Sheesh, are we already seven albums deep into Wisdom In Chains’ discography? So long as I’ve enjoyed hardcore punk, the Pennsylvania band has been a steady and reliable force in the genre for putting out a constant stream of tried and true hardcore, epitomizing it for the modern landscape. Nothing In Nature Respects Weakness keeps the band going into 2018, following up 2015’s The God Rhythm, and while bands typically fall into a groove of comfort by this point, Wisdom In Chains are still playing in the full spectrum of their respective genre instead of pigeon-holing themselves into a corner. Refreshing? Enjoyable? You bet.  

There’s seldom an album I listen to where I immediately love it. Granted, I like a lot of music. “Like” being the emphasis;  I like At the Gates. I love Insomnium, I like Darkthrone. I love Emperor. Even then, I’m generally only listening to the album that I love in my spare time the artist rather than trying to convince myself to love a different album by them. I’m picky about what I love. With that logic in mind, Yob’s Our Raw Heart is a stupendous, if not transcendent album that I loved from the get-go. Three minutes into the ten minute minute opening track and it was immediatey obvious that this album was on another level, entirely separate from the rest of the pack. There’s a lot of hype... 

I’ve become somewhat lost with progressive and technical death metal in recent years. Not that the genre has grown stale, but rather that my interests have been directed elsewhere while the two grew and prospered. Around 2015 is when I fell off the wagon, but through the early years of the decade I was all about the techically-inclined bands of that time. Burial in the Sky makes me nostalgic for that point in my life, but granted it’s probably not worth visiting those albums again because I’m quite certain Burial in the Sky are far more impressive to me today than what caught my attention back then.  

It was in the first few moments of “Beyond Death” that I thought “Hey, this vocalist sounds like the guy from Cloak.” Surprisingly, I was right. Before Cloak debuted their album last year, guitarist/vocalist Scott Taysom was a part of Haunting, a lawless and short-lived death metal group in Atlanta, Georgia. Only releasing a single demo, Sealed Shut, the band made their sound very clear in four tracks, clocking in just over 11 minutes. Though defunct, Haunting are getting some post-mortem love from Boris Records.  

The wold was lit on fire when At the Gates returned in 2010, and it continued to do so in 2014 when the band released At War With Reality to critical acclaim. Four years later, the band have undergone some line-up changes and taken some time off to prepare,b ut it’s obvious the classic melo-death group isn’t even close to being done.  

There is a really good chance your first “black metal” band was Dimmu Borgir, and it was probably “Progenies of the Great Apocalypse” that shocked and surprised you because it wasn’t your average metal band. I’m not saying this is verbatim your situation, but there’s a good chance you fit somewhere in this situation. But, essentially, this is where I found myself in 8th or 9th grade, and a lot of people were in the same situation as I when that Nordic metal scene became larger than just the UK and America. Eight years after their last album, however, and many years of silence, Dimmu Borgir have returned, and things certainly are different than they were before.  

There was a point on my second listen off Down Below that I realized Tribulation had done the impossible. The quartet of Swedish musicians surfaced to the greater metal community in 2015 with the critically acclaimed The Children of the Night, transitioning from a death metal act to something else entirely. The Children of the Night, as the cover and the appearance of the band members would suggest, was vampiric and wholly original in comparison to the rest of the scene, which is what would make following the album up a daunting task few bands would be capable of.  

Rikki Rockett – you know him for his incredible talents behind the drums with Poison and Devil City Angels. But there is so much more to this guy than kick drums and crashing cymbal.  

Arizona’s Gatecreeper are continuing to make a name for themselves this year, with being on an opening slot for Cannibal Corpse being an already huge honor. To add to their ongoing hype, Gatecreeper have just dropped a new two-song EP, titled Sweltering Madness, in the middle of their trek across North America.  

Whether we like it or not, being “heavy” isn’t something exclusive to heavy metal music. Even in the genre, purists are still arguing what’s considered “true metal” and if it’s “extreme” enough to be metal, thus producing so much infighting on comment threads between black metal basement dorks and dads who haven’t listened to anything new in the scene if it doesn’t have a musician they know in it or doesn’t sound like an already existing band. There are, however, artists out there not remaining stationary in a genre, as much as a purist would like to hope they would, and as such in recent years there have been bands and musicians popping up that are incorporating metal elements into their music,... 

Yesterday at New York Comic-Con, the joint-announcement from Marvel and Netflix confirmed that the release for the upcoming Marvel series based on The Punisher had been pulled from the Con in the wake of the Las Vegas shooting this week. The removal of the panel, however, wasn’t the end of it.  

I never clicked with the Warped Tour-metalcore thing during my formative high school years, but August Burns Red have always been a cut above the rest. Still going strong after all these years, the technical metalcore group just doesn’t know when to stop. And if this tour is any indication, August Burns Red aren’t slowing down eight albums into their career.