Reviews of metal albums released October 11 – October 17
This is a week of big comebacks and massive crowd pleasers looking to slay monstrous beasts of the underground.
Age Of Ruin – Nothingman
Genre: Heavy/melodic death metal/metalcore
Subjective rating: 2.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: A long-going US metalcore/melodeath project that’s now on their fifth full-length. I wouldn’t go so far as to say that it feels disjointed, but stylistically it’s a meld of thrash, heavy, gothic, groove, metalcore and hardcore, aside from the melodic death center. The problem is that it doesn’t quite perform strongly in any individual one of these iterations of the sound. Melodically it’s a bit iffy, especially as far as the vocals go, but they’re significantly stronger going hard and rowdy, and serve up some cool riffs and solos.
Battle Beast – Steelbound
Genre: Heavy/pop metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Regular readers of mine will probably do a double take at me rating a pop metal album this highly. What can I say? It deserves it. It’s been a minute since I’ve encountered a start to an album that’s this much fun. Past the opening track, you’re served four energetic, modern- and retro-pop bangers in immediate succession, that’d get the sullenest trve cvlt basement dweller to start head bopping. Led by an awesome vocal performance and sprinkled with Finnish melodic shred, it really is a hoot of a time. I’m making a deduction for a less exciting second half of the album and a completely unimaginative album cover, but overall they’ve really won me over with this one.
Highlight: “Twilight Cabaret”
Carcosa – The Axe Forgets, The Tree Remembers
Genre: Deathcore
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: A bruising deathcore album that finds a middle ground between percussive harshness and symphonic, metalcore-melody. It’s tight, it’s sharply honed, and it’s not overly obsessed with chugs and breakdowns. I would say that there’s a bit too much filler around the big highlights, so non-diehards like me have to wade a bit to get to the big catch, but it successfully implements a bit of atmosphere and is varied enough to give off a dynamic feel, which certainly isn’t a given in this subgenre.
Coroner – Dissonance Theory
Genre: Progressive thrash metal
Subjective rating: 4.5/5
Objective rating: 4.5/5
Review: What’s this? Thrash that requires you to think? Fans who have followed this band since the start in the 80s won’t be surprised at this, but not having released an album since 1993, they’ll have drifted beyond the radar for a lot of people today. What you get is rather stark, almost industrial-toned thrash with deeply considered rhythm control, and an atmospheric depth far beyond what’s to be expected from the subgenre’s riff-obsessed core. It’s almost dreamy in parts, sending your mind wandering, and I do think that it’s a bit energy-zapping at times. The production also feels a tad subdued for what this likely aims to be. But as you adjust your expectations it starts to make more and more sense, and on repeat listens it gets more and more engaging. It’s truly fascinating to get all this deadly riffage, Testament-like groove and Kreator-like, snarling vocal work deftly navigating their way through a complex, yet organic and surprisingly melodic system of ebb-and-flow energy, and subtly layered moods. A masterful execution making for quite the comeback.
Highlights: “Symmetry” and ” Consequence”
Defigurement – Endbryo
Genre: Technical grindcore
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: A dizzying assault of frantically racing riffs and drum beats, that’s somehow less technically minded than I had expected. A good portion of this is the kind of chaotic savagery that’s considered vanilla in this subgenre, and only in select parts does it go nuts with odd rhythms and spacey vibes. If you want a bit of a sonic challenge, this will do that for you, but there was a lot of potential for uniqueness that I think it failed to grasp.
Erdling – Mana
Genre: Melodic industrial metal/hard rock
Subjective rating: 2/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: I first discovered Erdling while they were still small and edgy, and I thought they balanced their ultra-catchy iteration of Neue Deutsche Härte with a fitting amount of alternative mood. Now, of the charm and novelty is gone in the pursuit of sounding as big and accessible as possible. It does its job quite decently, but there’s nothing interesting about it.
Evoken – Mendacium
Genre: Doom/death metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: Seven years after their last release, funeral doom staples Evoken drop their seventh full-length descent into terror. And while, yes, the abyssal death metal elements make for an ever-ominous presence in the pooling blackness of this album*s underbelly, it’s also what makes it shift forwards in lurches and lunges, on squealing guitars and pouncing drums. And the solemn, darkly medieval atmosphere is enough to describe an entire odyssey crawling through catacombs and castle dungeons. The pace is agonisingly slow at times, but it feels like just the right kind of emptiness and space in the soundscape, and only adds to the mood of despair and hopelessness. It’s epic in a way, but not fated for any sort of glory, wonder or conquest, only horror, decline and dark fascination.
Highlights: “None” and “Matins”
Grailknights – Forever
Genre: Power metal
Subjective rating: 2.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: Yes, you realize within the first five seconds that this is not to be taken seriously, and I’m sure the music videos are hilarious. But I don’t think they could have made the actual music much more predictable if they tried. It’s massively upbeat, cheesy as only the Germans know how to make it, and fun, outstanding tracks are offset by sleepy ballads.
Graveripper – From Welkin To Tundra
Genre: Thrash/black metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Graveripper slapped me in the face in all the best ways with their 2023 debut “Seasons Dreaming Death”. It was an all-guns-blazing, rough-edged graveyard demolisher of a pissed-off blackened thrash album, promising great things for the future. Now they’re back, with a tone that’s clearly been hung to chill in the cooler, and a much cleaner and crisper production. Whether that’s a good or a bad thing I will leave up to individual taste, but some of the chaotic ferociousness has been lost in favor of precise, well-defined beats and riffs. It’s still highly aggressive, and definitely gets your head moving, track after track, but a few of the tracks do come off as fairly by-the-numbers blackened thrash. It’s a ripping good time, if not a bit too reined-in.
Highlight: “Bring Upon Pain”
Impermanence – Anicca
Genre: Technical death/black metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: The debut album of a young, Polish blackened tech death band with plenty of instrumental chops, a good feel for tonal consistency, and no desire to play it safe. It comes off as experimental in the way it wriggles between different rhythm approaches and song sections. It’s not entirely bewildering, and somewhere in there might be a clear method, but there is a prevailing feeling of hesitance and disorganization, which the overall shape of the thing isn’t intentionally chaotic enough to absorb or mask. But the talent is clearly there.
Internal Bleeding – Settle All Scores
Genre: Death metal/hardcore
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Old school, brutal slam sent bursting out of the sewer drains. It’s gritty as all hell, with strong hardcore roots and a great sense for hard-hitting rhythms. To me it’s a bit too much of the same kind of thing repeated several times, but it feels vital, and just as ready to cause damage as you need it to be.
Kaupe – Destroyer of Worlds
Genre: Progressive metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: A (mostly) instrumental prog metal band out of Florida, here presenting their third full-length. It feels grounded, not massive in scope, but still conceptually solid and coherent, with a dry, warm sound that bears elements of heavy metal, hard rock and sludge. It’s not your typical shred-fest of colorful melody, rather something approaching classic doom and stoner in mood. That’s not to say it’s particularly understated, but while it’s decently adventurous and groovy, there’s a certain stoicism about it as well, which I find characterful. It doesn’t really offer any massive hits, but no two tracks feel quite the same, and tickle the mind in ways that will take you to both soothing and exciting places.
Highlight: “Unresolved Trauma”
Ladon Heads – Steel For Fire
Genre: Heavy metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: Retro fantasy-metal with traces of speed and thrash, this gets the vibe just right, with a galloping sense of adventure. describing familiar lands of legend. The vibe extends to the vocal and instrumental performances, but nothing here really blows your socks off. It’s a bit too mellow, too concerned with style to go anywhere new, and there isn’t quite enough enthusiasm shining through. Still, a good time.
Sabaton – Legends
Genre: Power metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Enough glorifying WW1, time to switch focus and create some crowd chants about tyrants and mass bloodshed from much further back in history. Templars are cool, right? And getting people all roused up about the exploits of Julius Caesar, Ghengis Khan, Napoleon and Vlad the Impaler sounds pretty much right on the money. There are few metal bands as epic-bombastic as Sabaton, and that hasn’t changed one bit on their eleventh full-length. This is all about the chest-beating feels. Forget that the lyrics are as dumb and wooden as the beach spikes in the “Troy” movie, forget the tedious realities behind the romanticized legends, this is about living a few minutes of phantom glory and belting your lungs out in front of a massive stage. And for that this is exactly what you want.
Sintage – Unbound Triumph
Genre: Heavy metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: A glorious trip back to the 70s and the heyday of classic heavy metal. The raspy, high-pitched-vocals, galloping rhythms and soaring, feelgood solos – it’s all there. Just as depicted on the cover, this is stuff you imagine projected like a lightning bolt from the highest mountain peak, causing the denim-and-chains masses to converge in headbanging worship. The spirit is not quite as effectively evident in every single song on the album, but enough to be thoroughly convincing. It doesn’t go off the rails or really surprise you, but it stays on message and is willing to rock your socks off all the way through.
Highlight: “Electric Walls”
Tombs – Feral Darkness
Genre: Experimental sludge/black metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: A style-indifferent, groove-amendable, crunchy, noisy and coarse amalgamation of sludge, black metal and a few other, related flavors into a beast of a record. It’s got grit pouring out of every crack and cavity, and a death-stare, anti-conventional gothic attitude radiating from the vocal performances and subdued melodies. It’s stronger the more aggressive and crushing it gets, with some of the atmospheric, spoken-word sections not feeling quite as convincing as they need to be compared to the blackened confidence of the harshness. But it provides character, and lets you know that there is more to this than just snarling nihilism and skull-grinding heaviness. It’s just unpredictable enough to keep you intrigued as well as feeling like wielding a sledgehammer.
Highlights: “Feral Darkness” and “Wasps”
Tribal Gaze – Inveighing Brilliance
Genre: Death metal/hardcore
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: On their third full-length, Tribal Gaze load on the stomps and breakdowns. It’s still very much old school death metal, and it’s just as chunky and grimy as you’d hope. But now there’s an influx of contemporary dissonance and slam-like rhythms, which transforms it into a much more urban-feeling kind of monstrosity than 2022’s “The Nine Choirs”, which I dug pretty hard. It’s not the direction I would have asked for, but in the end it’s up to the band, and they do as they intend with a highly convincing level of investment. There’s still a good bit of that savage Soulfly-feel to it, and while some of the rhythms get a tad predictable, there’s so much bone-crunching brutality going on, and plenty of skin-ripping riffage, that you can’t help but be in awe.
Highlights: “To the Spoils of Fate” and “Ruling in a Land with No God”
Wretched – Decay
Genre: Technical/melodic death metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: With their first full-length in 11 years, and fifth overall, Wretched want to savor your attention for as long as possible. This is melodic and technical death metal that doesn’t call undue attention to its musicianship, and doesn’t feel much at all like its Scandinavian genre peers. Those are both, at least in my book, two of its strongest qualities. Let’s just get it straight early on – this is an album that takes its time. At 1hr 5minutes runtime, it’s got no hurries getting to its destination, and while it’s not the richest, most moving or most intriguing hour you’ll spend listening to a metal record, it’s also not tedious. There’s always something going on, and it doesn’t feel tired or repetitive or unimaginative. There’s explosive aggression, rousing melody, doom-like atmosphere and intense technicality. And it all blends together really nicely. A bit lacking in focus, perhaps, but highly rewarding if you connect with it.
Highlights: “Decay” and “The Royal Body”
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 