Reviews of metal albums released September 26 – October 02
This week sees both veterans, up-and-comers and first-timers deliver career-highlight material, contributing both melody, brutality and darkness to the flavor gamut.
Amon Amarth – The Allfather Awakens
Genre: Melodic death metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: I won’t be alone in feeling that the Amon Amarth release quality has been on a downward slope since around the time of 2008’s “Twilight of the Thunder God”. That album seemed to solidify what they were supposed to sound like as a band, and too much material since then has sounded like increasingly watered down copies of the same formula. That said, the band members’ individual performances have always been up to snuff. It’s just that the songwriting kept them more and more tightly confined within their comfort zones.
I was therefore worried starting off with the big singles off “The Allfather Awakens”, not because they’re actively bad, but because they just sound like the 20th reshuffling of the same marching, drinking-horn-pumping, simple-riffed Viking anthems. Then comes the acoustic (!) “Upphaf” out of the blue (I don’t listen to the singles beforehand) and refocuses my attention, before the heaviest, most bloodthirsty song on the album “Die With a War Cry” has me reeling. There’s at least three more fantastic songs past this point – aggressive, dark, genuinely epic and with actual interesting playing. It’s the band at the best I’ve heard them for well over a decade. It makes for an uneven overall experience, but the latter half also makes me look back at the first more fondly, accepting the silly bombast as a prelude to what’s to come. There’s some fight in these old berserkers, yet.
Highlight: “Die With a War Cry”
Brymir – What We Leave Behind
Genre: Melodic death metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Yes, we’ve got more melodeath this week, and yes, the band name and song titles might lead you to believe that it’s another Norse saga in music form. But no. Brymir takes their ultra-melodic, power-leaning, polished death metal to the stars, with an album cover straight out of Warhammer 40K (so much so that I fear they might get sued) and a sound stuffed beyond the brim with synths and other electronica-derived elements.
The important thing to note though, is that the core of the band’s musical concept is intact. They play fast, big, technically advanced and vibrant, massively Finnish melodic death metal. Not able to stay serious for too long, they’ve tacked a comedy track on at the end, which might divide listeners on whether it’s fun or just distracting. The mood is all over the place, and the slower and moodier second half doesn’t quite deliver on the promises made by the first. Still, there’s a lot to enjoy on here.
Highlight: “Sleipnir”
Cyadine – Violence In Measure
Genre: Thrash metal/hardcore
Subjective rating: 4.5/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: Do you remember the first time you heard Pantera? The raw strain? The filthy groove? The stank face you were stuck with for the rest of the week? I’m not saying that this stuff is quite as innovative, but god damn does it channel much of the same attitude and energy. As debut albums go, this is nothing short of a rocket launch.
Cyadine play a beat-heavy, brutal variant of crossover thrash that manages to combine the youthful rattiness of the 80s pioneers with the heaviness of more modern death thrash in the vein of Cavalera Conspiracy. The riffs are ultra crunchy, the squeals are savage, the vocals sound like tearing apart a fabric factory and the bass rumbles like a demonic engine from under ground. The songs have strong individual characters and offer a good amount of contrast in terms of speed and rhythmic tension. I won’t say that they manage to squeeze out every ounce of potential that the 21 minute runtime affords them, but boy is it close.
Highlights: “Spill Your Guts” and “No Place Like Home”
Dissimulator – Artifice Dissolves
Genre: Technical thrash/death metal
Subjective rating: 4.5/5
Objective rating: 4.5/5
Review: There are unfortunately too few examples of bands following up an interesting, distinct debut album with something that both improves on it in terms of pure production and technical performance, and also refines and expands on the concept without diluting what made it special in the first place. This is, however, exactly what Dissimulator have managed with sophomore album “Artifice Dissolves”.
Gone is the slightly pretentious prog second personality of 2024’s “Lower Form Resistance”, replaced with a laser-keen focus on ripping, ultra-precise, hugely enjoyable thrash, while retaining that ragged, somewhat untamed death metal edge. It’s got an experimental, unhinged industrial side to it, but while it very effectively paints proceedings with texture and personality, it doesn’t get in the way of the true meat of the music. It’s hostile yet strangely inviting, complex yet super engaging, and somehow makes me welcome both an atmospheric interlude AND an instrumental track in close proximity. Do NOT sleep on this one.
Highlights: “Alloyed” and “Hungry Ghosts”
Dumal – The Trials of Existence
Genre: Black metal
Subjective rating: 3/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: What we’ve got here is on-the-atmospheric-side black metal out of Pennsylvania, wasting absolutely no time getting started and offering no real breaks (apart from an interlude track) in the constant output of tidal riffs and melancholic tremolo. It’s not oppressive or particularly violent, just a constant flow of sadness-softened bitterness. I find it to be a little too stretched and repetitive in parts, but they’ve done an excellent job balancing a tastefully low-fi production with huskiness, aggression, restrained, dark emotion and the sense of open, fog-draped space.
Highlight: “Rendered Impotent by Glass”
Firtan – Helios
Genre: Blackened folk/death metal
Subjective rating: 4/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: It takes a certain something to make your black metal sound truly mighty, without going the symphonic route or loading on empty-calorie effects like booming riffs, Gregorian chants or walls of dissonance. Firtan have managed to craft a sound for their fifth full-length worthy of naming it after an ancient deity. It’s effortlessly heavy and solemn without going stale or minimalist.
Included in their style are fairly restrained pagan and folk elements, and a willingness to dip into death metal for that added fullness and bestial hunger. Once they tone things down, you feel like you’re floating in a temperate forest pool, completely relaxed and in tune with the whispers of nocturnal life around you, aware that a violent storm is about to come crashing through the trees. The album isn’t without its protracted sections, but never gets dull, with effective and fluid mood transitions and a wide variety of textures, with the violin being a standout feature.
Highlights: “Kalika’s Tongue” and “Wide Open Eye”
Frozen Crown – The Legend Of The Six Kings
Genre: Power metal
Subjective rating: 2/5
Objective rating: 2.5/5
Review: I remember discovering this Italian power metal band back in 2023 with their fourth full-length “Call of the North” and instantly digging it for its melodeath-rooted, unapologetically epic, vividly melodic but also aggressively energetic fireworks display of a sound. Very little of that remains on “The Legend of the Six Kings” though. The heaviness has evaporated, the melodies feel completely generic and most of the chorus lyrics are made up of primary school-level rhymes. Get it together, people. You’ve proven that you’re able.
Hippotraktor – Annihilist
Genre: Progressive metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 4/5
Review: I was unprepared for the impact that 2024’s “Stasis” by Belgian proggers Hippotraktor would have on me, which might be part of the reason why I liked it so much despite it inhabiting a stylistic realm that I don’t feel too much at home in. Now they’ve followed it up with “Annihilist”, which has bled off some of the heaviness of its predecessor, but not in an even fashion.
The album takes much bigger leaps, from absolute calm, soft serenity to Gojira-at-their-heaviest, crashing djent riffs with an otherworldly quality to the groove. The overall mood is bleak and grey, as before, but it bothers me a bit more with its uniformity this time around, perhaps because it comes stronger to the fore in the clean sections. Still, the buildups in intensity are highly rewarding, and fully showcase the exquisiteness of the band members’ abilities. If you’ve been fully on board with these guys’ vibe from the start, you will almost certainly appreciate the added breadth and level of detail found on here.
Highlights: “Oblivion Walker” and “Builder of Eden”
Miss May I – No Place For Me
Genre: Metalcore
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3/5
Review: I get a particular spark of joy whenever a hit of fresh, old school melodic metalcore comes my way these days. This isn’t pure goods, so to speak, as the band mixes classic melody and rhythm techniques with those of the modern era, but there’s enough nostalgia in here to get me hooked. The overall experience is unfortunately a bit mixed, with wavering energy levels and songs going from feeling run-of-the-mill, overly poppy or trend chasing, to actually embracing the style and loading on some aggression and groovy catchiness. There’s enough for a fan to feel satisfied overall, but probably not to convert any doubters.
Highlight: “Portrait of Pain”
Spirit Possession – Cathedral Speech
Genre: Experimental black/thrash metal
Subjective rating: 3.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: Do not go off a description of this album being “blackened thrash metal” expecting nothing but scorched riffs, wild squeals, charging drums and snarled vocals. All those things are in there, but the way you get to them, and the stuff they’re wrapped up in is anything but conventional.
Spirit Possession play a completely freaked out, glitchy, frenzied-kabuki-theatre-on-acid kind of black metal with a strong penchant for speedy riffs. The whole affair feels properly damned, like it was meant to be something orderly and comfortably artistic but then got corrupted nearly beyond recognition. Some of it gets a bit too complacent and/or random in order to maintain a good listening flow, but if you let yourself get dazed to the point where everything starts to make sense, you might find that it pendulums between heaps of fun and something disturbingly profound.
Highlight: “Trinity Possessor (…In Ten Thousand Hells)”
To The Grave – Liberation Front
Genre: Deathcore
Subjective rating: 2.5/5
Objective rating: 3.5/5
Review: You know what you’re gonna get with these Aussies – an unstoppable landslide made up of boulders, butcher’s hatchets and demon roars, with the atmosphere of the Hostel films. They pull out all the stops on this one, clearly intent on hammering your brain into a gelatinous liquid. The shock and awe factor is immense, but unless you’re single-mindedly attuned to it, you’re going to be left numb after a while. With me, that happens pretty much three songs in. Too much of the time it’s just one crashing beat-riff after another leading into endless breakdowns, topped with cookie monster gurgles. There are truly awesome moments scattered throughout, but they’re a bit too few and far between to get properly hooked.
Highlight: “EYESTALK ABLATIONS”
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?
