Rexorcist's Reviews

Although I don't think I'll be joining the Revolution, I have to admit that I love punk.  Right now the only punk genre I represent in a clan is crossover thrash, which is a problematic genre that rarely ever amazes me.  Metalcore, IMO, is the superior genre thanks to the presence of more excellent bands.  Unfortunately, the genre also gets very tiring thanks to the countless emulators of bands like Born of Osiris, so when someone in metalcore mixes it up, like Zao does with their own strong presence, I tend to feel a sigh of relief so powerful that it's almost like a weight is finally off my shoulders, as if finding creative metalcore has become a literal chore.

This is their most popular work: Where Blood and Fire Bring Rest.  At first it starts off pretty typically, even though it's clear that mood and delivery is taken more seriously than punk energy, which is a sigh of relief.  The same seems to be true even as it switches from calm acoustic james to slow punk screams in the beginning of the second song.  Unsurprisingly, there are faint traces of proggieness and djent in the behavior of the riffage, but not enough to even warrant a sub-tag.  This also feels like a smart decision to me because it's very tamed and used specifically for mood.  In otherwords, this is the kind of metalcore album that keeps you on your toes, guessing what's going to happen next even as it rarely breaks its genre.  There are quite a few instances of slow-paced growling and droning, which seems to me is an atmospheric choice that the band likes to take advantage of.  In other words, speed is of little importance, even for a punk album.  Very interesting choice, especially considering that there seems to be some sort of Neurosis influence.

But there's also some time taken for melody whether or not speed is a part of the picture.  Listen to the openings of March and Ember, and then finish the songs to see where things go, even if certain sections may easily be dragged on too long.  Another interesting choice the band made was writing some songs about hypocrisy in the churches, despite being a Christian band.  They're tackling a wide range of themes involving personal struggles, even avoiding the preachy side of Christian lyricism.  In other words, the band tried to make a Christian album that raw metalheads could relate to.  Again, a smart move.  But concerning the lyricism and quirky song structures, practically throwing pop structures in the trash, I'm wondering if each section symbolizes something, which would make this album more conceptual than advertised.

I can see why this is considered a metalcore classic.  It's a SMART album.  So overall, I kinda like this.  Zao have gone far beyond what the Christian rock tag might've indicated for the music browser in terms of both style and quality.  I can say, however, that I'd prefer a LITTLE more punk energy in certain sections, and that some sections whether fast or slow be shortened to maintain a further punk presence and less of a Neurosis one.  Zao did something very artistic here, and they had their bumps but they were still very smart about this.

Kamelot's rocky history has practically come to a close with Karma, the album where they master all of the essentials of power metal and create something iconic.  It becomes clear that Kamelot recognized their mistakes from the previous album yet again, despite the fact that there was only one mistake on the brilliant Fourth Legacy: it wasn't very heavy.  Well after the intro, you're just plain blasted with heaviness.  Kamelot improved their technique in that respct, but the music itself is just as brilliant as The Fourth Legacy, if not more so.  And Kahn feels much more comfortable in the music he's singing for, so the lack of metal in his voice is adjust slightly to fit the melody so that he no longer has to struggle to go hand-in-hand with his softer voice in comparison to the vocal giants of metal.  And the rest of Kamelot didn't even have to adjust their playing for that purpose at all, just the heaviness.  Songs like "Wings of Despair" might feel standard, but the instrumentation makes up for that.  The ONE flaw of the album is that the music still feels standard for power metal, and it's noticeable.  But it's not enough to detract from the quality of the album and the noteworthy improvements the band went through.  Kamelot's Karma is a perfect album for power metal bands to draw inspiration from.

There are a lot of bands I need to go through in order to get my top 100 right, many of which pertain to the slower genres I don't normally explore.  Having said that, I have many fond memories of a long-term sludge binge I had throughout 2019 and 2020, and I've explored some brilliant artists in that time.  One I haven't explored, however, is Hell, not because I'm Christian and I think I'll get possessed, but because it was also a doom and drone album, two genres I haven't ever obsessed over.  So, the Hell debut it is.

But the album was quite good.  Right from the opener, "Lethe," the music was crushing and monstrous, refusing to succumb to the lightning speed of typical metal and allowing the growls of the guitar to do all of the talking.  Sometimes the sludgy music rang truer to Candlemass and sometimes it had the experimental vibes of Nadja  I found myself almost hypnotized by its epic finale, "Maeror," which starts out with the almost industrial sounding "dark ambient" influences and continues on into an ever progressing wail of agony coming from the wild, and yet there's a musicality behind it much like an old record player delivering a requiem mass but drowned out by reverb.  In this instance the album Soundtracks for the Blind by Swans came to mind.

Despite its heaviness and its authentic faithfulness to the many genres it combines, I feel that the album itself doesn't really do anything that unique for the veins of metal it tackles.  Just that it's a good enough performance to recommend.  But for anyone looking to get into the slower genres, the Hell but makes for a very good start.  Chances are it may not amaze you, but it will likely entertain you if you like these genres.  I know this album makes me happy that I decided to explore more drone metal.  I'd say it's better thanthe last drone album I reviewed: Thaumogenesis by Nadja, and that was a pretty good album.

If you had read my previous review of the 105-minute long Esoteric album, The Maniacal Vale, you're probably familiar with my one criticism of the album: the length made it repetitive.  So you'd probably think the five-star rating for Metamorphogenesis comes from the fact that it's only 40 minutes long, and is there shortest album, especially since repetition is a staple of funeral doom.  Um, no.  That honestly has so little to do with it that it's not even worth mentioning.  It's true that Esoteric have a tendency to draw out their albums to an extent that harms the release itself.  This has been true since their second album, The Pernicious Enigma, which was a one-trick pony in every single way.  But the real glory of Metamorphosis comes from the fact that it's so jam-packed with new ideas, twists and musical influences that some have even described the album as "batshit insane."  Considering what we typically get for doom metal, we need an album or two that gets batshit insane.  I'd have loved for the album to be longer, but we still got 40 minutes of brilliance.  It's no longer a repetitive shift from funeral doom to death doom to psychedelic doom.  What we have hear is an eternally progressing 40-minute work that throws in random moments of drone metal, post-metal, straight-up death metal and more.  And each piece of the puzzle delivers a loud blast of rage that's trying hard to fight its own melancholy but always succumbs like a normal human does.  The best combination of musicianship and production that doom can have is the very reason this album exists: a production-oriented 40-minute epic of atmosphere and emotion, giving us something that Esoteric have never replicated.

I'm nowhere near into solo Ozzy as I am into Black Sabbath, and I know I'm not alone in this.  Because of this, I've spent very little time in Ozzy's solo career.  Up until today, I had only heard his first two albums.  I really think it's about time I stopped putting both solo Ozzy and solo Dio off and gotten to a couple of their albums.  But I'll keep this brief.

I was glad that each song felt a little different at times.  Some were pretty speedy like the title track and (ironically) "Slow Down," some were more about the beat and biker attitude like "Waiting for Darkness," and songs like "So Tired" added a more symphonic and melodic side, steering itself away from typical power ballads by keeping the gothic vibes of the album intact.  There's also some time for raw creepiness a la Alice Cooper, like on the song "Spiders."  But I think what really made the album so enjoyable is that all the melodies are very strong.  It seems to be a major focus on the album where everything else, including the variety factor, seems to work around the melodies.  And this leads up to the album's only flaw: stylistically and structurally, it's a pretty typical 80's heavy metal album.  None of the songs are bad, but thanks to this, it comes nowhere near Paranoid as a whole.  In fact, its typical structure is also why I'm keeping this brief, because there really isn't a lot stylistically that's unique enough to talk about.

Well, I'm largely impressed with this album.  From what I can remember, this seems more focused on doing different things with typical heavy metal songs than Blizzard of Ozz.  This is a great continuation of a solo career built on two great albums, and I highly recommend it for any metal fan that wants darkness in their music, even for extreme metalheads.

The gothic doom sound pioneered by My Dying Bride and Type O Negative would be replicated by a large portion of the gothic scene, including Draconian, who mastered the basics of the genre on the debut without much creativity attached.  Doom and gothic fans seem to love their second album, Arcane Rain Fell, so I guess this was the most exciting part of exploring their catalogue.  When I turned this on, I was hoping for a serious improvement over the original and a stone-cold classic.

It's obvious that the band is becoming more poetic with their lyricism.  There seems to be a stronger focus on the imagery of the scene they're a part of.  And thanks to a stronger idea of using faint foregrounds as atmospheric tools, such as the choral backing vocals on The Apostacy Castle, the album has a stronger effect on the listener than before.  Because of this, the emotional core of the band is a little stronger here.  The elements that made the debut album good to begin with have a stronger harmony and balance.  This also means that certain aspects are going to shine at certain times even more than they did on the last album.  It was easy for certain focal points to shine when there was less harmony, but with a stronger sense of harmony from everything and stronger skill from the band, the focal points (when given extra strength), such as the bombastic gothica of Heaven Laid in Tears or the intro's slow sludge, feel more impressive.  In other words, the band is able to recreate the last album and all of its strengths with one difference: they've become a BAND.

Having said this, there are two problems I have with this album.  First, in following completely in the vein of the last album, it also recreates the sameyness problem.  While all of the songs are enjoyable, we know what we're getting.  And the second problem is that the lady singer is severely underused.  The male is given total priority, and it's kind of a shame.  I mean, as absolutely beautiful as our ending 15-minute track is, it's same old Draconian.  So the end all be all is that this is a slight improvement over a pretty good debut, and Draconian know who they want to be which from a moral perspective is perfectly fine, but from a musician's perspective it hurts their creative prowess.

This is a pretty special day for me.  I have officially marked my 13,000th music album heard.  And for that position I chose Kanye's live album, Late Orchestration.  I'm really happy with the outcome of recent musical ventures, but there's more to it.  Apparently, as this is smackdab in the middle of my goth metal phase, today just so happens to be the 20th anniversary of the debut album by one of the goth metal bands I was considering exploring: Draconian.  Since I was struggling with which band to check out next, the revelation made my decision.  Thanks a bunch to Shadowdoom9 for discovering this!

So Draconian are pretty much what you want from a gothic doom metal act: this slow droning and gothic sound have a strong potency, and this sound of theirs is so well done and good that it pretty much has a lot of staying power.  Even though this means the album's pretty samey, the sound really doesn't get tiring thanks to perfect production and a good balance between timing and melody, whether slow or fast.  These are all aspects that musicians can easily screw up, and so far Draconian don't seem to be doing that.  The fact that they were able to accomplish that much at least on the debut seems to be what makes this album a well-received classic among fans of the niche appeal.  However, as far as creating an album goes, I feel that I should only give the album extra points for its monotony while still acknowledging that they could've done more if they got the general idea right on their first try.  They could've even only taken one extra step forward in the creative department and improved this album quickly.  Despite this, I loved the inclusion of that very short folk song near the end.  It really brought some Celtic vibes to the album, which were out of place stylistically but perfectly suitable emotionally.

So while it's perfectly clear that Draconian had a strong grip on their style and identity with this album, a couple other things are very obvious: they were a less creative My Dying Bride with all of Tristania's vocal tricks, and featuring less potency on both sides of this delivery.  I mean, I like JUST finished the Tristania catalog a couple days ago, and I love The Dreadful Hours so the comparisons are pretty easy.  So unfortunately, I'd have to say that despite the clear strengths and staying power, this is a generic debut by technicality.  Still, it fit the vibe I was looking for, gives a fan what a fan wants, is good for fans of My Dying Bride, Type O Negative and Tristania and personally really helped me with the vibe of a novel I'm working on.  So I'll recommend this easy but well-produced album if not just to check out another gothic doom act.

I'm quite the Alice in Chains fan.  Way back when I was first getting into regular album exploration, one of my first ever binges was grunge, and that binge would be on and off for years before I felt I had exhausted all the albums worth listening to.  Of course, I kind of avoided solo Cantrell because I didn't want to explore a solo act just for a relation to Alice in Chains.  But the way I see it, a grunge junkie who actually started a wiki on it has an obligation, even if he's not working on the wiki anymore.

I heard the decent but unimpressive debut, Boggy Depot, before heading to this, and it's easy to see that Cantrell belongs in the metal world.  Right from the start, Cantrell makes a point of telling you that this is an Alice in Chains solo act by recounting that same dark and sludgy sound on the first track.  But the album doesn't stay that way; it goes from harder to softer on a beautiful balance, sometimes progressively.  Songs like Angel Eyes which bridge that poppy lightweight alternative with the noisiness of grunge riffs mingle well with softer and more acoustic bits with a slight emphasis on psychedelic country.  It made me realize that I wished there was a slight more alt-rock and psychedelic in Dirt, then it might've risen on my overall log.

However, there are a couple problems with this album.  First of all, the writing certainly isn't as unique or inspired as Alice in Chains.  It seems more predictable this time, despite all its efforts to both remind one of Alice in Chains and separate itself from the band.  The second problem is that the emotional aspect is not recounted much.  It's occasionally there, but it's lightweight.  This especially hurts if you know that Cantrell was with Alice in Chains, which means this overlong album is poppier.  So the variety eventually gets samey.

Well, I can't say this is my favorite grunge metal album.  I was hoping to love it for its connection to Alice in Chains, but I knew it was a bit much to ask for.  It's a pretty fun album with some cool songs, but totally passable.

So while I can't say I'm a Tristania "fan," I certainly appreciate how they've more or less become the kind of band I was looking for by the third album: a band that was willing to try a bunch of new things and differentiate songs.  The way I see it, a band good at multiple genres is a band with multiple talents, and I prefer a band with multiple talents over a band with one talent.  And of course, I'd like for it to show on a full album time and time again.  Although struggling with this on their first two albums, Tristania mastered this personality aspect on their third, and continued it on Ashes.

Ashes sees a dramatic shift from the symphonic sound in the long run.  The entire purpose of this album is to morph songs from genre to genre by using mood to keep the flow intact.  This album succeeds at this in every aspect, and may even be better at this than the previous album where they finally nailed the craft.  We have instances of symphonic blending with atmpsheric ethereal wave to bring out Tristania's strong gothic presence while still maintaining a metal edge as we see influences ranging from death metal to metalcore.  And it all fits the sadness and anger of this work.

However, while a part of me would like to give an album like that five stars, there are two major problems getting in the way of that.  First of all, one of the strongest aspects of World of Glass, the previous album, was that the vocal melodies and the instrument's melodies paired together beautifully despite being so different.  There is much less melody here in the vocals, leaving the instruments to deliver many beautiful melodies.  On top of that, the production is a little fuzzier, slightly drowning the vocals.

I think this is a well made album for its strengths, and it continues exactly what I wanted to see from Tristania in a diversity aspect.  But its flaws are pretty obvious.  Otherwise, this is an album where Tristania rely on their personality, and it makes for a good release in need of remastering.

After having finished the Type O Negative catalog, my next goth metal band to go through would be one I checked out a couple albums by years ago but wasn't fully into save one album: Tristania, and the album was Beyond the Veil.  After a revisit to the band, my opinions on their debut were exactly the same: same song ten times, beautiful and melodic but kind of generic.  I liked the next one slightly more, though; varied and experimental, even though every song is covering each influence in small doses, technically meaning that the variety aspect is hypocritically handled IMO by not bothering to differentiate the songs.  After checking out the genre tagging of their third album, World of Glass, I was interested in what these other sounds were supposed to be.

We get all of the familiar elements of the previous album with more of an idea of differentiating focal points on a track-by-track basis as opposed to combining them all in every track.  This is the best possible decision due to the extra influences that came aboard, notably the ethereal wave and the industrial metal.  There was so much to their identity, that they had to think about writing DIFFERENT TYPES of songs.  It might've been the only way to stay relevant to the goth scene.  And I'd say it worked.  Songs like The Shining Path and Crushed Dreams are all about that beautiful symphonic vibe, but there are even weirder, unique moments like the industrial Modern End which features heavy usage of repetitive riffs and a carefully placed symphonic layer to make it unique to the industrial vibe.  And considering how slow and dark Wormwood was, I'd say it was basically an epic doom metal track hiding under the symphonic tag and Tristania's signature aura.  There will be plenty of room for doom and death to make careful appearances depending on the pre-established vibes of each song, and each one has its own strong presence.  But there are a couple morphers which carry a few influences, progressively organized to keep the flow going and the Tristania feel strong.

There's been those who love this album, and those disappointed in the new directions.  Some ever say that this is a less "melodic" album.  But I think the melodies for both the instrumentation and the vocalists, though noticeably very different from each other, go hand in hand to keep the vibes strong.  I can honestly say that I prefer this Tristania album over the first two, and I hope to see more new ideas in the other albums.

Having completed the albums of Type O negative on my gothic binge, I have now turned to Tristania, a band I was already familiar with but haven't heard in a long time.  I love the idea of a symphonic gothic side, being a Phantom of the Opera fan myself, and I was really eager to see if I loved this album as much as I did years ago when I first heard it.  Of course, since I have a lot of music to listen to and have always had a lot to listen to, I hadn't heard this again in years.  This gothic binge of mine is just what I needed to visit it again.

Tristania's presence is built on two things: switching up the sounds, and constant flow.  Their first album might've been just a good gothic album that stood out with a heavily symphonic touch, but this was the album where those strengths were fleshed out in a more artistic presence.  Every song takes a plethora of different approaches all used to empower its never-wavering atmosphere of theatrical romance and darkness.  We get plenty of the violins and pianos that come with the symphonic side, but we're also given time to explore the darker side of metal.  The death metal vocals from the previous album were no longer just a unique gimmick to symphonic metal, it was given matching music to switch out with the gothic, the symphonic and the progressive.  We're constantly on a merry-go-round of focal points that all bring out Tristania's personality.  Unfortunately, this also means every song is effectively tackling all the same elements, so the variety aspect isn't perfectly handled, not like it would later be on World of Glass.

Tristania were no longer a gimmick band with this album.  They helped the 90's prove that symphonic music is just as relevant to bringing out metal's strengths to the world as any of the speedy thrash or slow and psychedelic doom.  This, with Nightfall in Middle Earth and Theli, are essential to this, and this was the album that was the proggiest and most unpredictable.

Type O Negative set themselves up as the leading example of what gothic metal should sound like early on in their career.  Many gothic bands have tried to emulate them or use them as a basis for what to sound like, but this doesn't mean Type O Negative always had success.  At one point, the went more mainstream, and some Type O Negative fans have been unfair to this album, ignoring it.  I'm not that type, however, as I embrace branching out.  Life Is Killing Me is considered the album that stopped the golden era of this band, but "golden" and "good" are still two different things.

Right from the start, the album makes a point of noisy production, doomy moments and punk undertones, so we already know what we're getting. Life Is Killing Me lyrically tackles many of the negative thoughts of Steele's mind at the time, dealing with mental instability and a midlife crisis, but the strengthened focus on alternative and pop structures gives this album a much more cheerful disposition.  We get a switch between gothic metal, alternative metal and rock, and gothic doom taking up most of the album, with occasional deathrock bursts with I Like Goils and Angry Itch serving as excellent examples.  Type O Negative never got over punk.

Despite the switch between these three major focal points, we still get some minimal but effective moments of creativity, such as that weird, surreal and repetitive riff in the backdrop of Gimme That.  That's easily one of my favorite aspects of the album.  However, because of the poppier structures, there's less of a romantic and atmospheric approach.  And it's not like we get very many amazing metal solos.

Type O Negative made it perfectly clear with this album that they still had the ability to deliver some fantastic melodies with their production style, but in the effort to go mainstream they forgot to be as atmospheric in their style as in the production.  But that's the only strength of TON that's absent from this album.  Otherwise, this is a perfectly fine Type O Negative album that will give a fan what's asked for.

I've officially become a fan of Type O Negative upon my revisits of Bloody Kisses and October Rust, as well as my exposure to World Coming Down and The Least Worst of Type O Negative.  I'm in love with their reliance on presence and personality over sticking with a scene, because they didn't really have much of a "scene" to stick to when they came out.  They helped invent goth metal, so they were very unique.  They also became controversial for their gruesome lyrical content, which showed heavily on their debut, Slow Deep and Hard, which mingled goth metal, doom metal and even bits of crossover thrash.  Now it seemed a little awkward but good at first, so they took the personality aspect to the next level and recorded a fake live album to show off that they were a black comedy band in a sense.

Basically, Type O negative's debut was when they were introducing their style, but The Origin of the Feces is the album where they were introducing their personality, and it didn't really get in the way of the music because the parody aspects were still handled in a serious manner to help the album.  Peter Steele feels like a real rocker and a metalhead when speaking out to the fake audience.  There's less of a drifting doom effect in this 40-minute album than the hour-long debut, and the production technique was replaced with a noisier and punkish sound that perfectly fused the doom and gothic elements with the crossover thrash bits that felt awkward on the debut.  Because of this, every great song from the original album is made more consistent, less awkward and easier to get behind.  This really isn't an album for diehard doom fans because of the noise; no, it's an album for fans of Type O Negative's personality as well as their music.  And if you have the extended edition at your disposal, you at least have to listen to the GORGEOUS doom metal cover of Black Sabbath's Paranoid.  It's more haunting and surreal than the fast-paced heavy metal original.  I honestly prefer it.

I finally have an ACTUAL controversial opinion: this is one of Type O negative's best albums.  This is boldness with a beautiful noise-production style and excellent flow, making this an improved variant of their debut if you ask me.  The joke might be unfunny or even pointless to some, but this sophomore work isn't so drawn out, each song has its own identity, and the noisier sound and mixing makes everything about the past album feel more natural, as if they finally found a proper ground to work with, removing some smoothness of the doom metal for this sound.  Once the joke wears off, there's personality, because this album really does feel like a live album with a very comedic side, like the cricket sounds at the end.  If only the original version included that incredible Paranoid cover, then I might've given it a 100.

Type O Negative are masters of eerily glowing atmospheres, being the perfect example of what a goth metal band should sound like.  They've done a lot during their short time as far as musical innovation goes, and they've even gone almost as far as The Beatles have by going into genre after genre and applying it to their personality.  And one of their most personal albums is their most famous: October Rust.

What we see in October Rust is the decision to go mainstream, and succeed.  This has very little to do with the concept as selling out, although the general sound of the album is less heavy.  Many of these songs fall under rock instead of metal, or maybe a hybrid of the two.  The production technique used throughout the album maintains a heavily-polished pop sound, which brings out all of the romantic strengths.  And Type O Negative once again play through a plethora of different styles, including their doom metal sound from the early days.  But many of the other influences are more fit for rock, like the shoegaze aspects and the darkwave reverb.  Because of this production type, many of the songs, while diverse, occasionally absorb into each other.  Safer to say, they are more similar sounding to each other than the songs off of Bloody Kisses.  There's even a little of this in World Coming Down.

October Rust is a very beautiful album, but it's not my favorite of the group.  This is still an excellent example of goth metal focusing on the art of the sound itself rather than writing the same song over and over again (looking at you, post-Dreadful Hours MDB).  The ideas on this album are built for a wider audience, and I think they did a good job of spreading word of the gothic sound to the masses.

Goth metal is one of my least explored genres, which I think is extremely hypocritical of me considering that I adore gothic and dark touches in things.  You have Jim Steinman and Meat Loaf to thank for that one.  As such, I've only heard a couple of Type O Negative albums, namely their most famous two: Bloody Kisses and October Rust.  I'm literally working on a couple of vampire novel ideas, and my debut novel was partly about zombies.  Ever since I saw The Nightmare Before Christmas as a kid, I realized how much I like dark and gothic stuff.  The desire for it became stronger and stronger, and the best album I can think of that replicates my current love of darkness is Bloody Kisses.

Bloody Kisses is an album all about the balance of everything that makes music what it is.  For example, the wide variety of the album brings gothic metal and rock into the world of doom, alternative, psych, hardcore punk, shoegaze and industrial in random places, despite the fact that we still have a primarily gothic sound.  The album's shorter songs have a tendency to morph into other genres while never breaking form, whereas the slower songs are all about the atmospheric gothic doom sound that fans of darker and slower music tend to love.  Yes, the songs still morph occasionally and the atmosphere is a gorgeously produced blend of the two genres with Steele's voice poetically chanting Nick Cave style topics with flawless delivery, which brings me to the next form of balance: deep gothic whispers and growls as well as higher pitched singing.  Everything in between is there.  This variety also has a bit of a humorous side, as we get a serious parody of hippie pop rock and a couple hardcore punk intros and outros for certain gloomy gothic doom songs.  And they still remain catchy as well as heavy.

On top of this Beatles-style exploration of the metal and rock worlds, there is a balance of the slower droning that the niche fanbase loves as well as some serious accessibility.  I mean, even the slower songs have SOME catchiness about them, because Type O Negative is one of the best bands you can get when looking for a melodic act.  This never gets in the way of whatever moods the band is trying to go for, and unlike a similarly handled album, say the overly-ambitious self-titled Beatles album, there are NO weak tracks.  In fact, the segues and skits have so much atmospheric power in them that I can't possibly even enjoy the idea of listening to this album without them.  I'm really glad Type O Negative made that choice, considering their back-to-back jokes tracks from their next album, October Rust, did nothing to set up the mood for that album.  On Bloody Kisses, it's different; they're all about setting up sexual and gothic tones.

I enjoyed every atmosphere, every note played and every word sung.  The whole album shows the band mastering the advanced tricks of music in a perfectly balanced way, and its presence glows green with gothic power and lust.  I'm having trouble deciding whether this is my favorite goth album instead of Let Love In.  It's an extremely close call.  On the second listen, October Rust has made it to my top 50 albums of all time, and I can even say I enjoy this album more than Paranoid, an honor I've given to only four other albums at this point.

Evoken had to step it up to compare this time, and while I don't feel that they did that with the titular opener, I still greatly enjoyed what I heard.  The production was cleaner and less dense, so it was more accessible.  But it didn't lose any of the structural strengths and emotional core of any of the songs from Antithesis.  I could only hope that the other songs wouldn't sound exactly the same.  Thankfully, Mare Erythraeum didn't.  I've gone on about how Antithesis has some gothic touches, but this is more than just touches.  This is the kind of heavily gothic doom you'd expect from My Dying Bride, and it's just as good as you'd expect from MDB.  There are few changes in the main riff, but thankfully everything in the background is there to change things up and either get more melancholy, more artistic or even more melodic.  It all depends on the section.  This beautifully instrumental epic also goes into an amazing metal solo which is quite out of place for Evoken's catalogue, but also perfectly fitting for this album.  That tells me that they're innovating once again.

We re-enter the death doom with a heavy dose on Of Purest Absolution.  Despite that, it's surprisingly more melodic as well, and throughout the middle section, the doom is placed behind an aquatic guitar riff that carefully layers over the doom without drowning it out.  The third section relies on none of that and goes right for tribal drumming and placing the vocals in the foreground to really bring out that deathly vibe.  Astray in Eternal Light is dense in its production, but not so baritone.  It's a very noisy track built on the same guitar sound as the middle section of the previous song.  We also get clearer vocals to bring in more of a depressing tone as opposed to the deep-seeded hatred we've been subjected to before.  But there's also something very sensual about the vocals, although this guy can't beat Peter Steele at this game.  And I also feel that the monotone nature of the album isn't quite as strong as before, as much of it is simply going "up down up down" between two notes.  So while it's a bit unique to the album for shifting focuses of similar elements in the same way that every song in Antithesis did, I can't help but feel it's a bit weaker than the previous songs.

Descend the Lifeless Womb is louder, deeper and slower, once again pushing the soul past its limits.  And boy, does it feel epic.  The general idea of funeral doom is extremely strong on this track.  Unfortunately, because it's so standard, it feels like it's missing something in comparison to the first three songs.  This is remedied during the third act, where things get more atmospheric and clear, as opposed to rough and dirty, and it features an ambient guitar drone which feels very astral.  Suffer a Martyr's Trial begins very quietly and carefully steers into some droning sludge and doom.  Throughout the thirteen minutes, it changes its monotone riffs and the back-layers of the density constantly, bringing back the overall high quality of the first three tracks as well as the previous two albums.  And because of this, the longest song on the album goes by more speedily, even when much of it is snails pushing their way through heavy mounds of dirt.  And finally, we have a single riff played with an orchestra of variation in the back, Orogeny, which has this post-metal vibe about it.

I have to say, I really like how straight-forward and accessible this is, not because a weird-ass like me who enjoyed Grand Declaration of War needs accessibility, but because it represents an incredibly healthy and high-grade kind of album which can be a very good introduction for noobs to get into both death doom and funeral doom, maybe even doom in general.  I honestly don't know why these guys aren't more popular in the doom community.  Is it the surrealism of esoteric?  The traditional behavior of Skepticism?  Either way, these guys are way underappreciated.  Unfortunately, this also sometimes gets in the way of the emotional core, which didn't always feel so varied.

Well I can safely say that at this point, my favorite funeral doom band is definitely Evoken for their ability to deliver seriously heavy music.  Even though this wasn't quite as creative as the last two albums, it more or less got the job done and would make a great introduction into doom, one that's very heavy but never too dense.  So I'd say this is another success for the band.

What with doom metal being my new primary focus, I'm becoming more determined than ever to perfect a proper chart of it all because my overall knowledge and experience of its various subgenres is actually minimal.  I've only heard 17 death doom albums and 11 funeral doom, including only three Evoken albums.  Thankfully, Evoken can add to both to help, so I have a foundation for either genre.  I already reviewed two other Evoken albums over the past couple of days, and I was more impressed with the atmospheric focus of their second in comparison to their good but generic debut.  I had no idea of knowing what was going to happen.

After our creepy intro of noise and wails, In Solitary Ruin covers a freakishly heavy blackened death background molding with structural and atmospheric aspects of the previous album, Quietus.  The band wasn't afraid to teeter-totter between slow, middle and fast paces in order to keep the song's specific mood original and to keep the layout challenging.  This one song is an incredible combination of doom, death, post and even black, aurally turning hell itself into a cold and desolate winter world with a few instances of hypnotic gothic guitars.

Now that I've written a good paragraph about the 10-minute intro and the first epic, let's head to the next song: Accursed Premonition, which sets up a slightly more classical vibe with hypnotic, aquatic dripping of noise and some choral vocals.  It starts out much clearer than In Solitary Ruin, and the atmosphere is more gothic and funeral, and slightly less death to make room for a little more black.  This song doesn't take a lot of time to speed up, either, even going into some much lighter moments and switching to heavily blackened ones without ever losing its hypnotic presence.

The Mournful Refusal is deathlier in its backgrounds, but includes clearer and higher-pitched guitars digging into some more melodic territory, bringing back the hypnotic gothic picking as well, and including the speedy and tamed drumming of In Solitary Ruin.  Every bit of slower or faster pacing is used sparingly, and normally only by one instrument at a time to help the middle-pacing of the song's primary focus.  Even for the longest song on the track, the atmospheres are always shifting in consistent ways, relying on the occassional metal solo, molding perfectly with the vibe and giving us another unique track to the album.

Pavor Nocturnus throws us right into the middle of neoclassical darkwave paired with loud guitars, increasing the melody factor.  The synths give us a strangely heavenly approach, like the lamentation of seeing a spirit of a beloved one rise to the sun shining beyond silver clouds and entering Heaven.  Pavor Nocturnus shows a perfect layout where each and every shift is carefully built up to and flows with incredible consistency.  Eventually it evolves into a storm of black riffage with flawless atmospheric riffage, but even that devolves into another doomy outro.

And now we enter the title track.  We have quiet synths leading us into the gloom of gothic doom metal, slightly romantic but just as scary as before.  But this song also gradually gets more extreme and less gothic overtime until it returns to the gothic behavior during the outro.  What we have here is a patient and sometimes progressive outlook on many of the elements that made previous songs so special, using length in unpredictable manners.

The final track is The last of Vitality, and it doesn't hesitate to start us off with a snailish stoner riff bereft of any of the black and death influences the album boasted about for so long.  And we get our most haunting dungeon synth backdrops to go with it, acting much more upfront.  But we soon get into a ferocious blast of bestial black speed and fury, almost creating a feeling of riding a motorcycle through a massive graveyard.  But we return to the gothic synths and our singer's growls turn into whispers.  This song is taking us all the way across the world of death: above the graveyard, six feet under all the bloodied dirt, and straight into heaven with no regard for sanity.  Our most haunting synths and backing vocals are featured here, creating what I believe is a perfect ending.

It is so true that these songs are very long, but for once in my life I came across a doom album that managed to keep these lengths generally inventive and creative.  A large part of it was the fact that this is one of the most deathly and metallic atmospheres I have ever heard, relying on a number of metallic elements like black and goth as well as non-metallic elements like dungeon synth and darkwave to get a very strong hypnotic vibe.  This is the kind of album where many of the songs will switch out the same elements every so often, justifying such a move by applying different levels of focus to both different moods and different genres, so it's an incredible challenge to predict what's going to happen.

I have never heard a doom metal album like this.  Antithesis of Light gave me more than what I ask for from a good album.  This is the first funeral doom album that passed the fifty minute mark and didn't feel too long, because its atmosphere, emotional core and presentation are all superbly well thought out.  Each brand of hypnosis is similar yet shifting.  Very diverse and intense, depending on my future moods this could very well be the best doom metal album I've ever heard.

Now that I'm more serious about exploring doom metal, Evoken has become a top priority for their high reputation in my least favorite doom genre: funeral.  EVoken bridged the gap between death doom and funeral doom on their debut, already making a name for themselves as one of the darkest bands on Earth since the debut's atmosphere was perfect, although the variety was low.  Let's see what they can do with death and funeral this time.

There's a stronger structural touch which is a bit more unpredictable and organized at the same time.  That drumming in Burning really added another layer of depth to an already deep and seriously atmospheric song.  Thanks to an thin-layer of general creepiness akin to a Blut Aus Nord album, there's a unique touch to this album without losing the deathly vibes of their debut, which makes the vibe of the first two tracks more ghostly than anything.  After having heard and loved In Their Darkened Shrines after the second playthrough, I've been itching for more "ghostly" metal.  The vibe of Withering Indignation, however, is totally different.  The snailish doom has a serious rasp to it akin to stoner metal or a good Boris song.  The droning creates a perfect vibe as dungeon-synth backdrops occasionally make their way into the mix.  It's a great combination of psychedelic noise and neoclassical ambiance.  Tending the Dire Hatred starts by following the same vein as before, but when it switches to a faster tempo, we get a raw heavy metal vibe that switches to tribal drumming like in a Neurosis album.  But eventually it calms down into a very dungeon-grounded song when the metal becomes equal to or second to the synth via atmospheric focus.  And Where Ghosts Fall Silent seems to switch through several of the previously established vibes in a manner similar to My Dying Bride until settling on a slower death doom sound.  The title track builds itself on louder drums and synths for a more menacing approach to its own reverb.  But Embrace the Emptiness is pretty much a shameless rehash, even more so than Quietus, even though it was still a good doom song.  Thankfully, the final track goes into softer alternative territory while maintaining that reverb-based sadness of the album.

I think this album really showcases the band's willingness to push forward everything that made the first album so good.  And while there is still a little sameyness attached, for the most part this highly hypnotic sophomore album proves that Evoken are more than willing to grow so that they can be seen as one of the best in doom.  For the most part, I was very pleased with the band's sense of atmosphere, experimentation, emotion and improved variety.  This is easily much better than the debut.

Evoken seems to be considered as essential to funeral doom metal as Esoteric.  They're one of those bands that many say has never made a bad album.  The debut left an impact on the metal world for helping to cement a darker side of funeral by combining it with the death doom of bands like My Dying Bride and Katatonia.  So when you combine the two, I would expect the result to be something even darker than the norm.  But for a debut, how well could it go the first time?

From front to back, atmosphere was their strongest point, and in the context of the funeral sound, that's exactly what they needed.  This careful balance between the sombre classical sound of funeral death and that malevolent sense of fear and anger that death doom is known for is carefully handled.  One of the biggest pros of the album is the variety of vocals, going from low growls to despairing cries to black metal pitches.  So we get the a very healthy doom experience that covers a lot of ground for the fans of the sombre world of doom, and not the psychedelic Sabbath lovers.  The guitar tone has a fairly gothic touch to it to bring out more of the funereal vibes  Of course, this is a funeral doom metal album.  There's a general flaw that's apparent in so much doom metal, especially the funeral brand: the length and sameyness of the songs.  A couple of these would be five-star songs if I couldn't tell what was gonna happen next. 

For a debut it was nice.  The atmosphere was more than what I asked for and much more impressive than what a debut album generally says about the act.  But as far as structuring a song goes, these guys are pretty standard.  They got the mood just right and left the idea of variety and uniqueness out the window, but at least they nailed what they focused on.

While putting together my recent Top 100 Death Metal Albums chart (ending with all 100 albums ranked 9/10 or higher on my chart), I was getting through an album that a few people here on Metal Academy loved: Altars of Madness by Morbid Angel.  I liked it so much that I decided to listen to most of their first six albums not once but twice.  This really helped me evolve my death metal standards, and can now safely say that my current pick for the number one death metal band for ALL the right reasons is Morbid Angel.  Reasons include: having a better debut than Death themselves, a more surreal willingness to evolve, heavier and darker music, no lightening their heaviness later on and two incredible vocalists with their own classic eras.  The first six are all death essentials, and I even gave two of their albums perfect ratings.  After the glory that was Gateways to Annihilation, their slowest but doomiest and possibly most soul-crushing and psychedelic effort, I was hoping I would once again be going against the metal grain and enjoy Heretic, the first of their albums that is considered unnecessary.

Well, I gotta say it.  For the most part, their heaviness didn't wane from their previous effort.  Morbid Angel went back to death metal roots with this one, and because of that, there's practically no willingness to evolve.  This means that the album is largely made up of standard pounding death.  The album doesn't do anything freaky or surreal until Place of Many Deaths, which is seven songs totaling up to 25 minutes in.  Only then does it go into weird, freaky and creepy background ambiance akin to Blut Aus Nord's The Work Which Transforms God.  Lemme tell you, it was a major breath of fresh air to get away from another mid-to-low-tuned flat-ass pounder with only a couple decent riffs to make it fairly enjoyable.  But deep down I knew that the chances of this continuing through the album were minimal, but not impossible.  Turns out, that minimal chance had a breath left for the two-minute ambient track, "Abyssous."  But as soon as that was done, we went right back to what the band was playing for the first six tracks.  Thankfully, it gets pretty unexpected out wild in the last few shorter tracks, but it would've helped the album if these shorter, weirder bits were more scattered around the album instead of lumped at the end.  Putting some of these unpredictable and shorter bits in with a bunch of silent pauses on,y made it less charming.  They should've been segues.

So in their efforts to remain a relevant death band, they put to much focus on the weirder bits and not enough on the actual point of their career: death metal.  So Heretic shows the band just putting out generic death metal and sticking weirder tracks on for the heck of it without organizing things or making the death metal rock.  It's raw heaviness brought down by riffs of either middling or decent quality and an unfocused teeter between laziness and ambition.  The long and short of it is simple.  The staggering potential of this album by evolution revolutionaries is both untamed and untapped.

The Napalm Death legacy is a weird one in which people are constantly battling over which ND albums are the best because of the various sounds they've covered in different eras, save the experimental scene in which they produced subpar albums during the early 90's.  The 1980's and the 21st century are totally different stories where most of the wars take place.  Me, personally, can't stand the fact that it took Napalm Death more than 30 years to create an album up to my standard of fine making: Throes of Joy in the Jaws of Defeatism.  This album has death, blackened crust, metalcore, industrial and more.  The problem with ND albums is that they make 40-fifty minutes of the same song on each album, usually.  And it gets on my nerves.

This EP doesn't have any of that stuff to worry about.  This is the kind of album a deathgrind album should be, not close to an hour but short and powerful.  I admit, I might've liked it to be a little longer, but thanks to the 2.5 minute average of these six songs on this EP, none of the ideas overstay their welcome.  It must also be said that the production of this album is noisy and dirty, which brings out the most of the punk attitude and the metallic vibes.  This helps make this one of their heaviest releases.  I love the fact that the percussion is so powerful on this album.  I mean, on Harmony Corruption, they were so weak I wanted to puke.  And people actually like that album.  I guess if I had to pick a favorite track, it would be Walls of Confinement.  It displays everything the albums about, fast, mid-paced, violent, hardcore and metallic.

Sometimes, all you really need is a short burst of heaviness to keep you going.  You draw that out for too long and it loses its effect.  I mean, why not?  So many punk genres along with their metal mutants build themselves on the EP instead of the album.  This is more than welcome to me.  It's got the brutality of Suffocation's Human Waste, although it could have slightly better production as it drowns in its own noise sometimes.  But 90% of the time it's very clear what's going on.  And even if it gets noisy, that's when it becomes one of the heaviest releases in either punk or metal.  A lot of lengthy ND studio albums could take a few cues from this EP.  I mean, yeah, there isn't a lot of differentiation between tracks... but this is only fifteen minutes.  And honestly, I'd scold myself for being so obsessive over fifteen minutes.  After hearing so many samey deathgrind albums, the variety-cultist in me wants more, but the critic in me won't allow that to be considered a con.

One day, and industrial band said, "let's put a better scifi twist on it" and created cyber metal, a niche genre that no one has really made a pure artform yet, and way?  Because it has a tendency to be very trope riddled.  But the appeal of the genre is obvious: cyber metal is all about the scifi, and one of the best bands to recreate that "cyberpunk" feel is Sybreed.  It shines at full force on Antares, no star pun intended.

The album recreates scifi vibes beautifully.  It's like all at once I'm being dragged out into space, experimented on in a lab or having to deal with dystopian problems in a cyberpunk world.  The drama is there, but never played up too much.  We have plenty of room for serene and melodic moments to just drag you away into "a sea of nothingness."  Sometimes the atmosphere is Floydian.  As for my favorite aspect of this album, I'd say it's Nominet's melodic vocals.  His high and youthful pitch is just robotic enough for the cyber sound but powerful in its softness.  The guy also has some decent metalcore growls, occasionally going into Wayne Static territory, which is pleasing to me considering that Wayne's voice was the best part of Static-X.

Unfortunately, the same problem that takes over the vast majority of cyber metal (I've started many albums but haven't finished them because of this) is that all the songs are pretty much covering every layer of influence at one.  There's cyber, pure industrial, groove, djent, electronic and death here, but most of these songs are made up of multiple sections each covering one or two of these genres at once, so originality becomes repetitive.  There's a little differentiation between songs sometimes, like the shift from atmospheric serenity in isolate to the raspy djent of Dynamic.  But otherwise, the reliance on shifting the same genres becomes tiring by the end, despite the melodies and atmos still being good.

Although cyber metal is a genre yet to be mastered and perfected, the fans of this niche genre will still have Sybreed and Antares.  This has very heavy feeling to it, which is the most powerful aspect of the album and the standout as well.  If you want metal that will put you right into a scifi world, I can't think of a better album.

Nevermore are known for having a diverse range which can potentially attract a lot of different metal fans: heavy, prog, thrash, power, speed, etc.  Basically, they've made for themselves a style which stays honorable to a large sect of the metal world.  But does this mean that they always write the best songs for any one of these genres?  They're considered an essential band in 90's and 2000's metal, so let's see where this takes me.

Nevermore's "The Politics of Ecstacy" sees them expanding on the style they created with their self-titled debut, but with a stronger progressive edge.  This is one of those challenging albums where predictability of the structures and riffs themselves is largely absent.  Thanks to this and their very metallic sound, they live up to the multiple areas they've included in their personal style at the time, which often relies on all of the major components playing at the same time.  Coupled with the singer's strong and loud vocals, this is a very energetic album, even during the slower compositions.  The rest of the components pairing with prog also makes this a very accessible prog album, which isn't necessarily bad.  However, while these songs are all cool and easy to get behind, the actual riffs aren't the most imaginative.  We have fun rhythms throughout the whole album, but not a single one of them amazed me, and I didn't give any five stars to any of the tracks.

This is an easy band to enjoy thanks to their range and power, but they aren't the most amazing group of writers out there, or at least they weren't at the time of this album's release.  The strong points, however, greatly outweigh the album's weakness, so I would easily find myself recommending this band to anyone looking to get into more metal, especially if you're already a Dream Theater fan.

Immediately after the highly melodic, beautifully different but not-so-heavy Tales from the Thousand Lakes, Amorphis realized that for them to stand out, they needed to be different.  This time, they expanded on their sound and took on a few different directions.  Their finally truly death album, Elegy, would see them becoming the prog metal band they're known for being, and of course this would set the band up as one of the essentials of that genre.  This is the finally truly death metal album we got, and even then it bridges the boundaries very bravely, so be prepared.

With Tales, Amorphis took a folksy route, capturing some old mythical vibes in the format of a death metal album.  Like that album, however, this band needs a little work in the heaviness department, as the drumming feels very weak and the lighthearted melodies overpower the extremity.  Unlike the last album, however, this takes folk influence to a much more surreal level, going into Arabic territory to create both desert vibes and adventurous cinematic touches.  Some of these psychedelic solos are very cool, and because of the Arabic vibes the folk metal influences bring in, they feel perfectly natural, adding to the unique behavior of this album.  We'll even have touches of prog electronic mingled in with our psychedelic solos on the third track, The Orphan.  Never would've seen a death metal act take a couple notes from Tangerine Dream, would you?  And thankfully, we do have a couple of heavier songs mixed in with this incredibly diverse bag of tricks, ones that never falter on the Arabic melodies.  Cares even gets pretty funky, and even has a short EDM mid-lude that fits the tone and presence of the song perfectly.

Now normally I would criticize a death metal band for feeling too commercial, even a melodeath band.  But Amorphis makes it work here because they've become a prog band with a plethora of influences that flow together with perfect consistency, like a good sangria and all its ingredients.  If only this album were heavier, I'd rank it among the ten greatest prog and or death metal albums I've ever heard, much like my feelings for the movie Southern Comfort and its lack of character development getting in the way of a top 10 slot on my movies list.  Elegy in an album that proves that Amorphis can pretty much do anything... except for be heavy enough to stand with heavier melodeath bands.

Amorphis was one of the first death metal bands I checked out, largely due to having gone through many death metal lyrics to find cleaner bands.  It's been ages since I returned to this album, and that's mostly due to the fact that I was turned off by them when I realized they gave up the death in place of becoming a formulaic prog band.  I love prog metal, but I was using Amorphis to explore new territory, so since they were covering more familiar territory, I gave up on them.  But now that I'm on a death kick, I'm finally giving their second and third albums another go.

To me, melodeath is a good excuse fore a death band to steer towards outsider influences for variety, pizazz and thematic depth.  We get that with Tales from the Thousand Lakes.  The album makes a point of prioritizing a folksy, mythical and slightly medieval feel over the brutality and heaviness of death.  This gives the album a unique touch for the early days of melodeath, and helped the genre overall.  This also gives the album a reason to be catchy and accessible without falling into radio behavior like Dark Tranquillity eventually did.  Unfortunately, this is also a hinderance to the album's overall extremity.  Our fantasy vibe here might appeal to fans of mythical music, but I can understand why some death fans would be turned off by this when they want their death metal blasting like hell, which is something melodeath bands can also do, like Edge of Sanity.

Anyway, this album has a lot of good about it in the creativity department, and because of that it'll always stand out as a stepping stone in the early development of melodeath.  But it needs to be heavier, so it's definitely not perfect.  But if you like melodic metal in general, then I will easily recommend this, even more so as an introductory album into death metal for the uninitiated.

While djent band Meshuggah is cool and all, and they've got an excellent vibe and a knack for riffs, damn do they beat the same basic principle to DEATH DEATH DEATH.  I mean, these guys invented a genre, and their album Destroy Erase Improve covers a few different metal genres and it all feels like it belongs together.  So why the hell can't they ever expand their horizons?  Meshuggah has become a one trick pony because frontman Fredrik Thordendal found a "formula" that "works" for his niche fanbase.

This guy might not seem so creative at a first glance, but before Meshuggah stuck to that formula like a bad habit, Thordendal created one of the most experimental and innovative metal albums of the modern age.  And guess what?  It's DJENT.  It's one of the most angular and wacky albums out there, but everything is taken super seriously.  The album has crushing progressive riffs flowing naturally into the calmer cooler djent which ALSO flow naturally into crazy jazz and free improv.  By connecting the "like elements" of each genre, the three are piecing each other together flawlessly, and the result is an extremely trippy journey into the wild world of prog, crazy enough to rival King Crimson.  This is what djent is supposed to sound like, and it's a shame we may never see something like this from Fredrik Thordendal again, especially not from his formulaic metal band.

Dark Tranquillity were the first melodeath band I ever checked out, and of course, it was such a new experience for me that I had learned to love them.  However, as I checked out more tech and brutal death, I eventually fell out of favor with melodeath, so it's been a while since I checked out DT.  Damage Done is considered as essential to death metal as The Gallery, but while The Gallery is a great album on its own, it doesn't hold up as well for me anymore.  Will the same be true for Damage Done?

I admit, this is pretty enjoyable.  It's got its catchiness about it, and because of its accessibility it makes for a great entrypoint into death metal in general.  To be honest, this would likely be the first or second death metal album I'd recommend because of that.  It also has great production working for each song.  Unfortunately, it's a little TOO accessible and not that varied, so all the songs mold with each other to the point where, even though it's obviously death, it has the same vibe as bands like Born of osiris and As I Lay Dying, modern-day alternative-structured metalcore bands that just want to get a few singles out.  So while this is obviously a good album, it doesn't hold up as well once you expose yourself to much more true death metal.  Even other melodeath bands like Edge of Sanity and In Flames don't go THIS radio.

Until the apocalypse, there will be bands knocking off Cryptopsy and Suffocation, an unspoken genre you could call "brutal tech death."  Many of these albums have a tendency to sound like the knockoffs, save a few key bands like the Egyptian-oriented Nile, or the short and sweet band that's always changing their sound a little: Defeated Sanity.  A couple years ago I blew through all the Defeated Sanity albums just to get through another brutal death band.  The last of these was The Sanguinary Impetus, and by that point I must've been a little burnt out on brutal death because I only gave it an 8.5.

Now the band has had 27 years of experience when this was recorded, and it shows.  Our drummer, Lille Gruber, has been going about this career since the age of 11, and the practice has payed off.  He's able to create the mania of the album and keep it up throughout.  And all the while, the band is maintaining the strongest sense of insanity they've ever had, even more so than the much more avant-garde Psalms of the Moribund.  This keeps the album unpredictable and shocking until the end, even if you've technically heard the tricks before.  The glory of it is the randomness of it all feeling so utterly consistent that it largely overcomes its monotony by being to wild and wacky.  Despite the wackiness, there's a deep seriousness involved in the songwriting that lets you know that the band is trying harder than they've ever done.  In fact, because the distinct sound of the album doesn't overstay its welcome, the last two tracks are likely the best due to maintaining its unpredictable approach with stronger effect.

The Sanguinary Impetus is a modern death classic that does pure justice to a genre that's been beaten like a decomposed horse already pushing daisies.  There's hope for the genre as long as bands like Defeated Sanity focus as much on depth as brutality, and this is one of the heaviest death albums of the 2020's.

When I checked out the Obituary debut, Slowly We Rot, I noticed its many facets pretty quickly and was impressed with the band's stylistic range, even if many of the same songs took from the same influences.  I wasn't quite as impressed with that album as others, although I still liked it.  But I've been aware of their sophomore's status as a die hard classic of the death scene for a while.  Basically, if there was a Big Four of Floridian Death Metal, Obituary would've cemented themselves as one of them with this album alone, considering the reputation it gets.  So with everyone hyping it up, I was really hoping this album would live up to that hype.

It comes as no surprise that the album is much doomier and slower at times.  This not only sets this album apart from the majority of other OSDM bands, but is a perfect stylistic choice to expand upon Obituary's special brand of "evil" that they built there early careers on.  And this evil isn't one of those interesting little treats that wears out its welcome by the end.  It stays strong and even scary throughout the whole.  This also means that with the doom persona expanded, the thrash of the debut is given little to no attention.  I'd say that despite the further lack of variety this decision entails, it was for the best because the end result was stronger personality.  And without the thrash, this also means that the scariness is replacing the sleaziness of the debut, which means Obituary can also shift their personalities easily depending on the direction they take.  This is a special trait that may go over people's heads if they hear this before the debut.  Maybe this aspect came from hiring Death's guitarist, James Murphy?  Whatever it was, it certainly did this album a unique justice.  And thanks to the abundance of doominess, extremely speedy tracks like the 2:40 Find the Arise come as shocks to the system.  And whenever we get a doomy, ambient sound effect beginning a song or somewhere in the middle of one, there's just this weird blend of gothic terror and total tranquility that comes from it.  These effects might not have had such a strong effect if the band's performances didn't have so dark of a personality.

If only just once, Obituary nearly perfected their craft.  What we have hear is an album that, while still doom-focused, recreates heaviness in a number of forms working together to tell a deathly horror story through riffs and monstrous vocals.  This is miles ahead of the debut, as this isn't just some guitar-driven riff fest.  This is a death metal album that's all atmosphere all the time.  The improvement over Slowly We Rot of its artistic maturity is staggering.  I've heard quite a few slow and doomy death bands (not death doom metal), and none of them are as horrifying as this.

Obituary has special attention here on Metal Academy.  Quite a few people here  love it, especially the debut as opposed to their more renowned sophomore album, Cause of Death.  Not having been familiar with either, and having found myself in a death mood, I hightailed it to this band the instant I was done with Morbid Angel.  They're one of those bands I avoided for years due to violent lyrics.  I've been a bit of a goody-two-shoes about that considering that I was mostly avoiding it not to make peers around me mad.  No I just don't care about that anymore, so Obituary is a top-priority band now.  The people here love it, so it had better be good.

That doomy sound of there's hit me as soon as it made itself known.  We get plenty of death energy on this album, but the defining trait that set them apart was their love for the epic doomy stuff, and they didn't even need to go into the "traditional" territory to crush the soul.  That creepy and slow vibe in songs like "'Til Death" has so much ooze seeping out of it that it might as well be goring out like a Re-Animator movie.  And this isn't just a psychological vision induced by the album's green and slimy logo.  This is GROSS guitar, more sleazy than Bon Scott ever got.  And during some of the lighter moments there's some thrash energy.  Coincidentally, the title track features both traits.  So Obituary already set themselves apart as a death metal band with a broad range of attractors, attractors most death bands were missing at the time because they were too busy being "death."

Of course, while I love variety more than anyone on Metal Academy, and commend the band's efforts for variety and fluidity, this doesn't mean I've fallen head over heels for the compositions.  They're fun and energetic, but it's kind of in that Ramones "gotta-love-the-genre" kind of way rather than the intellectual way that make bands like Morbid Angel and Death so good.  Because of this, while the album remains good and commendably heavy, the thrashy and punkish charm loses its personality overtime, as well as the surprise of the slower doom.  In other words, this album with various attractors has songs that eventually mold into each other.

Obituary's debut certainly does have a strong appeal factor to it, and I appreciate everything it did right, becuase those aspects were performed at full throttle.  But they really weren't the best songwriters then.  At least the album remained pretty entertaining until the end, which means there's a keen consistency.  I can't see this making my top 50 death metal albums or anything, but for its mix of punk and doom influence, it was fun.

Length is a very touchy thing for me when it comes to music. The biggest part of that for me in the world of metal may either be drone or doom, because we have plenty of doom styles that are so drawn out and build themselves on creating an aura with the same riff going on for a couple to several minutes.  The way I see it: atmosphere is a journey into new worlds, so don't stop at one world for too long.  Entire albums made up of these songs tend to be problematic across review boards, and I myself admit to being more annoyed by it than I should.  But doom metal has its legends, and some of them really know how to keep things out there and inventive.  IMO, the greatest musicians of all time should be able to accomplish a number of musical achievements, and not do the same thing over and over again.  In this instance, that band is My Dying Bride, a gothic doom band for Type O negative fans, but better.

The Dreadful Hours sees the band maturing and improving on the tame atmospheres they created with their past albums and making it a whirlpool of deeper emotion rather than just a dark frolic through cool riffs.  They've done some fantastic albums before, but this took the cake.  There's this incredibly careful shift from sadness to anger, and hatred to romance that overtakes the whole album.  Through this, we're able to resonate with the sadness from a number of entry points.  It helps that while each song is around six to ten minutes, our riffs are catchy whether they're fast or slow, and that combination of doom, death, goth and post switches focal points every couple minutes while keeping the themes intact.  And this album makes the gloomy sound feel effortless.  Compare an average dark and classic metal album to this one.  Other brilliant albums may usually make it look like they put in effort, but My Dying Bride made it look easy.

This is one of those doom albums that recreates a number of forms of anger and sadness, like a good Nick Cave album.  As such, The Dreadful hours is currently my favorite doom and gothic album.  This is a mournful hour that never lets down on the imagination factor, which means nothing loses focus when creating a metal atmosphere.  There isn't even another MDB album that comes close to this for me, not even the other five stars.

Pure thrash is a thing that's been done to death, and yet we still get occasional classics because there are those that know how to bring personality and technicality to it long after we've heard all of the tricks.  One of these bands was Havok for a time, before the reviewers started taking them a lot less seriously once their third album came out.  They hadn't had a break for a while, but they made one of the modern thrash classics: Time Is Up, a rare thrash album that captures the oldschool spirit perfectly.

Immediately upon pressing the play button, there's a successful and vicious display of energy with perfectly clean production.  It recaptures the same spirit of thrash from the 80's that made the classics so damn good, and its clean production does a lot for its pure thrash sound.  There are simple but melodic jammers like "DOA" and "Prepare for Attack," complex bangers like "Scumbag in Disguise" and "Fatal Intervention," slow-burners like "Killing Tendencies" and harsh blastbeaters like "No Amnesty," so this album covers multiple sides of what thrash is capable of, and without ever breaking their single genre.  Impressive.  This album kept me on my toes throughout its run because it's so wild and independent, which is a compliment I give to so few thrash albums because so many of them are redundant.  My best examples of wild and independent thrash albums are No More Color, Rust in Peace and South of Heaven, so there's an easy way to compare this album to the classics.

Of course, there is a con that also acts like a pro, but a con more strongly: DAMN is this album stuck in the days of skater dorks and Ninja Turtles.  This is an extremely 80's-sounding album.  I mean, it's cool in the sense that it's nostalgic at least, and they pull it off like the album really did belong there, but this really just means that Havok sounds like they're very stuck in the past.  In other words: in a way we've heard this music for the last 40 years, even those of us who aren't that old.

I do recommend this for anyone who misses the glory days, because this album is all about the glory days.  Havok might not be the absolute best thrash band of the modern age, but they made one of the most fun, powerful and nostalgic albums in the metal world.  I would find myself returning to this next time I get in a thrash mood, because there are a couple songs I might even give five stars.

OK, so in my bestial black metal ventures, a single album was all it took to prove that Archgoat is a bit better than the iconic Blasphemy.  In my earlier review for Blasphemy's debut album, I said that they have invented a standard but it would be easy for many bands to beat them at it.  It's pretty obvious that Archgoat was not only one of the bands that were struck with Blasphemy, but would surpass them.  Having said that, surpassing the two Blasphemy albums is not a difficult task to me, and their debut was a decent experience.  How would their next one turn out?

After the dark ambient into and the first song, I thought to myself it would just be a rehash, but I would soon be proved wrong.  The next two songs showed a careful death doom slow pace which was simplistic but fairly hypnotic.  If not for their standard sound, I would've been awestruck with it, but remained only impressed with the decision.  But then track 5, Sodomator of the Doomed Venus (I typed that shit out and I need to wash my hands) steals the show with a short, black punkish display of spasmatic percussion and raw noise.  The noise is further touched up on in the once again simple but purely black title track.  So by this point, I'm quite a bit more impressed with their attempts at further exploring extreme metal itself on this record.  I mean, I still have an obligation to call this album out for low-grade songwriting, but they're doing much more with this album while maintaining the strengths of their first.  The group also makes room for more melody during the slower and doomier moments, but are improving their melodic prowess a little bit in the faster moments, too.  Not much, but still.

So while Archgoat clearly still have some training to do in the songwriting department, they've been able to touch up the concept of innovation a little more.  Having said that, they don't often overcome the monotony of the first album, but at least they're trying.  Easy improvement and a nice direction forward.

Alright, so after having been disappointed with Blasphemy's work, I was really hoping my ventures into Archgoat wouldn't become a disaster. Cabinet and Caucasian Concentration Camp are my go-to acts for comparing the good and the bad, as each bands meets their extreme very well.  And Archgoat, having their fine share of albums needed for any BBM collection (if there is such a thing), were practically a must do for me.  So, I started with one extended play which I won't be reviewing here, just to get a taste for their sound first, and then decided to move through their debut upwards.

After than dark ambient intro, it was pretty obvious that the studio-quality production already gave it a serious advantage over Blasphemy's albums.  Thanks to the perfect production, the heaviness is more enjoyable than Blasphemy.  All that was left was to see how the songwriting went.  And lemme tell you, among the mindless thrashing, there were some MAJOR breaths of fresh air in the "give you a break and put something new on the table" department.  Early on, Lord of the Void makes a point of slower doomy moments, and eventually just bursting into seriously unpredictable territory without breaking format, mood or genre.  But I decided that unless the band mixes it up a little more, I'm not going to give it the best rating.  And Dawn of the Light largely did that, although I appreciate the slow Sabbath midsection.  But no matter which song came next, it ended up sounding like a shameless rehash of the last song, so I don't really get the feeling that these guys are bringing war metal to its fullest potential and are just standard.

Archgoat is way better than Blasphemy, that much is obvious.  But this is the kind of album that satisfies raw headbangers and thrashers who need a metallic atmosphere, and are nothing short of the very norm that they set up for black metal musicians everywhere.  Archgoat's proven they can perform a black metal song with the fury necessary, so let's see them try to do something else.

After being sorely disappointed in Blasphemy's Fallen Angel of Doom, I was practically begging this album to show more imagination.  I've already found a few bestial black metal albums that I'm really impressed with, and I was hoping that Blasphemy could recreate that for all of their popularity.  This album would have to do.

It was pretty obvious from the first track that these guys were making improvements over their overrated debut.  The production was studio quality, so the dirtiness of the album was overall more effective.  And there were a few little changes in the songwriting as it was much less samey and annoying.  The distinction between black, death, thrash and grind was much clearer here, as we do have a few shorter songs working their way into deathgrind territory, and slight progginess helps create moments of the other three genres while the album remains consistent.  Bottom line, this album had imagination.

But does this mean that I think the different songwriting makes it brilliant?  No, just better than before.  The sad truth is, I don't really get a lot out of these songs as all the different types had already been done better by the likes of Venom, Bathory, Napalm Death, and Death themselves.  This is still pretty basic extreme metal.  I mean, some songs are much better than others, but nothing here really "sucks," it just gets a little boring occasionally.  It eventually gets to the point where the band is recycling all the same tricks in an effort to make things look more imaginative than these things are.

So I'll give this album major points for the obvious improvements over the debut.  Honestly, I wish these guys had continued into a third album because I would've liked to see where they were headed next.  Gods of War is at least a full star over Fallen Angel of Doom, and it's a shame this sophomore release gets second banana to the simple-minded debut.

I need to really thank Metal Academy for motivating me to explore more war metal.  A couple days after I get back in black metal, this thread shows up and suddenly a bunch of war metal albums are being reviewed.  And of course, there are bound to be a couple reviews for the most famous BBM album ever: Blasphemy's Fallen Angel of Doom.  In Daniel's review here, he wrote: "Blasphemy managed to combine all four of the major extreme metal sounds of the time (i.e. death metal, black metal, thrash metal & grindcore) into one swarming mass of largely indecipherable noise."  And he was right.  It was ONE noise.

I heard this album on DMS, a YouTube channel that provides full metal albums with high sound quality, and that includes really dirty sludgy albums with the proper production for the job.  This is just having come off the back of checking out various Teitanblood and Infernal Coil songs, as well as re-evaluating a few black, prog  and death albums.  Pretty much every song shares a 98% DNA similarity.  The production here is only there for the brutality, defeating its own purpose as you can barely here anything beyond the drums which are more or less doing the same thing for all 30 minutes. This production doesn't even sound as dirty or noisy as good black albums tend to be.  it's just bad.  Also having come of the back of the much lesser-known Cabinet's album Claustrophobic Dysentery, which mixes death and black with occasional doom, noise and ambient for very weird sounds, in comparison this album feels more like a bunch of jokers recording a bad demo for a major label rather than an actual studio album.  I'm not kidding.  That's EXACTLY what it sounds like.  it doesn't even get creative with the concept of non-studio works like Bee Thousand did with the concept of Beatles bootlegs. The heaviness was definitely cool at first, but they practically beat it to death, and they only show their most imagination through small bits in the LAST TWO SONGS for crying out loud.

This album will be mimicked many times throughout history, but most will likely succeed because... DAMN.  This album might be brutal, but that's the only strength to me.  Otherwise, it's more boring than Bob Dylan's Shadows in the Night and Trapt's self-titled.  Stick with Teitanblood, Cabinet and Goatpenis.  This is the single most overrated album I have ever heard.  I haven't hated a beloved album this much since that obsolete helf-star rating I gave the Ramones debut years ago (upgraded to a 9/10, bion).  Please tell me the other one will be better.

In my recent curiosity pertaining to the controversial war metal genre, I started, but didn't finish, dozens of war metal albums that I would shut off in the event that I noticed an obvious flaw, usually the monotony.  I finally ended at a Lynchian journey into the very essence not only of hatred, but of darkness and despair.  It's much like a Hell album, but more appropriately for the North and the Horde rather than the Fallen.

This is a surreal exercise in atmosphere, not in conventional music.  What rhythm you may expect from this album is largely absent, which in most cases, even for the unwritten rule of it set by BBM as a whole, ends up being a flaw.  As Daniel pointed out here, war metal is often about the worship of hatred, although I find that this can be achieved through multiple forms, and thus, through a diverse album.  And so, we have a Gira-style reliance on atmosphere and sound rather than melody, one that drags you through its terrifying world with little ambient / noise surprises here and there, oftentimes flawlessly produced.  Sound effects turn into instruments and instruments turn into atmosphere, rather than just playing monotonous music.  The best example of this may be Hallway of Dacryocystotomic Depriciation.  Even immediately afterwards on the next track do we get an extraordinarily fuzzy guitar carefully raising in volume behind the foreground of a clearly produced static buzz accompanied by blowing winds, and pairing with these fuzzy death guitars are clearer and more polished post-black tremelos that somehow pair with the death fuzz flawlessly.  This all happens in the first MINUTE of Eternally Pendulemic Flourescent Bulb / Deteriorating Interminably.

Never before have I heard a metal album that is so rhythmless and so full of imagination at the same time.  This is music at some of its most reliant on presence before rhythm, and successful as well.  It took a real creative genius to achieve something like this and manage to mix clear production with fuzzy production, sadness with anger and ambiance with terror so beautifully and so disgustingly.  Easily making it somewhere in my top 10 black metal and death metal albums at the same time.

Emperor had made it into the big leagues and stayed there forever thanks to only two albums: In the Nightsdie Eclipse and Anthems to the Welkin at Dusk.  One was a new take on traditional black metal with a whole new sound, and the second was a more cleanly-polished take on the original which a very notcurnal vibe.  Emperor always loved trying new things, so where were their ventures going to take them next?  Into... straightforward original black metal, apparently.  This really isn't a bad decision just because of that, but could Emperor pull it off?  Let's see if they "sold themselves out" instead of wanting to try a new vibe.

In some cases, Emperor were attempting straightforward black metal.  And if track one, Curse You All Men, proves anything, it's that they can pull it off effortlessly.  This is more brutal and maniacal than anything Darkthrone or Immortal ever put out.  This is a first time for them when you think about the genre!  ANd once again they shift their symphonic sound for a new vibe.  It seems that the point of IX Equilibrium is to once again try new things with a very different mood from what we got before.  Unfortunately, while this mood has been rarely perfected, this is the first Emperor album featuring an atmosphere that's already been attempted.  This is one of the reasons it's considered inferior.  But damn if that black metal energy isn't extremely thick and dense.  I can't even see out the window of this aural hurricane.  Rain covers everything, although I can occasionally hear the symphonic parade of musicians and soldiers marching, as if the stabbing rain didn't hurt them.

Unfortunately, because they're acting more straightforward on this album, a couple of the songs are a little too long, so they tire out pretty quickly.  As for any flaws pertaining to other songs, this one's a really easy one.  While the absolute maelstrom of sound on this album is nothing short of formidable, there's typical blastbeating mixed in with Emperor's strongest point: melody, so it's easy for one to outshine the other.  Now the album has its share of diversity.  It covers Emperor's symphonic sound with the newfound original black sound while adding bits of new stuff, including the heavier prog which would be more fleshed out on Prometheus, as well as bits of speed and thrash in sparse places.  But that's also a little bit of a con as these little bits are sparse and scattered.  This includes the gothic sound of Welkin, which thankfully makes it onto this release, especially during the final track, "Of Blindness & Subsequent Seers" which carries a surreal tone to it.

This third Emperor album is the point where they stopped being "just" a new sound.  In an attempt to gain the favor of the followers of ancient tradition, they took part in it.  There was some excellent skill in sound, technicality and melody, but there was little drawbacks to this new sound.  In other words, Emperor could do just about anything, but couldn't perfect this is it was their first attempt.  This is excellent black metal, but not the best compliment to Emperor's prowess.

I went through the whole discography again so that I could flesh out my black metal opinions even more.  I've been very serious about this for a couple weeks, and I pretty much have them sorted out.  There are just a couple things I need to get clear, especially concerning the band I went through the whole studio catalog of today (for the second time this month): Emperor, one of the most influential black metal bands in the world for creating, pioneering and perfecting the symphonic black metal sound.

A little Emperor history.  They invented a new black metal genre, and it's considered one of the greatest albums of all time.  They change up their sound, and it's considered one of the greatest albums of all time.  This says something about Emperor: they are NOT conformists, and they weren't gonna stay that way.  I may seriously piss somebody off when I speak honestly: if you won't let the non-conformists change their style, then you're not a real fan of them.  In short, if you don't like Prometheus just because it doesn't sound like either of the first two albums, then you're not a real Emperor fan.  It's one thing to say you prefer the original sound(s), but to act like they're not supposed to sound any other way in general is just unfair to the constant renovators.

Because of its shifting riffs and melodies within the same songs, a trait often found on Emperor songs, it is given a progressive tag.  I think a couple songs are prog, mostly "Grey," but this just feels like a different sounding Emperor album with more influences than anything, rather than progressive black.  I mean, come on.  I've even read criticisms for how often In the Nightside Eclipse shifted its riffs.  If people are worried that the progressive metal status and the heavy metal behavior of some of these songs takes away from the true blackness, I find that appalling to even consider.  Songs like "The Prophet" and especially the thunderstorm that is "In the Wordless Chamber" have plenty of black attitude and blastbeats to maintain the status, and it's not alone.  On a secondary note, what is "tr00 black metal?"  I've heard various definitions of that as well.  The most common answer when naming the perfect black metal sound, as I have researched, seems to be one of several classic Darkthrone's, usually A Blaze in the Northern Sky.  That clean, sympho-gothic work is so far from Blaze that I feel like vomiting when I hear Welkin called "tr00."  You might get away with that argument concerning Nightside, but I still find that album very cleanly produced.  On the subject of Welkin's sound, I think one of the biggest underlying differences is the large lack of the gothic behavior of the synths, as well as the slight downgrade of necessity in place of more riffs.  I have no problem with the decision itself; all I want is to see if it works.

Now that I'm done combining deconstruction of the album with my own personal ranting, I'm ready to go into the more detailed side of the review.  Prometheus is, like Welkin was, a collection of various metal genres working together to create something unheard and new.  That's Emperor's specialty.  Why can't most war metal bands try this out for once?  We have storms of fire, ice, wind, water and lightning all taking turns amazing with some of Emperor's healthiest melodic structures.  Oh, forgot the earthquakes.  Working with the elements of nature re a variety of different vocals all being perfectly delivered by Ihsahn, be it the high-pitched demonic squeals of Nightside, the more nocturnal growls of Welkin or some straight up operatic heavy metal singing and harmonies.  He even get a couple 80's metal wails.  And the best part?  Each song has its own identity, standing out from the rest without any trouble.  This is a feat that Emperor struggled with in past albums, even if they were able to bring together a collection of various influences together in shifting ways on Welkin.

What we're facing is the final metamorphosis of a modern Proteus.  Emperor were a like a tiny larvae that made a big impact on the world, and once it became a butterfly, half of the metal community wanted them to be a larvae again. Prometheus is a concept album about the titular myth, but is that really what makes the album so strong when a large part of the idea is not to understand the lyrics?  It's the monolithic power.  This is a collection of a symphonic metal opera, the raging storms of ancient traditions, the further steps of prog, as well as so much more.  I'd say that Emperor "accomplished" more on this album than they ever did. If I had to be fully honest, I consider this one of the very few albums that I feel represents a whole side of metal itself, rather than one or two genres.  This is about all the extremities that black metal can achieve rather than just being another black metal album.  Because of this, I know find myself in a very rare state of mind: I rank this above PARANOID.

Now my third best metal album of all time.

Dark Angel's Darkness Descends is considered to be a cornerstone of thrash by the metal community.  Unfortunately, many would say that about Among the Living, too.  Like I do with every album, I'm going to judge this album on my own merits.

Right from the getgo, this album is brutal and villainous to the point of a mental breakdown.  The opening title track has Pleasure to Kill level heaviness and some Metallica melody attached to the intro.  There is a constant power throughout the whole album that keeps you awake and ready to cause mayhem, and so Dark Angel have mastered exactly what the trash sound needs to sound like.  The unfortunate thing is... I was waiting a while for it to get either more melodic or more technical.  In other words, most of what the album is doing is thrashing.  Thankfully, I got some riffage on the fourth track, which is made even better on the virtue of the first three tracks being shorter rather than longer.  So there are moments of creativity that keep the album from just being an impressively heavy album where the production and mixing help the brutality more than the layouts.

This is a cool album for the thrash fan, but considering it one of the greatest of its genre feels a bit too religious to me, like the heaviness can somehow make up for any obvious flaws.  Albums like that are rare for me.  But this is still well worth listening to, and it has about the same creative and heaviness prowess as Pleasure to Kill.