Y’all wanna know the bands Relapse put in their RIYL? Nevermore, Death, Behemoth, Megadeth, Testament, Arch Enemy, Obscura, and Exhorder. So I should expect classy musicianship with ties to both thrash and death metal that invokes Southern & Swedish flair blended into extraterrestrial ghoulash?

This is gonna feel good. After countless times resurrecting this classic line from Metallica’s Some Kind Of Monster with my good friend/co-worker/brother-in-metal, who has recently moved across the country, I finally get to appropriately apply it in an album review: “It sounds fucking stock!”.

Insomnium – Across The Dark released September 15, 2009 on Candlelight If you want your melancholy and infinite sadness pumpkin-free, seek out the fourth album from this Finnish quartet. The unchanged core lineup (since 2001) still crafts nuanced melodic death metal, but also reach out to guest musicians to achieve their powerful sound. Aleksi Munter (Swallow The Sun) brings his remarkable keyboard skills, subtly essential to overall affect. He even gently unfurls the opening track, which bleeds beautifully into the next, and are better experienced together. Jules Näveri (Profane Omen, Enemy of the Sun) reveals a striking new dimension [...read more]

Rating: 4/5

Heavier, more incisive, and less comical than its predecessor, it feels almost nerdily narrowcast. However, those in the know have wisened up, and would even throw their beloved Dethphones into the throat of a Lake Troll if it impeded their path to this incredible album.

Horse The Band – Desperate Living released October 7, 2009 on Vagrant Records HTB can only exist right now. The music world at large needed to be far enough removed from the 1980s to appreciate the retro irony of their sound, and hardcore needed to exist for long enough that a desire for the two worlds integrating would be present. The ‘retro’ comes by way of keyboard sounds, mostly harvested from 8-bit game systems like the NES. They start strong with appreciable dynamism; time shifts, musical interplay, and choice of samples all make sense. But it loses focus midway, [...read more]

A Storm Of Light – Forgive Us Our Trespasses released September 29, 2009 on Neurot Recordings ‘Ambitious’ barely captures the atmosphere surrounding this album. Josh Graham––the man behind the visuals during Neurosis’ live performances (and the artwork here)––offers more Twelve Monkeys-esque apocalyptic visions on ASoL’s second release. Andy Rice’s drums drive much of journey (esp. on 2 & 10), as the cascadence between the vocals and stringed instruments concentrate on layers. When we first hear Graham, he sounds effectively like a muted Chris Cornell, but bassist Dominic Seita (ex-Tombs) does well fleshing out the spectrum (even more strongly on [...read more]

Voivod – Infini released June 23, 2009 on Relapse It looks like the journey may be over. Though the progressive-thrash-punk powerhouse will tour in support of this album, by all accounts this is the last material Piggy committed to laptop before succumbing to colon cancer four years ago. Heavily in line with the first posthumous release–Katorz–it rocks first and foremost. It starts with a driving riff and odd sci-fi subject matter (“God Phones”) before returning  to terra firma with a defiant biographical tune (“From The Cave”). We follow with a pair of environmentally-minded songs: the first delivered with a [...read more]

Havok – Burn released June 30, 2009 on Candlelight Hailing from the mile-high city, this young band has set up base camp about one thousand miles from the Bay Area and the thrash it spawned. They’re set to impress on their debut album: nice chops, daunting leads, strong bass presence, and varied vocals somewhere between early Chuck Billy and Tom Araya. Following the mellow intro, “The Root of Evil” has got all of those aforementioned positive qualities (with “Ivory Tower” meeting this bar later). By and large, the music progresses both logically and viscerally, and never tries to overextend [...read more]

Obituary – Darkest Day released June 30, 2009 on Candlelight They say there are five types of torture: hot, cold, sharp, blunt, and loud. I could annotate the adjectives ad nauseum, but suffice it to say, the latter two best describe the death metal legends’ assault. John Tardy sounds (as always) like he is receiving said torture, executing his vocals with terrifying conviction. Their delivery is largely midpaced and blanketed in Floridian haze. They speed things up here (1) and there (9), while on the title track (6) they slow to a lurch. 12 & 13 are originally from [...read more]

Thrice-Beggars released September 15, 2009 on Vagrant Records Thrice is a modern hardcore band from Irvine, California that was formed in 1998. This is their seventh full-length release. “All The World Is Mad” starts out with fast-paced drums and sounds similar to modern AFI and Coheed And Cambria.”The Weight” follows a similar pace and shares some similarities with The Blackout except that it’s slowed down. “Doublespeak” has a good drum line to it and seems the more upbeat of all three songs mentioned. There are some Christian themes in the songs but the band does not resort to proselytizing [...read more]