Like a good wine, East Of The Wall has only been getting better with time. With “Ressentiment” the band not only improves over their perplexingly brilliant “Farmer's Almanac”, but they take things to a whole new dimension. The main addition to “Ressentiment” is the use of vocals to adorn the bands highly textured musical compositions. The vocals are partly because of the merger of Biclops and them.

East Of The Wall’s brand of music is of particular interest to music connoisseurs that can greatly appreciate all the technical powers behind this band. Every single song is masterfully crafted to perplex the listener and make him have to listen to the songs a few times before fully digesting them. Then you move on to the next song and the process begins again.

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”.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.