In this age of digital piracy, when downloaded albums are catalogued and forgotten by the hundreds on a daily basis, only a band as undisputedly awesome as Rotten Sound can get away with putting out 6-song/8-minute EPs that must be owned at all costs. Seriously, the record ended before that first sentence was finished, but it kicked my ass like a North Side King backstage — quick and easy. Fuck Vin Diesel’s gay porn franchise, this is the real fast and furious. If there’s anything negative to say about these ferocious Finns, it’s that they render all other Grindcore bands obsolete and weak. They’re almost bad for the genre in that sense. Yes, the perfect is still the enemy of the good, and if your favorite Grindcore band is The Thing, Rotten Sound is the fucking Hulk (and last I checked, puny rock man couldn’t even take gray Hulk, bitches). Sure, they owe a whole lot to Nasum, but someone had to pick up that torch, and there was only one band strong enough to lift it. Rest assured, no group short of Nasum can lay a finger on what Rotten Sound does within the confines of Grind. Even with this stopgap teaser they annihilate the mere notion of competition. Everyone else’s Grindcore record this year just turned into Purity Dilution Part 106. This is a strategically crafted mini-assault as well. The odd-numbered songs are all burners. Jackhammering spine-disintegrators that showcase the inhuman drumming talent of Sami Latva. Dude plays at the speed of electricity! The even-numbered songs have all the hooks. That breakneck groove these guys effortlessly blend in through that ominous, Left Hand Path-with-some-of-that-deer-spray-Ray-Lewis-uses guitar sound. My only complaint is obvious: much like 2010’s Napalm, this just isn’t enough Rotten Sound. No one has ever said, “Man, I wish I could score a really small amount of blow.” Similar situation. Luckily there’s a new full-length on the way this year. In the meantime, shell out for this EP. Go all in and get the CD/t-shirt/etched-vinyl/bologna sandwich/autographed jams/Lament Configuration replica package. This is the only Grind band worth it.

To me, Nightfall has always been a band who’ve just slightly missed the mark. Perhaps overlooked, or more likely overshadowed by the Black Metal giants of their native Greece, I feel as though they did not leave the imprint they’d set out to. Our Editor will vehemently disagree, but I was never all that impressed by their Holy releases in the mid-to-early ’90s. Good records, not great ones… certainly nothing I remember 20 years later. My only real memory of Nightfall is a bad one — that batshit wacky Lesbian Show misadventure. However, it’s never too late to make amends. I thought the band showed legitimate promise of rebirth with Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves, or whatever the fuck their last one was called, but Cassiopeia just might be the best thing they’ve ever done. No exaggeration, kiddies. If album #9 isn’t their finest hour, it’s at least their most well-rounded one. It seems they’ve hit their stride by settling into a very engaging mid-pace not unlike Rotting Christ circa A Dead Poem. A mid-pace from which they comfortably yield infectious melodic hooks, all-pro solos, and highly refined symphonic accentuation. Two decades in the game have honed the gruff bark of Efthimis Karadimas into a professionally precise weapon. By far the best he’s ever sounded, and by far the band’s most coherent and endearing songwriting to date. They’ve shut the door on those notorious oddballisms and have let in a rich flow of melodies to take their place. Melodies that permeate the regal headbangability of “Phaethon,” the darkened pummel of “Colonize Cultures” (replete with sick-ass breakdown), the shout-along pomp of “Hubris,” and the dejected majesty of “Akhenaton.” But “Stellar Parallax” is hands down the greatest song they’ve ever written. An ethereal battle anthem on a level of sincerity and sorrow they’d yet to achieve until now. Not all the bugs have been completely worked out, though. Songs like “Oberon & Titania” and “The Reptile Gods” feel jumbled and poorly transitioned. “Astropolis” could use a hook, and —despite some fantastic drumming— “Hyperion” is more like “Hyperi-yawn.” Still, Cassiopeia is the sound of a band rejuvenated, refocused, and above all, determined. I won’t be forgetting this one.

Some albums are just difficult to review, no matter how much you like them. Fuck the Universe is one of those. I’ve been trying to figure out what to say about this for months, and even after approximately 666 listens, it never got any easier to articulate my thoughts beyond “I like it!” To steal a phrase, Blizzard’s Heavy/Speed Metal is so old school, it’s pre-school. That and the bad mix (too-loud vocals, too-quiet everything else, no audible bass) should have doomed this record to one-listen oblivion… But there is just something about this group of German blasphemers that makes me want to keep playing Fuck the Universe over and over on endless repeat. Maybe it’s the old coffin spirit, which almost subtextually hides within the music, or maybe it’s the lyrics -even the occasionally goofy lines. Perhaps mostly it’s how instantly memorable these songs are, and how the band manages the nearly-impossible feat of making them (the songs, I mean) seemingly immortal, too. I’d like to check out an alternate mix, with the drums turned up enough to make out more than the snare and a cymbal, and the guitars even louder, but… I don’t know if that would work. Somehow this album’s flaws might kind of make it better, which may not even make any sense. All I know for sure about this record is that the whole is inexplicably greater than the sum of the parts, and… just like Blizzard, I came to fuck the universe.

When I got this to review, I thought that it was a “Best Of” because a lot of the tracks were from older albums. The material the label sent us to review is actually just from the audio CDs that accompany the live DVD. I hate it when labels do this. A major part of this release is the DVD, and that wasn’t included. How the fuck am I supposed to review something like this? That being said, the review here is only for the audio portion. From the material I’ve seen on YouTube (mostly the official promos that the band put up), the video looks pretty awesome. At some point, I’m going to have to track it down because I really want to see it. This is the whole concert, from the intro music to the end, unedited and as it was played. This could have easily been cleaned up in the studio, but it wasn’t. The audio on this isn’t perfect. In a live situation, things rarely ever are. A case in point, the guitars are almost completely inaudible during “49 Theurgy Chains” and “Rise of the Shadow.” The drums and keyboards completely drown them out. They only become prominent when “Sing Ling Temple” (the third song) begins. At that point, things start sounding really good. Chthonic really kicks ass live. I got a bit lost during the band’s crowd interactions, mostly because I don’t speak Chinese. From what I understand, the actual concert was filmed in Taiwan (where the band is from), so it stands to reason that they’d be speaking to their hometown crowd in their native language. The band’s playing was tight all of the way through Final Battle at Sing Ling Temple, which is what you expect from an official release. Outside of the minor sound issues that I expect at a live show (such as not having the guitars turned up enough during the opening two songs), this was a flawless set. I like the fact that this was an unedited concert, because for me, it simulates what it actually sounds like if you’re at the show. If you’re a fan of Chthonic already, this is definitely something you will want to have. The newer stuff from Takasago Army meshes seamlessly in with their older material and all of it flowed really well together, even the Pgaku flute solo. If you liked Takasago Army, you’ll definitely like Final Battle at Sing Ling Temple. If anything, Chthonic sounds better live.

When I saw the cover of this album, I thought that it would be Goth Metal. It has that washed out color and the cursive script that so many Goth Metal bands use. A Sound of Thunder also has a female vocalist and song titles like “The Nightwitch” and “The Day I Die” on their album. Those are usually clues that you’re going to get tinkling harpsichords, frilly shirts and songs about running mascara. A Sound of Thunder does have Goth Metal elements in their music, but I wouldn’t call them a Goth Metal band, at least not strictly. Their sound veers from hard driving Rock & Roll (“Kill That Bitch”), to a dark and heavy Black Sabbath groove (“The Day I Die” and parts of “Murderous Horde”), to straight-out Goth Metal (“The Nightwitch,” “Calat Alhambra” and “This Too Shall Pass”). You never really know what you’re going to get from one song to the next. All of the tracks on Out of the Darkness are good, but there is a serious lack of consistency between them. When you go from a Goth Metal track with fantasy lyrics and atmospheric music like “The Nightwitch,” to a hard rocking ode to killing the “other woman” and dumping her body behind a Pizza Hut, like “Kill That Bitch,” it throws you for a loop. Out of the Darkness is a good collection of songs, but as an album, it’s a bit too disjointed for my taste. The different styles are not the problem. The problem is that the songs don’t flow well together. On their own, they all rock. Together, this sounds like a compilation album with no direction. Given how different some of these songs are from each other, a few of these tracks clearly don’t belong. “Kill That Bitch” is a great Rock anthem, but it sticks out like a faithful-to-the-original cover of The Cure’s “Pictures of You” on a Napalm Death album. The other, more Rock inspired tracks are less anomalous, but when compared to the Goth Metal style of the others, they also stick out. And then there’s the track order… With all of those styles jumbled together, any consistency you might have gotten is lost. If the more Rock oriented songs came first and things gradually became more Goth Metal inspired, you could see where A Sound of Thunder was going. Maybe I’m just being too much of a perfectionist, but I really thought that the track order and song selection needed work. Maybe their next album will do it for me, but Out of the Darkness shows a band that can write deadly songs, but still needs work putting things together to form a deadly album.

They say in baseball that it all evens out. For every line drive or frozen rope you hit right at someone, a bleeder will squeak through or a duck fart will drop in no man’s land. Relatively speaking, 2012 seemed like King of Asgard’s year from this spectator’s standpoint. Constant Music Choice bombardment, satellite radio airplay on an almost daily basis, and a music video in heavy rotation on Fuse and Havoc had my inquiring mind wondering what the fuck the big deal was. Then I learned that this group features Karl Beckman (guitar/keyboard) and Karsten Larsson (bass) from the legendary Mithotyn. The criminally underrated Viking Black Metal horde who scored not one but two of 1998’s best albums (In the Sign of the Ravens and King of the Distant Forest), yet never got the recognition they deserved and fizzled around the turn of the century. That’s when the old baseball adage occurred to me. To be fair, King of Asgard’s sophomore outing for Metal Blade is considerably harder hit than a mere “duck fart.” The epic riffcraft on “The Dispossessed” and “Bound to Reunite” is passable enough to remind us of vintage, pre-stardom Amon Amarth, while mid-paced scorchers like “Gap of Ginnungs,” “Nordvegr,” and “Up on the Mountain” at times reveal a hook-laden swagger not unlike Kvelertak minus the party vibe. “Plague-Ridden Rebirth” gives us a taste of Blackened Mithotyn-like fury, and “Harvest (The End)” rides a quirky gallop to semi-greatness, but both tracks are ultimately too drawn out and boring to achieve standout status. In the end, …to North is a quality, Viking-themed Melodeath record that sorely lacks a battle anthem. Good but not great, and no match at all for the borderline-suicidal majesty of Mithotyn’s past triumphs. However, I wish King of Asgard all the success and popularity in the Nine Worlds. For Beckman and Larsson, it’s better late than never.

Eye of Solitude has only been active since 2010, but this is their second full-length album and third release overall. Prior to this LP was an EP entitled Awoken by Crows, which was originally self-released in 2011, but later officially issued by Kaotoxin in 2012 with an additional song. That additional track, “Awoken by Crows,” was re-recorded and included on Sui Caedere as the opening cut. If you’ve heard Eye of Solitude before, then you’re not going to be surprised by what you get here. Sui Caedere continues in the slow, melancholic, atmospheric Doom/Death Metal style, but the song structures this time around weave more Dark Ambient into their sound. Where Awoken by Crows had a more straight-forward Doom/Death approach, Sui Caedere has an almost Horror soundtrack feeling. Some of the songs, especially “Those Who Don’t Return” and “Depths of a Sick Mind,” have interludes where the atmosphere is heightened by the Dark Ambient inspired instrumental parts. Though the songs are long, clocking in at a minimum of six minutes, the band uses melody and atmosphere to great effect. If there is a weakness in this group’s sound, it is in the vocal department. Daniel Neagoe has a growl that sounds like Cookie Monster gone Goth. It’s dark and mostly fits the music, but his tonal range is very narrow. It isn’t quite monotone (think: old Incantation), but it’s pretty close. The way this is produced, his vocals tend to be dominant. They don’t drown out the guitars, but they are near parity in terms of volume. I thought that there were times when a different vocal style or vocalist could have lent some additional atmosphere to the track. Overall, though, this is a solid release of heavy, atmospheric Doom/Death that fans of Thergothon, Chorus of Ruin, old Morgion or Kostnitsa will probably enjoy.

Gather ‘round, kids. Uncle Ychoril is gonna tell you a story about the old days of Metal. Way back in the days before Death Metal, long before the likes of Doris Yeh (Chthonic) and Angela Gassow (Arch Enemy) were even jailbait, there was one true Metal Queen. That was Doro Pesch, the lead vocalist of Warlock. Back in the ’80s, I knew guys who literally spent close to thirty bones to get a poster of her imported from Germany. I wasn’t one of them. Thirty bucks was way more than I could conveniently afford for a poster. Doro Pesch was the hottest real Metal chick there was. Lita Ford didn’t count because none of the music she played was really Metal. It was L.A. Butt Rock played by a chick, which made it marginally more acceptable because she was the best looking Butt Rocker out there. That was until Lorraine Lewis of Femme Fatale showed up and made everyone realize that Lita Ford looked like a man with breast implants. It’s easy to be hot when your competition is Blackie Lawless - literally. But I digress… Doro Pesch was hot in the ’80s. Unfortunately, this is 2013 and Doro is on the wrong side of forty years old (I’m being generous, mostly because I’m there too). The glamour shot photographs and the paintings of her in epic poses (and wearing some pretty revealing outfits) that adorn her album covers can’t hide the fact that she’s old enough to be somebody’s grandmother now. Even though she is still in pretty good shape physically, it’s been a long time since Burning the Witches and True as Steel. One listen to Raise Your Fist is all it takes to tell that her voice doesn’t pack the same punch it did three decades ago. She might not be twenty years old anymore, but I could’ve closed my eyes and pretended if she could still let it rip like she did on True as Steel. There are times when she comes close, though. Most of the songs on Raise Your Fist are pretty rocking. As far as her solo output goes, this is the best Doro album in ages - maybe ever. Songs like “Raise Your Fist,” “Rock Till Death” and “Revenge” are easily the best she’s done in her entire solo career. Where this album fails is in the ballads. The worst one has to be “It Still Hurts,” a duet with Lemmy. How do you fuck up a duet with the voice of Motorhead? You have Mister “I’m So Bad Baby I Don’t Care” sing a ballad that amounts to, “I’m sorry I hurt you, baby, please don’t hate me forever.” That’s a sin against five or six different kinds of extreme music. If you want sappy shit like that on your album, get that fag from H.I.M. to sing it. Lemmy is one of the few remaining Metal Gods on Earth. You don’t relegate someone like that to second string on a sappy love song. If I wanted to hear sappy love songs, I’d listen to Taylor Swift. I could’ve handled a song like “It Still Hurts” if it had been indignant (“I’m going to saw your dick off, you cheating asshole!”) or had lyrics about her mailing him dead animals. Instead, it just droned on and on and on for what seemed like forever, never building but lingering in the air like a really bad fart. On the whole, the ballads make up only a thankfully small portion of this album. The rest of this is a solid slab of Traditional Metal that longtime fans of Warlock will surely enjoy.

This album is available in several different configurations. One with just Alpha Noir, this 2-CD version with Omega White, and a limited edition that is the same as the 2-CD variation, but with different packaging and some other swag. And then there is the digital download, and vinyl too… If you’re a fan of Moonspell, you will obviously want the 2-CD version (or the equivalent) because you literally get a second album for just a couple dollars more. Alpha Noir and Omega White are actually two separate LPs that were recorded at the same time. Conceptually, they represent the two different aspects of Moonspell. Alpha Noir is more Black Metal influenced, and Omega White is more Goth Rock influenced. Though you’re not going to see this often, I liked the concept. It gives you the option of not listening to the Sisters of Mercy/Bauhaus-influenced stuff and just listen to the Metal songs (or vice-versa). If you were a fan of their previous album, Night Eternal, you will enjoy Alpha Noir. The two albums are fairly similar in style and the amount of aggression and dark atmosphere is similar. One notable difference between Alpha Noir and Night Eternal is the amount of keyboards that are used. Alpha Noir is far more guitar-driven. While it is still atmospheric, it uses guitar harmonics and strategically placed keyboard parts rather than an ever-present and powerful keyboard section. On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have Omega White, the Goth Rock inspired album. Whether you like Omega White or not depends on your feelings regarding their older material. If you liked albums such as The Antidote or Darkness and Hope, you’ll probably enjoy Omega White, too. While the production on Omega White is the same as on Alpha Noir, the difference in sound is easily noticeable. Where Alpha Noir is more aggressive and dark, Omega White has a strong Goth vibe. If Sisters of Mercy or Love Like Blood decided to do a Metal album, it would sound a lot like Omega White. The songs are markedly mellower and the vocals are more melodic compared to Alpha Noir. The music is also more accessible. There are some strong hook-laden tracks on Omega White that stick in your head long after the CD stops playing. My personal preference was for the darker, more aggressive material, but I found myself enjoying the Goth Rock stuff almost as much. I’ve followed this band for a long time and though they lost their way for a while, Moonspell is definitely back on track.

Though this band was formed in 2008, Monuments of Doom Revealed is their first official release. Prior to this, their musical output was composed of rehearsal recordings and a 2010 promo recording. I had initially thought that this band was going to be either straight-forward Black Metal or maybe a Doom band, a quick glance at the names of the band members told me all I needed to know about them. Face it, when you have band members with names like “Deathpriest Goatcommander of Black Abyss and Morbid Bestiality” and “Gasmasked Flagellant of the Innocent,” Blasphemy and Beherit played a major role in your Black Metal upbringing. In this case, Blasphemy looms large. Monuments of Doom Revealed is brutal and in your face Black/Death Metal from the beginning of the first actual song to the end of the last track. Once you get past the intro, it’s essentially a musical beat-down with pauses in between tracks. Unlike other bands in this genre, the production on this album is fairly good while still maintaining the brutal onslaught. Thorybos has that “wall of sound” style, but things are still discernible. You can tell that these guys are actually playing riffs and there is some substantive music underneath the distortion. Fans of Blasphemy, Black Witchery and Deiphago will probably find Monuments of Doom Revealed to be right up their alley. While I’m not a huge fan of the Blasphemy-influenced Black/Death Metal style, I appreciate it when a band remembers to kick ass and this certainly does that in spades.

Something tells me that Totenwolf is NSBM. There isn’t a whole lot of information available about this band out there, so I could be wrong. This is one of those rare cases when the internet is absolutely useless when researching a band, and most of the sources that I usually use to get info were lacking in details. Here is what I know about Totenwolf: they’re from Russia and this is their second album. That’s it. They have a website on MySpace, but it is blocked to everyone not listed as a “friend” of the band. Every site that had anything about the band was entirely in Russian, and the various translation utilities (Google & Bing) were pretty useless. The fact that they’re blocking access to their site tells me that they’re being deliberately secretive, which is a hallmark of an NSBM band. Regardless of how popular groups like the Golden Dawn party are getting, most countries still have a problem with Nazism. The band name is a not so subtle hint, as is the fact that they have songs with titles like “Werewolf” and “Post Holocaust Night.” Still, nothing about this band is blatantly NS. Politics aside, Totenwolf is a cut above the average Black Metal band. The production here is very good. No instrument is overly loud and there is plenty of punch in the guitars. Musically, the songs are mostly mid-paced melodic Black Metal, but Totenwolf knows how to slow down and get heavy. The strongest parts of Night Path of Pest are the Doom-infused sections. These guys know how to work a Doomy groove into their music. This is helped by the production. A Necro production would have killed this album right from the start. The fact that there is more bottom-end in the guitars made parts of Night Path of Pest pretty punishing, which is always a good thing. Regardless of their political leanings, this group is a force to be reckoned with. Their relative obscurity may keep them a cult band, but if you’re willing to track them down, this is one of those rare releases that makes taking a chance on an unknown band worthwhile.

This is one of those bands that I’ve always had trouble keeping track of. Their releases were invariably hard to get, mostly because Khors had been tagged as Nazis at some point. The band maintains that they are non-political, but their early releases were on Oriana Music, the label of Nokturnal Mortum. Once Nokturnal Mortum came out as being NS, every other band on that label was considered NS too. Khors has evolved quite a bit over the years, honing their sound from their early Emperor/Graveland worship with Folk elements, to a more solid Atmospheric Black Metal sound. I’ve seen quite a number of negative reviews concerning this album, centering mostly around the fact that longtime fans thought their last album was better. The other complaints I heard about this record related to the length (it was too short), and to the fact that there are only four actual songs out of the eight tracks on this CD. Four of the tracks are atmospheric interludes and are generally quite short (between one and a half and three minutes). The actual songs are pretty epic in length, being between six and nine minutes each. Reviewed in a vacuum, this album is actually pretty good. The music is dark, melancholic and has a ton of atmosphere. The playing is tight and the sound on Wisdom of Centuries is very clear. Given what I’m hearing, I have a hard time believing that this band’s last album was actually better than this. I haven’t heard it yet, so that may indeed be the case here. Still, I wouldn’t call this a dud. The songs are well written and well played. This isn’t Khors releasing the equivalent of St. Anger by a long shot. This is a solid Atmospheric Black Metal album written and played by a band that knows what they’re doing. Some fans might be disappointed, but I really enjoyed Wisdom of Centuries.

I’ve been a fan of Sodom for almost three decades, starting with a cassette tape of In the Sign of Evil that I scored for three bucks at a used record store in 1985. In the Sign of Evil is one of those releases that I look back on as having had a profound impact on my life. The early albums by Sodom still get a significant amount of rotation on my stereo even to this day. A side note: as much as I love this band’s music, I refuse to refer to myself as a “Sodomaniac.” I live in San Francisco. The term “Sodomaniac” has different connotations here. 30 Years Sodomized: 1982 - 2012 is a three-CD retrospective that celebrates their three decades of existence. Like all retrospectives, it’s a mixed bag. The first CD is an assortment of live tracks that comprise “The Witchhunter Decade,” which featured Chris Witchhunter on drums. Of the three CDs in this collection, this is the reason to purchase this retrospective. All of the other tracks are otherwise available on other releases, but these live tracks have never been officially released. These are different from Mortal Way of Live and the other live tracks that Sodom has released over the years, so you’re getting something new. Sadly, the purchase price of this collection and the quality of the live material may not be worth it to all but the most die-hard Sodom fans. Due to the age and quality of the recordings, the sound on the bulk of the live tracks is pretty bad compared to a professionally recorded live album. The live songs are from various different concerts so there is little consistency between tracks. Some of them sound good, with nice, loud guitars, and others are mediocre and have guitars that are barely audible. You never know what you’re going to get from one song to the next. If you want consistency, you have to move on to the CDs that have the studio cuts on them. The second disc in this collection covers the early years, and the third one is full of newer material. There is a lot of stuff here to listen to and because it is a retrospective, it covers all eras of this band’s history. My only major gripe is the track selection. Some of Sodom’s best songs are missing. Where are “Bombenhagel” and “Blasphemer”? Where is “Ausgebombt” or “Agent Orange” or “Equinox”? I know there isn’t room for everything, but come on! Why have a bunch of mediocre tracks when you can have the hits? That’s like Motorhead doing a retrospective and leaving off “Iron Fist” and “Ace of Spades.” As a fan of Sodom, I can’t recommend this because the song selection leaves me wanting, and the live material isn’t enough to get me to open my wallet and shell out any hard earned cash. I have all of their old stuff already, and Mortal Way of Live has both consistency and a good selection of songs, something that this release doesn’t.

I don’t know what it is about Russian bands and their desire to remain obscure. I tried to research this group, and outside of the facts that this is their debut album and they’re from Russia, I know little else about them. They have no website, the label (BDTO) has no website, and the label distributing the album (Daemon Worship) has an advertising blurb describing the release in terms so vague that you get the impression that they don’t know anything about the band either. I checked several internet sources and I couldn’t find out who was in the band, how long they’ve been together, or even if this is a continuing band or a one-off project. Kostnitsa may have some connection to another Russian Black Metal band called Funeral Poetry, but my evidence for it is circumstantial. BDTO only has two bands on their roster (Funeral Poetry and Kostnitsa), and I’m guessing that one of the band members owns the label. Musically, this is on the Doomy side of Black Metal, reminiscent in sound to bands like Wallachia or old Katatonia. The tempo is slow to mid-paced, and the emphasis on melancholic atmosphere is evident. The guitars have some reverb on them and they are backed by occasional keyboards to enhance the mood. Kostnitsa is pretty consistently able to capture that dark, melancholic feeling in each of their songs without having them sounding too much alike. The pacing is pretty steady, never getting ploddingly slow or fast enough to ruin the atmospheric element. The use of the raspy Black Metal style vocals in conjunction with Death Metal style growls is another element that enhances their sound. The standard raspy Black Metal style vocals tend to get a little monotonous, and the inclusion of alternate vocal styles helps break this up nicely. If you’re into atmospheric Black Metal in the more Doom oriented style (slower playing, more melancholic sound, but not in the whiny Goth style), this is well worth tracking down.

In marketing, we refer to an album like this as an easy sale. Why is it an easy sale? Because it has everything that you could want in one package. Old-school Swedish Death Metal with lyrics about Cthulhu? It practically sells itself. I was sold at “Cthulhu.” Cthulhu makes everything cooler just because he is that fucking awesome. I would stop saying that the Twilight movies/books/everything are gay, if at the very end of the saga, Cthulhu rises from the depths and devours everyone in an orgy of blood, violence, tentacles and insanity. That is the level of awesomeness that Cthulhu has. If he can’t save your album, you really, really, really fucking suck. Puteraeon doesn’t have a problem with sucking. If you worship at the altar of Dismember, old Entombed, Grotesque, Carnage and Unleashed, you’ll like this record. Cult Cthulhu is like a more melodic version of Like an Ever Flowing Stream. It has the dark, brutal atmosphere and punishing riffs down pat. Is it horribly original? You could’ve told me that this album was a lost studio recording of Dismember that had been sitting in a storage room at Sunlight Studios since 1990 and I would’ve believed it. This definitely has that old Sunlight Studios sound. While originality isn’t their strong point, the amount of brutality and ass-kicking on this album puts Puteraeon over the top in my book. The Cthulhu stuff is a bonus.

Graveflower hails from Russia, but they may as well be from Halifax, England. Why Halifax? Because that’s where My Dying Bride is from. Why do I say this? Because Graveflower sounds exactly like them. I kept thinking that I had the wrong album on because I could swear that Returning to the Primary Source was The Angel and the Dark River or The Light at the End of the World. I mean this literally. The music and vocals are so much like My Dying Bride that Graveflower should be sending royalty checks to them. I’ve heard tribute bands that sound more original than this. As much as I like the music that’s on this album, I’m going to have to rake Graveflower over the coals for essentially ripping off someone else’s sound. I remember the days when every other Florida Death Metal band sounded like Morbid Angel, but at least you could tell that it wasn’t Morbid Angel on the album. This sounds so much like My Dying Bride that you could literally fool a hardcore fan. Returning to the Primary Source goes beyond being influenced by a band and into the realms of copyright infringement. If this had been a My Dying Bride album, it would have been at least a nine because musically, this is some good stuff. The reason it isn’t a nine is because everything on this CD is literally indistinguishable from My Dying Bride. I couldn’t give this a one because the playing is too good, but I can’t give this more than a five in good conscience.

I don’t know what the title of this one-song EP translates to exactly. I checked metal-archives.com and they had the translation as “the phoenix will be dead,” but other places have it translated differently (“the phoenix must die” or “death of the phoenix”). Tomb hails from mainland China, and their music can be best described as Depressive Black Metal with a Necro Black Metal production. The guitars are very thin and treble-heavy, which is a hallmark of the whole “we sucked all of the warmth from our guitars because we’re so anti-life” Necro movement. I’m not a fan of this kind of production, but in the case of Tomb, I’m going to make somewhat of an exception. This EP is pretty good. I think the atmospheric elements are what make it work, almost in spite of the production. The abundant use of acoustic guitar to add atmosphere with keyboards in the background makes this far more listenable than it would have been had it been straight Necro Black Metal with no frills. Without that eerie atmosphere, this would be just another generic Under the Sign of the Black Mark-worshipping Bathory clone with shit production. The Ambient interludes seem to divide this twenty-three minute long track into roughly three parts. I’ve heard that this EP was actually supposed to be two distinct songs, but information on the internet is conflicting regarding this, too. I guess the lack of information regarding Tomb and this EP stems from the fact that I can’t read Chinese and most of the other people putting information about this out there don’t know how to read Chinese, either. That aside, I’m interested in hearing more from this band. They have an interesting sound and though the production here leaves something to be desired, the material they had on display was good enough for me to add them to my watch list of bands that have some serious potential.

I was awfully mean to this UK Metalcore outfit back in 2008 when I reviewed their sophomore outing Ruin. Not that I didn’t have my reasons. A) I’m a dick. I’m impatient and miserable people tend to say miserable things. B) In those days, Ray used to shoot me up with horse tranquilizer and grapefruit juice, then lock me up in a room in his basement with 300 records to review and a wolverine high on biker meth for several days. C) The album was flat-out boring as fuck. I hadn’t paid much attention to the band until 2010’s “Day in Day Out” single from The Here and Now — an album unanimously chastised for its more commercial direction. I didn’t hate the song —at least it was an actual song— and jumped at the chance to take on Daybreaker. It was surprising to learn that the album debuted at #28 on the Top Heatseekers chart in the US (and even more surprising to learn that only means 1200 copies sold — fucking pirates.) Well, I’m pleased to report that these young Brits have earned that position with album #5. By far their most cohesive and focused work to date, finally striking the perfect balance of their aggressive, technical, and somewhat scattered Mathcore beginnings and their softer, more accessible Post-Punk side. So much of Daybreaker reminds me of Define the Great Line-era Underoath (a band so stellar even I have to look the other way on their beliefs). Explosive moments of tension and release collide with pure passion, as complex song structures and bare-knuckled simplicity battle for supremacy. Vocalist Sam Carter executes his harsh scream/radio-ready clean voice combo quite admirably, spouting socio-political and religious lyrics from an atheistic point of view. Elsewhere, “These Colours Don’t Run” sounds like Shai Hulud and Parkway Drive in a bar fight, while their buddy Oli Sykes (Bring Me the Horizon) returns the guest vocal favor on “Even If You Win, You’re Still a Rat” (a cut that wouldn’t have sounded too terribly out of place on There Is a Hell…). The band has achieved a remarkable equilibrium of abrasive and emotive elements, resulting in an album with no real filler. And while I’d wager their approach is a bit too lightweight and modern to win over the denim-vested hearts of the Death/Thrash community, I believe they’ve made a record that will silence their critics and satisfy fans new and old. Consider me officially the former.

This is a re-release of Virgin Steele’s 1993 album with expanded liner notes and a second CD of bonus materials, not a new album. Why Steamhammer chose to re-release this particular record is a mystery because most fans of Virgin Steele consider this the band’s worst album. It’s easy to see why. This is Butt Rock from beginning to end. The singer thinks he’s the bastard son of David Lee Roth and David Coverdale (Whitesnake) and the rest of the band is trying desperately to make White Lion and Europe sound heavy. Life Among the Ruins is so limp-wristed that it makes Shout at the Devil by Motley Crue sound like Master of Puppets-era Metallica in comparison. Hell, I think Vixen might even be heavier. Songs like “Sex Religion Machine” and “Too Hot to Handle” sound like desperate attempts for attention. It’s like somebody told the members of Virgin Steele that writing shitty songs like this would get them chicks, but nobody told them that they were five years too late and that the party was already over. This is an album that Virgin Steele should be trying to bury, not promote. Life Among the Ruins is down there with Pantera’s long out-of-print early albums (the ones prior to Cowboys from Hell when they were wearing make-up and had big poofy hair) in terms of being shamefully bad. Fans of Poison and Warrant might enjoy this record, but if you prefer anything heavier or more Metal, avoid this like the plague. There are far better albums out there. In fact, there are far better Virgin Steele albums out there, too.

Nachtmystium is a band that I haven’t followed too closely for a number of years. I had some of the earlier stuff, but I’d stopped listening to them prior to the “love it or hate it” Black Meddle albums (Assassins and Addicts). Listening to Silencing Machine, it’s easy to tell that they’ve progressed beyond the basic Darkthrone/Burzum worship of the early days. For one thing, this is a very well produced album. The sound here is very clear and every instrument is given its space. When listening to Silencing Machine, I noticed that there are two distinct parts to it. The first half of this album is straight-forward Black Metal with some experimentation. It’s nothing wild and crazy. It pretty much sticks within the bounds of what most fans think of as being “acceptably Black Metal.” The second half of this album is where the weird stuff comes in. After “Decimation, Annihilation” starts, the songs get far more experimental. There is still a strong Black Metal element, but the outside influences are more prominent. The songs range from Industrial sounding stuff to Metal with Gothic or Ambient influences. The experimentation never turns into the kind of oddball shit that you get from bands like Ulver or D.H.G. (formerly known as Dodheimsgard). It may sound strange, but if you looked underneath the weirdness, you can still find a solid Black Metal core. It never degenerates into experimentation for the sake of experimentation. If you’re open-minded about your music, Nachtmystium stretches the boundaries of Black Metal, but on Silencing Machine at least, they don’t stray too far from the reservation.