Our favorite kind of “favorite record” is the one we weren’t planning for. In fact, the majority of our “Year End” lists tend to be built from that. Not anticipated at all. Not on any sort of new year preview. Just a record that seemingly comes out of nowhere and knocks our socks off. Like Harvest by Poison Ruin did.
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Hailing from the gloomy Northwest (Portland, Oregon to be exact), Hoaxed’s brand of captivating ethereal Doom Rawk is soon to be your new favorite thing with a sound that’s also sure to be a Spooky Season staple as well.
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I try to stay away from other reviews when it comes to any album I already know that I’ll be reviewing myself here but after hearing the latest Cave In record all the way through for the first time I got a little overexcited to see if people felt the same way I did. That said, I’ve gotta hand it to Decibel Magazine’s Shawn Macomber who was so on point in describing Heavy Pendulum as “the best stadium-ready modern Metal record” because, in a nutshell and at its’ core, it’s exactly that. And obviously so much more.
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Supergroup is a weird fucking term. And completely objective. For me, an artist like Old Man Gloom is the definition of a supergroup put in the same realm as, say, Down, there’ll inevitably be people who are all “Who is even in this band?” (For the record, OMG features members of Cave In, Isis, and Converge i.e. most of the Mount Rushmore of Boston heavy). Again, objective. Which brings us to similarly underground supergroup Absent In Body who feature in their ranks members of Amenra, Neurosis, and Sepultura and have a debut release that, as an essential part of this “supergroup” formula, sounds unlike anything that makes up the sum of its’ parts.
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It’s hard to wrap one’s head around Genghis Tron. Are they Metal? Are they Doom? Are they Electro? Are they “Cybergrind”? With Dream Weapon, their first full-length in 13 years, Genghis Tron is throwing every preconceived notion you may have had about the band out the window with a fresh line up and an even fresher sound.
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Denver’s first and only Death Sludge band is back!
Primitive Man is returning after a three year absence apparently and since I don’t follow the band on the regular that isn’t really news to me. What IS news to me is that this record and this band slay because having just listened through the resulting album after those three years and having not heard anything previously of PM from start to finish….well, I don’t know what I just heard….but I like it!
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I’ve probably said this before but I’ll say it again: Cover albums are a tricky thing to master. As an artist, you want to honor those that came before while putting your own stamp while also not being too close to the original to make it all pointless while also not sounding like a parody. Make sense? Okay, then!
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Somewhere in the beginning of my review of Torche’s last behemoth (Which you can conveniently read here!), I mentioned something along the lines of wanting to write a review on the title track by itself because it was that good. Well, it seems that the quartet from Miami, Florida have topped themselves yet again and yet again I will refrain from writing a whole piece about how much of a killer track “Admission” is. Even though it’s that awesome. And is totally deserving of a separate post just to talk about that fact. But there are other awesome tracks within to discuss…
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Damn, this is some dense shit right here. Fresh off the Enthroned review we recently published comes a similarly despondent work of metallic art from a different spectrum of the music world. We’re of course, talking about Pinkish Black and their fourth opus, Concept Unification, which is an elaborate six track beast pushing the boundaries of Prog.
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Another throwback to my Popblerd! writing days! I knew it had been some time since ASG had released some new stuff but surely something had come out that I missed in the interim of my writing there and here, right? Nope! It’s been five years since that last album (For a flashback to that review, head here) and ASG has returned with this blistering, burgeoning, beautiful beast of a new album. [Read more…]