2010

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    The Body - All the Waters of the Earth Turn to Blood (2010)

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    Today we have one of the weirdest albums we have received in the last few years with The Body’s “All the Waters….”. This band combines Drone / Sludge Metal with a bunch of random shit creating a very enthralling atmosphere unlike anything you have heard before.

    Since their opening track “A Body”, you know you will be in for quite the experience. This song features angelic voices for around 7 minutes and then it transforms into a mix of heavy sludge riffage, angelic voices and deranged screams. The album pretty much continues in the same weird fashion with the drone-like “A Curse” and then it just keeps getting weirder and weirder with “Empty Hearth”.

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    Fluwid – From Surface to Suffocation (2010)

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    If you have been an avid reader of Infernal Masquerade for a while now, you should know that we despise most of the shitty Metalcore releases that all the kids over at Hot Topic go crazy about. However, we have always been objective and giving props when props are due to Metalcore/Deathcore/Whatever-core releases that are actually good. Today we have Fluwid and their Metalcore/Melodic Death Metal second album “From Surface to Suffocation”.

    First off, it might be the promo we got but the album sound leaves a lot to be desired since it sounds very hollow and diminishes the overall quality of this release. The music is very straight forward and is highly repetitive, repeating riffs over and over until you can easily play them just by listening to this album once. The breakdowns and clean vocals made us want to puncture our ear drums, but they are very standard for releases of this kind and sound good when compared to other Metalcore bands.

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    Interment – Into the Crypts of Blasphemy (2010)

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    We love Death Metal and we greatly enjoy bands from the good old days like Grave, Entombed, Dismember, etc., so when we got Interment’s promo we got excited. Interment formed 22 years ago in Sweden when all the glorious Swedish Death Metal movement was going down, after a few demos they broke up never to be heard from again until 2007.

    Fast-forward to 2010 and they are finally releasing their first full-length “Into the Crypts of Blasphemy”, with some members of the band having played in Centinex and still play in Demonical, we can only foresee a very impressive band…. Well this is not the case since in our educated opinion this album blows from start till end.

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    Pest – Tenebris Obortis (2010)

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    With a very chaotic and gloomy Black Metal sound with Thrash influences, today we have Pest and their fourth full-length release “Tenebris Obortis”. While this release is not highly original, it still has enough elements to make it a very solid release that will find it self lingering in your playlist more than you would have expected.

    “Tenebris Obortis” features 10 tracks of solid Black Metal that sometimes feels like a sample platter of sound bits of Gorgoroth, old Dark Throne, Arckanum, etc, but still has enough personality to stand on its own and not get called a recycle band by all the critics and followers of the genre. There are a few ‘weird’ direction shifts between the songs that might put of some people, but for us they actually help this album flow differently and avoid getting dull.

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    Triosphere – The Road Less Traveled (2010)

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    Powered by Ida Haukland’s powerful vocals, today we have Triosphere and their second full-length release “The Road Less Traveled”. This album features a very interesting combination of Power Metal with some Progressive elements and hugely characteristic female vocals. We get tons of female fronted bands each year, but Triosphere immediately stands out because of her singer’s more ‘old school’ deeper vocal style.

    With over 50 minutes of music, “The Road Less Traveled” makes a huge impression since the beginning with a very powerful opening (after the intro) Progressive/Power Metal sound, then it quickly mellows down to a more slower but equally impressive sound that shifts between the previously mentioned genres but focusing more on guitar and vocal melodies that at some points they hit hard rock territories.

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    Magica – Dark Diary (2010)

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    Since 2002 Magica has been gracing us with very interesting and consistent releases, “Dark Diary” is not an exception to this trend and shows the band embracing a more Gothic Power Metal sound than their original Power/Melodic Heavy Metal sound from their earlier albums.

    With a new bass guitarist and a new drummer, the band is sounding as good as ever. The band’s music is somewhat very symphonic, but it never gets to be ‘too much’ like other bands that sound like a Star Wars soundtrack with vocals plastered on top. We love when bands know when to balance their synth/keyboard use to not overwhelm the listener with needless epicness.

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    Heaven Grey – Falling Mist (2010)

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    Hailing from Latvia, today we get a very impressive Doom/Gothic Metal self-released album with Heaven Grey’s “Falling Mist”. We are suckers for Doom/Gothic Metal and everything in between, but when the genres are combined we get even more excited. Heaven Grey had most of the ‘activity’ in the late nineties, and because of line-up issues split-up in 2000. Recently reformed the band set up to record “Falling Mist”, their second full-length and one of the best Doom/Gothic Metal albums we have heard this year.

    Combining lyrics in both English and Latvia, the band sets up a very bleak and depressive atmosphere with their music. We particularly love the language combination since it’s very nice to hear bands embracing their own language when it comes to writing songs. The music is very bare-bones and does not require anything fancy to make it excellent. Mainly driven by the weeping guitar work and depressive clean vocals, Heaven Grey’s music is right up there with As Divine Grace, Thorns of The Carrion, Castle, etc. when it comes to creating depressive music that will keep you engaged for the duration of the full-album.

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    The Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza – Danza III: The Series of Unfortunate Events (2010)

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    There are a few things that make us think WTF, recently the movie “The Human Centipede” and Comparative Anatomy’s “Mammalia” have produced some of those epic reactions. Well, today we have another one of these priceless reactions with The Tony Danza Tap Dance Extravaganza’s new album “Danaza III”. We have heard the band before and their previous bizarre albums, but we quite didn’t expect this one either.

    Moving into a very brutal territory, this American trio has managed to release one of the most dissonantly brilliant albums of 2010. The band takes many ideas from movies and just about any other random shit (like Tony Danza) and merges them together in a chaotic fashion to make a brutal yet highly original release.

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    Waking the Cadaver – Beyond Cops. Beyond God. (2010)

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    If it wasn’t enough that all the kiddies are playing Deathcore these days, we now have BRUTAL, yes BRUTAL Deathcore. We can definitely can notice an extra ‘aggression’ level in Waking the Cadaver’s Deathcore sound making it much more brutal, but it still borders with the Death/Grind bands of a few years ago.

    The band call their style “Slamming Gore Groove” and we think this is downright hilarious, there aren’t enough Groove elements to categorize this release like this, but we can see that there is some Grooviness to their music. We can’t really find the ‘innovative’ aspect of this band anywhere since they just sound like a really pissed off version of Black Dahlia Murder without their occasional good riff.

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    Divinity – The Singularity (2010)

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    There are countless European bands that play great Melodic Death Metal with hints of Progressive, Thrash and even Modern Metal elements, but there aren’t many that can pull it off on this side of the pond. Canadian Divinity is one of the few that can make this claim on North America and it’s ready to kick-ass at a world wide level.

    The band originally self-released ‘The Singularity” late in 2009 and has gotten rave reviews from almost everywhere we can see, and this comes as no surprise since this release is top-notch and puts many others to shame. While we personally would categorize Divinity as a Modern Metal band, there are so many genres fuse together that it would be completely unfair to rule them out based on their ‘primary’ style.

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