This co-ed Virginia quartet's first full-length is as confident and realized a debut as has come down the metal pike in many a moon. Two instrumentals ignite midway between '70s fusion and '80s Metallica; seven songs with words alternately set mythic D&D play-by-play to relaxed NWOBHM or the toastiness, tunefulness, rhythm and calm of classic Thin Lizzy. Criss-crossing guitars of Paul Sebring and Marie Landragin warm prog intricacy with blues á la the great lost Chicago band Winterhawk. Landragin finally takes vocal reins in "The Desert," and closes the set traversing Yes-like topography.
Together for three decades, Quebec's science-metal astronauts still rule their own planet.Target Earth, their 16th studio album, is named for its lead song, about a mass cyber-attack initiated on a home computer. That's followed by Inuit mythology, alien invasion, nuclear destruction, street demonstration, and deteriorating bodies and minds. Tracks tend toward longish but are dense, infectious and occasionally punk-speed, often opening with extended robot mechanics or incorporating indigenous globalisms. As for new guitarist Chewy, the late Piggy smiles down on him from prog-thrash heaven.
These Toledo boogie-stoners open up with an ominous riff, echoing and building and panning across speakers like early Aerosmith back in the saddle to record an open-expanse spaghetti western about recovering debts on a horse named Mexico. "The Job," the song's called, and the band never equals it. But their harmonica-hopped backporch-biker heaviness holds its own regardless, ripping down wanted posters and dodging hanging-tree blood as it goes. Eventually Cheap Trick's Robin Zander ups the pitch for six minutes of "You're My Girl," and in "Shoot My Way Out" they funk out with burly 16th notes.
This Pasadena neo-thrash crew's two guitarists, one a newcomer on this second album, slide into plenty of lush solo interplay to cancel out any brief death or screamo hints. Melodies don't end there, either: A couple dark ballads balance superfast semi-automatic ratatats without sounding sappy; opening harmonies of "Sleep of Virtue" shine an almost doo-wop sweetness and light; opener "Archeus" and Spanish-classical interlude "Wake Me When It's Over" are no less lovely for lacking lyrics. And when James-Paul Luna does sing, he comes off like a bratty young human, not an ugly old monster.
Most distinctive thing about this '80s-style blue-jeaned Brit speed-power-metal trio's 2012 EP is that two of the six tracks are cute 20-second "transmissions" of Maggotronic electro-robot chatter. Which, along with the ginormous purple mechani-dinosaur on the cover, suggests a fascination with future scientific inventions. Little of that translates in the four actual songs, but they pack enough impatiently thrashed low-rent noodling and switcheroos to keep batteries charged -- long galloping closer "Oblivion's Call" might even sneak in a brief reference to Edgar Winter's "Frankenstein.
These yodel-progging Netherlanders' fourth album since the '70s ended veers mostly toward instrumental jazz fusion, fronted by lifetime member Thijs Van Leer's flute and organ. "Father Bachus" opens it up with a big rock riff, then gets fancy; not until deep into the seventh track, "Hoeratio," do things get as aggressive as, say, '70s Rush. Even "Amok in Kindergarten" doesn't quite run amok. But "All Hens on Deck" chicken-scats fast, funky and silly enough, and between medieval jigging ("Talk of the Clown") and percussion-rocked lounge-lizardry ("X Roads"), there is still weird fun to be had.
As allegedly grooving Down/COC/Brand New Sin-style sludgers go, this Columbus, Ohio trio-plus-pals stands out for both the gunky chunkiness of Brad Stemple's axe tone and the coherence of Paul Jones' macho low-fiber-diet croaking. Rick Ritzler's drums aren't exactly funky or propulsive, but he keeps a musclebound beat. They let oxygen in, too, when their doom heads skyward and when backup harmonies turn King's X frilly. They stay too close to grunge, but "Keepers of the Night" is quality fake Sabbath, "Chicken Little" swipes a Zep riff, and man-handling Cinderella's "Night Songs" took gonads.
These Germans -- especially the two who never left the lineup -- have been cranking out souped-up Euro-power-metal since the mid-'80s, so they've got it down pretty well by now. They open their 14th album paying tribute to the allegedly millennia-old middle-Eastern proto-democracy Nabataea, then argue against corporate warfare and in favor of scientific skepticism, work in Beatlesque art-pop ("Live Now!") and Killing Joke jungle drums ("Wanna Be God"), and bash out a few speedy vicious ones. On the Premium Edition, they get out a Hammond organ in memory of Deep Purple's Jon Lord.
Following a 2011 debut that inspired more hipster blog bytes than the rest of Copenhagen's population combined, depressive Danes Iceage return with a squatter-rock sophomore set maybe even punkier than its predecessor -- at least if punk means varying your Killing Joke dolor with Hüsker Dü Zen Arcade barrage (see "In Haze" and "It Might Hit First") fronted by Darby Crash-style blabbermouthing through a Vaselined lens. "Ecstasy" gets stressed out and spits staccato; "Interlude" goes the militia-drummed industrial instrumental route. "Everything Drifts" raises fists like the revolution's begun.
Their trappings suggest occult rock of the Devil's Blood ilk, but this ostensibly demonic Austin, Tex. outfit sounds more like the commercial end of grunge: Alice In Chains harmonies, clearly, but also artsier inheritors like Days Of The New and, disturbingly, every-hair-in-place moaners like David Cook. There's gothic metal in there, too: oafish Americans Danzig and Type O Negative, at least, plus '90s Metallica. Heavy riffs are rare, but "The Last Man On Earth"'s Chris Isaak hushabilly is a surprise, and chain and wind sounds lend "I Am Rebirth" and "Here Is The Grave" an eerie atmosphere.
This black-eyeliner-sporting, Cincinnati-rooted L.A. emo-goth-glam band's third album went top 10 in its first Billboard week, and apparently took some work to get there: This is an ambitious record, a 19-track Kilroy Was Here/Operation: Mindcrime-type concept opera about an organization called F.E.A.R. trying to round up and suppress young rebel deviants, who ultimately foil the Megachurch of Lies. Semi-legit power-to-hair-metal riffs and high-mass chorales uplift the bombast a bit, between piano-schlock and narration interludes. "Days Are Numbered" and "In The End" even manage crunchy hooks.
Clearly still misanthropic messengers of mundanity even if you can only make out snatches of complaint, these Allentown, Penn. reprobates spend most of their fourth set yanking their dirty, dirgey glop downward with basslines anchored Flipper-style deep beneath the Lehigh River. They tell a "Teenage Adult" not to grow up; "Cafeteria Food" snarls at a "stick-figure family" stuck to some car. Now and then, a hook surfaces: Stranglers melody in "Bathroom Laughter," garage riff in "Cathouse," and the guitars in the doctor-shunning "Health Plan" catapult out the gate like mid-'80s Hüsker Dü.
Anglo-Saxons from Saxony, in the former East Germany, Alpha Tiger do a tasteful, operatic-chorused '80s prog-bombast metal thing that'd be more diverting if they played faster (as they do to start "From Outer Space"), if their rhythm section had more thickness to it (as it does to start "We Came From the Gutter"), if they really sounded like they came from an outer-space gutter, and if their songs didn't outwear their welcome. As is, Queensryche fans might fall for them regardless, and those munchkins conducting the call-and-response Q&A in "Eden Lies in Ruins" do earn their fall from grace.
If Otep Shamaya's music still qualifies as metal, it's due more to gratuitous deathcore ogre retching than to riffs. Or maybe it's because she gets mad a lot -- notably at a webcamming pet-torturer in "Voyeur," who she opts to torture herself. More often she recites poetry about "mental sodomy," "celestial incest" and sundry dominatrix fetishes in a breathy Marilyn Manson whisper-to-scream, over synthesized drippings and, in "Seduce & Destroy," quasi-Middle-Eastern tones. Later she halfway nods to very early Patti Smith and (in the cutely bubble-rapped "Apex Predator") Blondie's "X Offender."
Several tracks on this Welsh metalcore foursome's fourth album grab early with guitar intros, and a few make way for savory power-metal fills later; Michael Paget is clearly no klutz. The songs themselves, though, are almost embarrassingly clichéd in their sub-late-Metallica therapy-session emotionality: "Temper temper, time to explode/ Feels good when I lose control." Several lyrics address mean people (especially girls), and "Saints & Sinners" damns the bad folks for eternity. Only when running from sirens in the punkish, Misfits-shouted "Riot" do BFMV sound like they're having much fun.
