Technicality, brutality, and a comforting display of aggression without being overproduced or artificial is the name of the game for Hypoxia.Continue reading
Tag Archives: Death Metal Albums
ALBUM REVIEW: Necrotted – Imperium
It certainly says something about a slamming Death Metal band when they’re able to both breed heaviness organically and give the listener a sense of being in good, capable hands throughout the onslaught.
ALBUM REVIEW: Crypta – Shades Of Sorrow
If Crypta failed to make it onto your radar after their 2021 debut, they’ve returned to ensure that doesn’t happen again.
ALBUM REVIEW: Olkoth – At The Eye Of Chaos
For seven years, the members of South Carolina-based Olkoth stewed over themes of horror and corruption. Interposed with a visceral hatred, At The Eye Of Chaos (Everlasting Spew Records) is the resulting debut full-length.
ALBUM REVIEW: Defiled – The Highest Level
With album artwork that looks like Job For A Cowboy meets a color run, the latest chapter in the death-metal saga of Defiled’s career is no less domineering or pounding than anything else the Tokyo-based band has delivered during their multi-decade existence.
ALBUM REVIEW: Mithridatum – Harrowing
The juxtaposing contradiction that is Mithridatum’s debut album Harrowing makes it surprisingly difficult to reach a conclusion.
The Willowtip release sees the newly formed trio (featuring former members of Abhorrent, The Faceless) jockeying with a myriad of other bands in an ultra-saturated landscape that is just begging for a group to come along and shatter the mold. As such, it’s nearly career suicide not to stand out from the rest (unless you’re AC/DC). Continue reading
ALBUM REVIEW: Dryad – The Abyssal Plain
The vaunted Mariana Trench is nearly seven miles deep underneath the ocean surface. Or in other words, it plummets down into the Earth more than Mt. Everest stands tall. The creatures that occupy that type of ecosystem need to withstand unimaginable pressure, cold temperatures and a complete lack of light.
And if that’s not terrifying enough, Dryad took this notion to the next level and crafted a thirty-five-minute opus that does as good a job as anything else in positing what the environs found down there might actually sound like via the medium of biting blackened metal: The Abyssal Plain (Prosthetic Records) captures and exploits the paralyzing nightmare of finding oneself in such an alien, unknown world. Foggy, muffled production represents the complete disorientation that would be felt so far below.
ALBUM REVIEW: Languish – Feeding The Flames Of Annihilation
To follow the seven-year trajectory that is Languish’s ascent from debut to their third and most recent offering is rewarding and comforting. The Arizonan death grinders were born as an independent group that had neither the backing of a record label nor even song titles for their first album, opting instead to use Roman numerals. Now, the foursome has harnessed the support of Prosthetic Records and is finally starting to carve out a compelling identity, and that journey crescendos with Feeding The Flames Of Annihilation, the first full-length to feature artwork that isn’t monochromatic.
ALBUM REVIEW: Faceless Burial – At The Foothills Of Deliration
There are (at least) two ways to ascertain if metal is going to be technically inspired: the cover or the song titles.
In fact, with an album entitled At The Foothills Of Deliration, maybe it was obvious all along.
ALBUM REVIEW: Autopsy – Morbidity Triumphant
Artificial intelligence is a concept seemingly ever-present in the modern day. But nobody talks about when musical instruments become sentient and develop their own mannerisms and consciousness.