with Cianide’s Mike Perun and Scott Carroll, before the band’s live set on November 26, 2011, at the Empty Bottle in Chicago.

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I’ve never seriously listened to Rwake prior to this release, but the stuff I’ve heard never impressed me. Now that I’ve sat through an entire album of their music, I’m still not a fan. In fact, once I’m done with this review, I’m deleting this from my computer and never listening to them again. They don’t suck, but listening to their music made me feel like I was wasting my time. The music meanders all over the place. On top of the meandering music is a singer that sounds like he should be fronting a Hardcore band. He’s got no melody. All he does is shout and that puts him at odds with the music. I can live with meandering music if they have a vocalist that sort of makes things interesting, but this felt like I was at a protest rally outside a Hippy jam festival. Somebody was yelling at me about something while loud music played in the background. Ultimately, I didn’t care about either enough to stick around.

Here’s what I know about Ghoul. Sean McGrath (Impaled, Engorged) and Ross Sewage (Impaled, ex-Exhumed) are the main culprits involved. Their 2002 debut full length, We Came for the Dead!!! was fucking awesome. It was Gore-Grind, it was Death Metal, it was Thrash, it fucking ruled. In fact, just now typing that I’ve come to the realization that it was essentially this year’s new Exhumed album nine years ahead of its time. I didn’t fully check out their 2003 or 2006 albums, because the small bits I did hear just weren’t quite as good. But nothing could have prepared me for how awful Transmission Zero is. It’s pretty much the same cast of characters, except for newer drummer Fermentor (aka: Dino Sommese) of ex-Asunder and ex-Dystopia fame, but the sound and feel of the record is totally different. And by totally different I mean totally happy. Sure, a pack of ski-masked, blood-covered, chainsaw-bearing freaks isn’t ever going to ensure total seriousness, but unlike 2002, this is a complete fucking joke. They’ve pretty much removed the heaviness and brutality from the fold (hopefully reserving them for a new Impaled album, should one ever surface) in favor of a much more lightweight Death/Thrash, sometimes bordering on Street Punk. The vocals are no longer brutal. Towards the end of the album, I want to say maybe the last song, there are vocals so terrible I had to turn it off. And I don’t mean like when I was nine years old and I had to turn off Slayer’s Hell Awaits because it scared me. I mean I was embarrassed to have this playing in my home stereo, and I was alone. The total joke lyrics might as well be about fishing with your dad, rainbows, running hand-in-hand with your gay lover on the beach, and flowers that smell pretty. It all invokes the sickening feeling of fun and happiness, laughter and joy. This album is for people who wake up and say, “Oh boy! Another wonderful day to live my happy life! Hooray for life! Hooray for fun and good times! Yay! Life is all fun! Happy!”

I should probably warn all readers right here in the first sentence, Boston’s Junius are not a Metal band of any kind. The title of the album and the record label it’s on are about as Metal as this gets. However, if that doesn’t matter to you, you may want to read further, because Reports from the Threshold of Death is actually an extremely good album. My curiosity was initially struck about this quartet by a handful of reviews I’d read. They all categorized the band as Post-whatever, but the descriptions of the music and the emotion it conveyed wouldn’t allow to me to simply write them off as another Neurosis/Mastodon abortion. Finally getting the chance to listen to the record, I have to wonder what the goal of some music critics is. A competition to be the most vague? Twenty seconds into the opening cut, “Betray the Grave,” and the correct comparison couldn’t be more evident. So I’m going to go ahead and spoil it for everybody, and hopefully in the process ship a few extra units for these guys. Junius sounds like the Deftones. See, there was nothing difficult about typing that arrangement of words at all. And it’s the honest truth. They aren’t an exact clone or a carbon copy, but the similarity is totally undeniable. Vocalist/guitarist Joseph Martinez is an amazing singer, that’s the album’s greatest strength, but if you don’t hear the Chino Moreno in his voice, well then you’ve never heard Chino Moreno sing. The music might be a touch darker and more straightforward, a bit less adventurous than your average Deftones record (i.e. Junius don’t get let laid as much), and the lyrics are certainly more philosophical. I don’t have a lyric sheet (speaking of far-out concepts) but from what I can gather, near death experiences and existence after death are the sole themes. There seems to be an obsession with theorist Immanuel Velikovsky, as I’m told this concept is a continuation from their previous record, 2009’s The Martyrdom of a Catastrophist, which was based on his writing. I wouldn’t care if they were singing about Strawberry Shortcake, the music and the voice are that good. It’s heavy, it’s emotional, it’s deep, the production is amazing, it’s cooler than the other side of the pillow you shoot yourself through. If you’re a fan of the Deftones, or Dark Rock like Khoma, or even the ultimate suicidal masters Katatonia, Junius will provide the same funereal yet ethereal feeling.

I’ve heard Sol Invictus and bands covering Sol Invictus off and on while exploring the Folk Metal phenomenon, but I’ve never been a big fan. Neo Folk isn’t really my cup of tea. I’ve heard many bands in the genre, and while some are fairly good (such as The Soil Bleeds Black), most of them are boring and dispassionate (such as This Empty Flow and even Blood Axis). Sol Invictus, being one of the older groups in the genre, is a bit more interesting than the average Neo Folk band. One of the first things that I noticed is that Sol Invictus doesn’t exactly write “songs” in as much as they participate in a cacophony of Renaissance and Medieval musical instruments that blend together in a mish-mash of sounds that sometimes works and other times just makes your head hurt. It’s like improvisational Jazz for the Ren-Faire set. The second thing that I noticed is that the vocals, while sort of melodic, are very flat. You can understand everything, but they generally fall into a tight range that drones on and on and on. I really couldn’t get into this album. Things were just too chaotic and unstructured where the music was concerned, and the vocals just bored me because they lacked dynamics. When I want to listen to Folk music, I have Lord Wind, Hagalaz Runedance, Perunwit and Wojnar, all of which are better at creating a Medieval atmosphere and also have more structured songs. Sol Invictus is an interesting listen for limited amounts of time but I couldn’t sit through an entire album of this.

San Diego’s As I Lay Dying have got to be the Metal scene’s most tolerated Jesus-fuckers. It’s no surprise why, they’re actually pretty damn good. Sure, I’d love to sit and watch the first segment of the Zeitgeist documentary with frontman Tim Lambesis (with all Christians for that matter) just to see what his anti-logic, anti-reason, brainwashed responses would be. And I’m not saying I wouldn’t enjoy an afternoon at the coliseum watching lions eat his flesh, but that doesn’t mean Frail Words Collapse isn’t a great album for the gym, or that An Ocean Between Us isn’t perfect for long drives. I enjoy their brand of good cop/bad cop Metalcore, as they simply know how to write a memorable song. Truth is they’re such lukewarm Christians that the message never really gets preachy anyway. Which means they’ll even be in Hell with us since, last time I checked, God spits the lukewarm (cum) out of his mouth. So, the fact that I like the band aside, Decas is a pretty unnecessary compilation of scrap material. There are three brand new songs (“Paralyzed,” “From Shapeless to Breakable,” and “Moving Forward”), none of which do anything for me. Very uncharacteristically unmemorable for them. Probably throwaway cuts from The Powerless Rise sessions. Then they toss some covers our way. Slayer’s “War Ensemble” is done well, but I’m pretty sure that the faggot Christ does not want his sexy ass children listening to Slayer, let alone covering them. Oh well, 666 Hail Marys, right? Hey, speaking of being brutally sodomized by an Irishman, next up is Judas Priest’s classic “Hellion/Electric Eye” duo. Again, a decent cover, but I don’t think decent covers are selling records in a recession or in the age of file-sharing and blogspots. The last cover is an odd choice. “Coffee Mug” by Descendents? Good for the sheer novelty of hearing a serious Metalcore band do a comical Punk song, I guess, but that novelty lasts all of 40 seconds. This is followed by a slew of completely worthless remixes of select As I Lay Dying songs. I don’t have time in my life for remixes. Mix it right the first time. I don’t need to hear Dubstep variations of Metal songs, unless I’m getting blown by some Techno whore during the process. Good band, useless stopgap compilation.

It pains me to say this, as I’ve been a huge fan of this band since the beginning, but Krisiun sound really tired on this album. With 2008’s Southern Storm, I believe I said something along the lines of the band hitting a “creative wall.” Well, on The Great Execution, the band sound like they’re sonically putting up drywall. A few tracks still serve to impress. You wouldn’t know the dullness you were in store for judging by the vicious opening cut, “The Will to Potency.” The title track and “The Extremist” also stand out as great songs, but the album as a whole suffers from a very workmanlike deja vu. You’ve more or less heard Krisiun do all of these songs before. They seem to be merely going through the motions here. Which it should be noted, in all fairness, that these Brazilian psychopaths’ motions are by no means commonplace. It would take mortal bands aeons of practice to learn how to go through these motions. But the bar is raised for Krisiun by their own doing. The Great Execution basically features their two styles of recent albums mixed together. By that I mean the rapid fire speed and the start-stop breakdown tactics. Somehow it just feels tedious. Songs all of a sudden feel too long, even though they’re standard length for these guys (most tracks are five minutes or longer). A lot of this record sounds like an intro or a pre-chorus that just never breaks through or explodes. It even feels like drummer extraordinaire Max Kolesne is playing nothing but Tool beats the entire record. An endless sea of tribal tom fills. Of course that’s not all he’s doing, but that’s all I take away from his performance. The energy seems gone for some reason. Whether that be a slight change in production, me hitting the nail on the head about going through the motions, or maybe just my ever decreasing will to live, I simply don’t get my Krisiun fix from this Krisiun record. If you happened to track down the “limited edition digipak version” (aka: Jew version) with the “limited edition digipak bonus track” (aka: Jew track), which is a re-recording of the legendary “Black Force Domain,” maybe you’ll understand what I mean. The original song from that eponymous album sounded like jackhammering through the crust of Hell. It turned my stereo into a winged demon that flew away to cause limitless property damage while taking several innocent lives by breathing fire. The re-recorded version sounds completely sterilized by comparison. Better sound quality, but a band showing their wear and age nonetheless. I didn’t even realize it was the same song until the chorus hit. Something obviously needs to re-light the fire. May I suggest fatal amounts of blow? First degree murder? A bottle of Absinthe and some razor blades? Virgin sacrifice? All of the above?

Ah, Cynic, we meet again. The band everyone inexplicably loves. I had Focus on cassette, I didn’t want to be left out. Plus, Tony Choy played bass on Pestilence’s legendary Testimony of the Ancients LP, so I had to see what all the fuss was about. I remember selling it several days later to the local used record store for $3. Yes, a tape sold for $3, which back in 1993 bought you two gallons of gas, a pack of smokes, a hooker, and a good meal. Times have certainly changed, but lifelovers still worship Cynic. I haven’t heard them since their reformation in 2008 because I don’t have time to waste on happy, positive music. Okay, fuck it, let’s see what all the fuss is about. Whoa! I remember disliking this band for being lightweight, anti-memorable, overly technical Death/Thrash. The first thing I hear on this EP is Bjork singing! This transitions into the next song which is Dream Theater’s take on a Winger ballad. What the fuck is this, Mike and the Mechanics? Next song please. Now, I’ve never seen Saudi Arabian gay porn, but I imagine “Bija!” is the proper background music. “Box Up My Bones” and “Elves Beam Out” might as well be Amy Grant covers. And I’m not talking about when she went total Satanic underground with “Baby Baby.” Alright, Cynic fans, explain your way out of this one. And don’t give me that “they’re good at their instruments” bullshit! You know who’s good at his instrument? That inbred kid from Deliverance. Doesn’t mean I need his albums nearby. This is completely pathetic unlistenable garbage. Carbon-Based Anatomy sounds like two men making passionate love to each other in outer space. Recommended if you like Yanni, Kenny G, or Enya (except nowhere near that feral). Please break up again, Cynic, you fucking suck. Would anyone like to buy my burn of this for $3?