Recent Album Reviews

After a ten year hiatus Maniac Butcher returns with a powerful Black Metal release that will surely send a lot of crappy Black Metal bands crying to their garage wishing they could craft such hate filled anthems of destruction. The band’s original members Vlad Blasphemer and Barbarud Hrom are back in top form and ready to spread disease through the world of Black Metal.

With six songs clocking around 30 minutes of hate filled raw Black Metal, it’s like the band never left the scene. Featuring a crystal clear production, the band sounds as raw as ever and their music crushes since the first riff. Haling from the Czech Republic, the band writes are their lyrics in Czech, so we can’t really know what they are singing about but all we care about is how brutal and chaotic their music is.

In a day that almost everybody is doing what has worked for somebody else, playing it safe and avoiding any kind of creativity seems to be the typical approach ‘new’ bands take to making music. Luckily for us Lava Engine actually tries to craft their own unique sound and actually manage to create pretty solid compositions with intricate musical palettes that sound very well when mixed in together.

Hailing from Sweden, Lava Engine brilliantly merges Progressive Metal elements with some ‘Symphonic’ elements and creates a very uniquely sounding Experimental Metal sound that many bands will surely envy. The band’s combination of powerful riffs, keyboard arrangements, and well crafted vocal lines, carries their second EP “In Limbo” from start till finish and hopefully lands them a record deal.

October Falls is one of our favorite bands of all time and they have returned with their 3rd full-length album “A Collapse of Faith”. The band plays a mean mixture of Black/Dark Metal with Folk elements unlike anybody else these days, just imagine if early Ulver, Empyrium and Tehni had a genetically engineered of spring.

As in the same vein of “The Womb of Primordial Nature”, the band crafts epic songs that will transport you to a dark world filled with nature, helplessness and pain. All through a hefty dosage of distorted guitars, surgically precise drumming and majestic acoustic passages that will haunt you till the rest of your life. The atmosphere created for “A Collapse of Faith” is very haunting and unique, and when paired with M. Lehto’s shivering vocal performance you will surrender your soul to this majestic aural experience.

Featuring ex-Killswitch Engage vocalist Jesse Leach, we were very weary about “Awaken” from The Empire Shall Fall. We never liked Jesse’s vocals on KSE and we also don’t like 95% of the Metalcore that bands put out these days, so we imaged that we would completely rip this album to shreds and call it a day. To our surprise we actually found and interesting sounding album with “Awaken”, an album that will put many of the current Metalcore shit to the ground and Tea-bag them all night long.

Right of the bat, we still hate the vocals and we will not change our minds about them. The screams seem forced (like he has something up his ass), and the ‘growls’ seem weak in comparison to other dudes in the Deathcore/Metalcore circuit. Jesse’s clean vocals are as vanilla as they come, and there is nothing else to add about such a plain (and boring singer).

All the way from Sweden today we get WAN, a band that features a sound that will take you back to the ‘early’ days of Black Metal with their Bathory/Hellhammer influenced music. With a lo-fi production that will make some sound snobs cry, and fans of the ‘poor’ sounding music cheer. We think that there is a fine line between sounding ‘old-school’ and just ‘plain shitty’, and for “Wolves of the North” we have to lean on the ‘plain shitty’ category.

The band takes us in a 13 tracks and 35 minutes long ride of dull sounding old-school Black Metal. After a few songs you will start wondering why they are signed and releasing such an unimaginative album. There are some ‘ok’ moments, but they quickly get dulled by the monotonous drum machine, random riffs, and reverbed vocals. There is not much to be rescued from this album besides a few riffs and some decent songs like “Ulvhall”, but the drumming makes them less than bearable.

The German Heavy Metal monsters are finally back with their first studio album in 14 years and with a new vocalists that while not as good as respected as Udo, he holds his own at the helm of such a legendary band. Accept has managed to combine some of their old day’s magic with a fresh sound that sounds better than anybody else in the Heavy Metal scene.

For the first time in years we can notice that Wolf Hoffmann and Peter Baltes managed to get their shit together and craft an epic album worthy of the Accept moniker. And by recruiting Mark Tornillo as the vocalist they managed to get a vocalist that we are sure nobody, except the hardcore Udo fanboys, will be complaining about since his performance is better than expected.

Every once in a while we get albums that make us listen to them over and over in order to form an actual opinion about them. After the first spin, we knew that Poois latest release “Opera House” will be one of those albums that will take more time and effort in order to properly describe and correctly inform the listener about what they should expect with such a rich and interesting release.

Hailing from New York, this band will surely turn everybody’s head around with confused and puzzled faces for at least a few minutes. After you get over the first weird impression about this album, you discover that Poois is actually one hell of a talented band that has constructed a very diverse and unique ‘sound’ that is showcased in small doses through the album’s 13 tracks. There is not really a ‘main’ influence other than the Metal aspect of the bands music, and this is also a stretch since they feature influences of Alternative Rock, Grunge, Progressive Rock, and other genres.