Keeping most songs right around the five-minute mark, this paradiddle-loving Portland math-metal bunch makes its third full-length an onslaught of sections within sections, little riffs hidden inside big ones. Gregory Meleney's vocals float airy and nasal like an aging Ozzy, and his and Andrew Forgash's guitars certainly have their heavy stoner moments -- notably in the title track. A couple mid-album tracks also add some extended Heep/Purple cathedral organ, out of a dusky sort of Western prairie feel in "The Last Goodbye." But hooks you'll remember aren't what you'd call Danava's priority.
From these corpse-painted Hot Topic ghoulies comes an eight-cut, 40-minute-plus stack of rarities and remixes. It opens with a staticky late-night-radio call about Siberian oil drillers encountering "sounds from Hell," then gets kitschier from there, tempering all its demon and witch fighting with plenty of Brit-accented Masterpiece Theatre declamation. Notable moments include medieval moans and AOR crunch riffs opening "The Persecution Song," an electro-trance-dance reboot of the confession-boothed "Forgive Me Father" and some concluding haunted house program music, "Summer Dying Fast."
On their second album back in action after an eight-year '00s hiatus, Syracuse's straight-edgers sound typically ticked off -- or at least Karl Buechner does, given his PETA-inspired praying-to-porcelain-god horror-thuggy tirades about capitalism, biological weapon attacks, parasites and vileness, and self-preservation. For a vegan, he sure does have a low-fiber throat. Still, the stars here are guitarists Scott Crouse and Erick Edwards, who temper the band's thick-necked heavycore with all manner of surprising surf, psych, soundtrack and wah-wah licks.
Skeletonwitch plunder Ohio graveyards, but in a blindfold test you might guess their beast-grunted devil-metal came from someplace bitter and Scandinavian. While the drummer is usually not super-distinctive, now and then he forgoes blast-beats for a near-power-rock bottom. But the real saving grace is the two guitarists, who open the album almost placidly folk-strumming, then solo in commendably exploratory ways in cuts like "Reduced to the Failure of Prayer." Most magnificent climax comes in "Cleaver of Souls," which is also simultaneously the most harmonized and Celtic Frost-like track.
Though they claim to be inspired by speed metal's early giants and flaunt the negative production values to prove it, these Oakland, California throwbacks rarely keep their tempos fast for long -- not even in the drum-rolled "God's End," which enters whiplashing like 1983 Metallica. But they can stomp. "The Eye Obscene" and instrumental "Earth's Possession and Death's Procession" are seven-minute wonders of moon-cave ooze; "To the Grave Possessed" tops hearty '70s rock riffs with a manly chorus. Then "Walk to the Light" finishes it all by scaling Power Metal Mountain.
Claims of Southern swamp-boogie in these Alabama boys' genes were always overstated, but on their fourth album, they dive head-first into contemporary radio-rock anonymity. A few cuts do open with some smoky semblance of barbecue-pit riffing, and the intro of "Taking on Water" even cops rustic Skynyrd licks. But as soon as Dallas Taylor starts busting his gut and baring his aching heart, any scorch inevitably dissolves into an aggregate of post-grunge, pop-punk, Christian rock and screamo. Tentative echoes of '80s Aerosmith in "Killing Me Slow" and "Cat's Walk" are as grooving as this gets.
Subtract the placid minute-and-a-half intro with drifting female vocal and the under-a-minute stoned-in-freshman-dorm monologue about how there's enough stars up there for each of us to have our own world, and that leaves just four songs on these Arkansas avant-sludgers' 2011 platter -- all extremely long and intermittently psychedelic, with hysterical yowling and yapping that suggests a chupacabra caught in a bear trap, alternating with occasional Middle Eastern melodies, backwards masking, nifty guitar solos and drawn-out sad parts. At the end, somebody informs us that it was all a dream.
Opening with a long-term relationship song that might be the closest thing to a Stones rip they've ever done, and seemingly inspired from there by Extreme, INXS, early '80s Queen, and -- no joke -- Justin Timberlake, these prog-metal vets make a funk-rock record. And they don't hide it: "Wot We Do" has Geoff Tate begging you to "put your hands in the air" on "the dancefloor." He also pants a lot (in "Got It Bad," "Higher," "Drive") about wanting to turn on hot women. Things get more subtle, protest-y and slightly heavier toward the end. But mostly these old guys just wanna get down tonight.
Contrary to published hype -- and despite the anomalously over-the-top opener "Shockwave" on their teenaged 2008 debut -- these Miami whippersnappers are neither a thrash nor a power metal band. On their 2011 follow-up Post Mortem, they stick to contemporary commercial loud rock, in "so damn numb" screamo mode. Matt Tuck of Bullet For My Valentine bares his sensitive soul in "Ashes," the first song; the album closes with a blatantly radio-friendly ballad, "Into The Sky," preceded by the metalcore bark "Walking Dead Man." If this is a throwback to Metallica, it's to '90s Metallica.
Still dirging to the moon and back but not distorting half as much as in the old daze, these drone-doom titans open slow then get slower. But the first few cuts here feel, well, down-to-earth, regardless, mainly because their gradually shifting minor-key metal-gaze seems constructed out of rustic reverberations and dusky twang that hark back to spaghetti westerns, maybe even Link Wray, with enough quiet space to hear the cymbals chiming. As the tracks draw out longer, though (ultimately peaking above 20 minutes), be prepared for your eyelids to get heavy, though not necessarily in a bad way.
These rock-radio successes split their third album between pleading sensitivity about mean girlfriends and klutzy but not humorless rap-metal bullying. The former occasionally recalls System of a Down; the latter occasionally recalls Anthrax circa "I'm The Man," though "The Pride" (which namedrops NASCAR, PBR, Bill Gates, MySpace, JFK and the NFL) sounds like the only rapcore ever inspired by Billy Joel's "We Didn't Start the Fire." "Back for More" is some passingly melodic jock-rock trash talk; "American Capitalist" possibly a protest song. Much of the rest is directed at people they hate.
Mike Patton and his fellow tricksters ring out the old and bring in the new onstage, drawing the first 15 of 18 selections from 2001's Director's Cut, which was all reverent-to-mangled remakes of mostly instrumental themes from scary, suspenseful, and/or supernatural movies from the '20s (Der Golem) to the '90s (Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me). So: plenty of blips, blurps, oinks, grunts, whispering, screeching, fritzing, flatulence and door-creaking, with olde-world tuneage tossed in. To close, they follow a punchline-less riddle with noisy joke covers of Al Green and T. Rex songs.
Reportedly now an actual Portland trio, even if onetime one-man thrash-revival band Joel Grind doesn't always employ the same rhythm section live, Toxic Holocaust get all down-and-dirty here about flesh-eating zombies destroying your mind, bitches burned at the stake, nightmare killers behind your back, personal hells you can't escape, and the Book of Revelations. There's something half-cooked and generic about it, but that doesn't stop "The Liars Are Burning" from turning low-budget riffs into chubby hooks or "Sound the Charge" from getting a decent bullyboy-hardcore battlefield gallop going.
