When I compare the canonized albums of metal gone by with those of the last ten years or so, I sometimes wonder if we learnt all the wrong lessons. We get bogged down in vague and subjective details, the feel of the music rather than the logic. As music evolves, specific aspects of a sound... Continue Reading →

Pressor: Weird Things (2018) After power metal and grindcore, stoner doom is one of the most limiting genres in metal. It's one of our worst kept secrets. But not all limitations are created equal. And where some see limitations, others see a challenge, an opportunity to discover uncharted creative spaces. There are a number of... Continue Reading →

The 2000s were a tedious era to be a teenager. Our youth was set to a backdrop of Star Wars prequels, that frog text alert, and Coldplay existing. It was a largely dormant zeitgeist, punctuated by terror atrocities, illegal wars, and economic collapse. For all the horrors the 2010s have witnessed, it has at least... Continue Reading →

It’s an agreed fact that genre saturation eventually leads to genre decline. It’s also an agreed fact that this happened to death metal by around 1993/4. But was this as simple as genre saturation, or simply saturation of subpar music? The risk – for the interested fan – is in simply sticking to the same... Continue Reading →

The other day I find myself trapped in a Youtube hole when this video cropped up: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ybohhW7pf74   It’s a fairly standard clickbait screen rant. I’ve watched a few from this chap in the past. His ‘What Killed the Genre’ series offers some distracting summations of various genres of metal and rock. As with any... Continue Reading →

Megalith Levitation: Acid Doom Rites In many ways the true heir to Electric Wizard’s ‘Come my Fanatics’, this wholesome slab of murky doom metal is a big old beast to tackle. And just like CMF, Megalith Levitation’s first LP ‘Acid Doom Rites’ offers a few lessons in undertaking the delicate balancing act that is doom... Continue Reading →

OND: Carve Prog-thrash rising stars OND are back with the timely new single ‘Carve’, which tells the tale of a pumpkin being carved…from the point of the view of the pumpkin. For a metal song that sincerely explores this subject matter, this about as good as it could possibly be. ‘Carve’ sees OND once again... Continue Reading →

Industrial’s influence on extreme metal is probably greater than I tend to give it credit for. For all its shortcomings as a genre, some industrial has a unique atmosphere and energy to it that – when properly harnessed – is all its own. Its history has been almost as long and rich as metal’s, although... Continue Reading →

Can modern music that entirely references decades-old influences ever be evaluated on its own terms? Or are we condemned to simply say…if you like style x then you will like band y? But surely, no matter how well executed the imitation is, it’s still an imitation. The criteria we use to evaluate modern ‘retro revival’... Continue Reading →

Another round up of the noise of 2019. Takafumi Matsubara: Strange, Beautiful, and Fast The history of grindcore is an interesting one. At its inception it became a catalyst genre of sorts. Pure grindcore was made up of the bare bones of music; half songs and incomplete scraps. But the unique levels of energy and... Continue Reading →