Hailing from Sweden, we have Avsky, a two man band that is here to rescue use form formulaic and lame Black Metal. You wont find any keyboards or fancy element in this release, only straight in your face raw Black Metal.

“Scorn” presents us with 6 tracks for over 45 minutes of hellish Black Metal. The band does a great job creating raw sounding music that would most likely be part of the ambiance music down in hell.

After listening to this release for a few times I started to wonder if I had accidentally downloaded the wrong promo album. I never expected for this band to have such a traditional Heavy Metal sound (the cover gave it away, but you still won’t expect it). Hailing from Finland, this band got a third place on a nation wide TV competition for demo bands.

Featuring a healthy dose of traditional Heavy Metal in their influences, the band is great at playing this genre. You will never expect that they formed only in 2006 and that this self-title album is their first full-length. The enigmatic Vince "Werewolf" Venom is the band’s vocalist as well as the vocalist for countless other bands that play very different styles, like Black Metal with Satanic Warmaster

As with the current re-make and ‘bring back the old stuff’ trend that plagues Hollywood these days, we have a similar trend when it comes to music. We have Trash Metal coming back, old-school Death Metal returning, and etc, etc, etc. Disfigured Dead play, like you can guess from the album cover, ‘old-school’ Death Metal like in the early days of Cannibal Corpse, Incantation, etc.

The band has no single piece of originality to it, BUT they mimic the ‘old-school’ sound to perfection. This makes Disfigured Dead attractive to some of us that sometimes are looking to hear something from back in the day, but are tired of spinning the same CD’s we have in the last 10-15 years.

Hailing from Chile, these old-school inspired metal heads propose a very traditional sounding mix of Black/Death and Trash Metal. Heavily influenced by Hellhammer, Possesed and old Mayhem, this band will blow you away with their latest EP “Demon Metal”.

Featuring only 17 minutes of music this release flies by with all its brutality and will leave you wanting for more. With their old-school logo, album cover, and sound this band will take you on a backwards journey to the lat 80’s.

With “Christcrushing Hammerchainsaw” Hell’s Hedbangers has re-released one of the best underground albums of Black/Trash Metal ever made. Bestial Mockery was a Swedish band that played Black/Trash Metal in the vein of Venom, Sodom, Bewitched and Bathory.

The band never reached wide acclaim or recognition, but all their releases hold a special place in all the fans of old-school Black/Trash Metal. Featuring 26 minutes of music in 10 tracks, you know you are into a wide ride from start to finish. The album starts with pure aggression and never stops.

Armored Saint is one of those bands that haven been on and off like as many times as a hooker drops her underwear in a month. However, every time the band comes back they either release a kick ass album or tour. “La Raza” is the band’s latest offering that continues the band’s tradition of releasing very solid albums that make people remember them once more.

Featuring John Bush from Anthrax fame and Joey Vera from Fates Warning fame, you know you have a pretty solid band only by hearing these two names. The band plays straight up ‘classic’ or traditional Metal, and they do so which such grace that only a handful of bands can pull this off.

Almost 20 years after the original release of “Parallels” we get a great re-issuse that features a bunch of goodies that will please ALL the fans of this legendary band. And to top it all there will be a few select reunion shows to support this re-release, so be ready to travel in order to catch a glimpse of the band live.

This re-release features the full original album completely re-mastered and sounding more impressive than even. The extra CD features 8 live tracks (that have great audio quality) and 6 demo versions of tracks from “Parallels”. We particularly love the demo tracks, which allow you to get a more in-depth insight of how the band intended the tracks to sound originally, before going to the studio. They also allow you to discover little differences here and there.

“To The Metal!” marks the band’s 10th full length release in over 21 years of existence of Gamma Ray. So far the band’s journey has been very solid, filled with epic releases like “Land Of The Free” and “Somewhere Out in Space”. This new album, while pretty solid, is not near the quality of those releases.

With ten songs and around 50 minutes of music, these Germans show that they still have what it takes to create a good release. The album feels a bit disconnected at some times and half the songs are short from memorable, but still very good compared to other bands in the genre.

After a very enticing intro, Aenaon does not waste any time in showing what they are made off. The second track opens furiously and shows the true beast hiding within the Aenaon moniker. You can clearly listen to the Zyklon, Emperor and Behemoth influences in this band.

However, they are not just another clone of the previously mentioned bands. They just take all the best elements of them and fuse them with such grace that the 24 minutes that this EP presents will leave you with an extreme thirst for more.

The shit-storm of bands like Agalloch, Negura Bunget and Wolves in the Throne Room has finally reached monsoon status, and now it’s harder than ever to pick out the good bands from all these clones popping out of every dark corner in the world. Luckily for us, Sokrovenno is a very good band that this storm has produced.

Hailing from Italy, this “Philosophical Pagan Black Metal” band is actually one of the best we have reviewed this month. Alongside the new albums from Negura Bunget and Alcest, “De Rerum Natura” is one of our favorites this year when it comes to the “Atmospheric Dark/Black Metal” genre combination.