In today’s progressive landscape, it’s rare for spectacle and wonder to take a backseat to the artistic merits of music. Prog was founded in the late 60’s and early 70’s using both of these aspects, but acts like King Crimson exploited the more experimental and art-inspired side of the genre almost immediately out of the womb. Today, the modern math rock/proggy noodling community of internet-famous bands who, in a constantly changing environment, work even harder to get noticed by the general public, is a constant fight to differentiate one’s self. Covet is an interesting one, in that they are artistic by nature, but also rather than bore their listener with wordless displays of their superior musicianship,...
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.
