Another short week as we ride off the slump of summer, but the sake of all that’s unholy, don’t sleep on this one. Some real face melters coming your way.
Bless The Dead – We Create This
Genre: Groove metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 2.5/5
A bone dry, harsh kind of southern groove metal album with some good aggression behind it. They unfortunately fall fully flat on their asses whenever approaching a melodic vocal line, but they’re also not too commonplace.
Carnivore Diprosopus – Rise Of The Insurrection
Genre: Brutal death metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Talk about setting the right expectations with your album art. This is a smorgasbord of excessive force, in the form of meatgrinder vocals, artillery barrage drums, and chainsaw windmill guitars. It could benefit from a richer production.
Crushuman – CrusHuman
Genre: Death/nu/groove metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Here’s a combo I didn’t think I’d hear this week – death- and nu metal. It has those beat-based rhythms, and a bit of turntable effects to go with it. Later on it kind of switches to groove, and every now and then hardcore. This genre schizophrenia is, unfortunately, the most interesting about this. The production is lackluster and uneven, the album has no less than 17 songs, several with a grindcore-style short runtime, but still. Good moments kind of get lost in the crowd.
Dark Deeds – Death Keeps
Genre: Deathcore
Subjective rating: 1.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Personally, I find that this album has one of the most uninteresting opening 5 minutes of runtime I’ve heard all year. It’s nothing but slow, low-tuned riffs and breakdown beats with some spoken-word interludes and clenched vocals. Lots of rage on here though, for those who simply wants to get fired up.
Duhkha – A Place You Can’t Come Back From
Genre: Metalcore/hardcore
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
A truly bludgeoning album mixing the deftness of metalcore with the stompiness of hardcore, and adding in some sludgy, even death metal-like low-end steamroller force for that bone crunching heaviness. There’s hardly any melody to be found, but it’s not truly dissonant either. It feels nimble, like a heavyweight fighter with good footwork and a headsman’s scowl to psyche out the opposition.
Highlight: “Echo Theft”
Earth Ship – Soar
Genre: Stoner/doom/sludge metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3/5
This album sounds a bit like each section of the band was given a different subgenre space to play in. You get stoner-style lead and drums, doomy riffs and bass, and sludgy vocals. It fits together perfectly fine, but the whole ends up a bit removed from the more potentially interesting extremes of either of its parts.
Fulci – Duck Face Killings
Genre: Death metal
Subjective rating: 4.5/5
Objective rating: 4.5/5
Sometimes death metal can be allowed to be both brutal and lively, in insanely headbanging-inducing fashion. It doesn’t take more than a few seconds listening to this album to realize that this is what you’re in for, in spades. Built around an aptly tongue-in-cheek gory horror theme, you get that same entertainment factor of Dethklok at its very best, just springing from a significantly elevated level of musical craftmanship. The drums and low-end riffs deliver an industrial slaughterhouse level of precision, with a thrashy, Slayer-esque, malicious-toned, nimble lead riff line stalking like an eager axe murderer in the background. They make some tastefully weird thematic choices in connection with their cinematic inspirations (The New York Ripper by Lucio Fulci), which adds enough barbed character to embed itself in your memory.
Highlights: “Human Scalp Condition” and “Maniac Unleashed”.
HammerFall – Avenge The Fallen
Genre: Heavy/power metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
I was poised to diss this pretty hard, but, aside from its utter lack of innovation, there’s way too much good stuff going on here to simply dismiss it as a conveyor belt release. There’s actual depth to the melodies, good variation, and a genuine genre enthusiasm radiating through the whole thing. Most importantly, it’s far from so overproduced that it doesn’t sound like it’s made by actual people. And these people have a masterful knack for the accessibly epic.
In Aphelion – Reaperdawn
Genre: Melodic black metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
The veteran-comprised black metal band that is Reaperdawn strikes once more. If you’re unfamiliar, then think Necrophobic and Nifelheim (from which two of the members hail), and you should have a pretty good idea. This is quality, plain and simple, although it does little to subvert expectations. Furious wraith riffs, icicle solos and vocals like ripping gangrenous flesh. It’s full of classic metal energy and that Swedish quality of injecting melody without affecting the heaviness.
Highlight: “Reaperdawn”.
King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard – FLIGHT b741
Genre: Blues rock
Subjective rating: /5
Objective rating: /5
Not gonna review this, cause it’s definitely not metal, but just thought I’d mention that King Gizzard has released another album. Again. It’s good. Just not metal this time.
Kurokuma – Of Amber and Sand
Genre: Doom/sludge/psychedelic metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 4/5
An album that wants you fully committed all the way through. It’s equal parts heavy chugging and mildly psychedelic ambience, which extends into interludes in between every full song. It does feel like a spiritual journey, but perhaps not one taken willingly. The melodies are warm and flexing – reaching out beyond the deep core of the doomy bass, to whatever might be found out there. While the rhythms move us steadily forwards through the unfamiliar landscape.
Highlight: “Death No More”
Monument Of Misanthropy – Vile Postmortem Irrumatio
Genre: Technical/brutal death metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Did you dig the latest Summoning the Lich album, and wish you could get more of Aborted sooner rather than later? Well, here you go. Like with the Fulci album also released this week, this is serial killer themed, although with a real one (Ed Kemper) adorning the cover. What’s cool is that these guys manage to deliver what I found the Aborted album earlier this year to be missing – some actual depth and variation. Sure, it’s hyper tight, fast and heavy as all hell, but it knows how to get into some grooves, use different rhythms for effect, and dip into more classic death metal whenever a hit of believable malevolence is needed.
Highlights: “Vile Postmortem Irrumatio” and “How to Make a Killer”.
Mushroomhead – Call The Devil
Genre: Nu/industrial metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 2.5/5
Mushroomhead is another nu metal golden era band that I honestly never listened to. So, going in half blind and hearing the first song, I got my hopes up for a thoroughly aggressive, groove-laden, perhaps a bit artificial-sounding industrial record with some hip-hop beats. Alas, on the next song it decided it wanted to be something else. And something else on the one after that. And so on. For those not minding a mixed bag, it might be entertaining, and it has some cool moments, but objectively, this inconsistency is highly detrimental.
Oxygen Destroyer – Guardian Of The Universe
Genre: Thrash/death metal
Subjective rating: 4.5/5
Objective rating: 4.5/5
Fucking hell. Don’t turn your back on this one. You’ll need your complete faculties to withstand this tsunami-through-a-knife-factory merciless onslaught of blackened death thrash. If you thought that death metal can only fuse well with the more mid-tempo and groove-laden parts of thrash, you were clearly mistaken, as the guys go absolutely scorched bananas with their picks and sticks pretty much from one end to the other. The delightfully geeky Kaiju theme functions as compact sinew to hold the whole thing together, only showing up at key intersections, rather than some half-assed veil dropped over the whole thing. Through a combination of tone, vocal style and production, they’ve managed to keep the jagged dagger edge of thrash intact, instead of opting for the meat mallet blow of death metal, all the while backing it up with an atomic breath’s worth of force.
Highlights: “Shadow Of Evil” and “Eradicating The Symbiotic hive Mind Entity From Beyond The Void”
As always, if you think I’m completely off on an observation, unfairly dissed your favorite band, or need to give an album another shot, why not pop a comment down below?
The Metal Dispatch 
Missed that Mnajdra. Shit was top of the pile.
LikeLike
That one flew right by me undetected. I’ll check it out
LikeLike