These paganistic Finns' 2011 album comprises four stately über-extended troll-metal rituals (all well over 11 minutes) broken up by three brief interludes in which a heavy-burdened man tromps across endless frigid terrain, coughing for breath as snow crunches beneath his feet and a baby cries; eventually, he succumbs to primal screams. The longer tracks feel by turns hopeful and funereal, sometimes involve cadence-shouting soldiers, and tend to be built atop almost jig-sprightly sub-Arctic folk progressions. Closer "Kuolleiden Maa" climaxes in multiple semisymphonic false-ending crescendos.
On their fourth album, you can totally tell this instrumental trio comes from Chicago, home to Tortoise and Sea and Cake. Russian Circles' metal machine Muzak basically rushes in circles like a louder, distorted version of the new agey so-called "post-rock" that those bands concocted back in the '90s. There's plenty of bloodily valentined oceanic shoegaze, too, which aligns them with combos like Isis, Pelican, Cult Of Luna and Red Sparowes. In "Atackla," they even manage some bombastic Glen Branca overtones. And in closer "Praise Be Man," they finally murmur a few words.
Given the seeming breakup-song bent of several lyrics (inspirational verse: "You never understand me! And I don't care what you think! Or maybe I do!"), the "Playground" in these once-death-metallic Swedes' 10th album title doesn't seem to signify abandoned jungle gyms so much as a loss Glen Campbell once lamented in "Where's the Playground Susie." Decorated in minor-key-melodic intros and on-and-off electronic body beats, In Flames sound pretty sad all through -- also pretty same-y, though it's sort of special when they enter extreme hermit mode in "The Attic" and the talked "Jester's Door."
Several of these 13 songs were once bonus tracks, downloads or videogame placements. Yet the hodgepodge hangs together okay, partly thanks to lots of aging Alice Cooper shtick: Notably in the multi-rhymed bad-guy tune "Public Enemy No. 1," teen-angst tantrum "Whose Life (Is It Anyways?)" and schlock horror story "Deadly Nightshade." We get current events, too: global illuminati conspiracy theories in "We the People" and "New World Order"; Mexican cartels in "Guns, Drugs, & Money." Plus some hot guitar -- curiously Van Halen-like in spots; occasionally steamrolling, shredding or psychedelic.
Ferocious hardcore with elements of black, death, grind and doom metal, All Pigs Must Die's debut for Southern Lord is a bottomless pit of aggression delivered with high-speed musical brutality. A throwback to the intense-negativity heyday of death metal, this fresh (if sweaty) burst of ticked-off air is sure to soothe folks annoyed by the hipsterization of the genre. With only a self-titled EP and this first full-length under their belt, APMD are rippling with potential, proving that the ancient rites of extreme metal are as vital as ever.
Playing heavily rhythmic, butchershop-riffed metal, but yelling like punks (low voice sorta early Black Flag and high voice sorta Dropkick Murphys, usually with An! Exclamation! Point! On! Every! Word!), this Savannah band keeps things concise, by metal if not hardcore standards -- 10 songs, almost all around three or four minutes. The tracks assume creative stop-and-start structures, grind speedily here and sludgily there and oily always, and boom like old Swans toward the end of "Carved in Stone." But does "Bring Me Darkness" go "Six! Six! Six!" or "Sick! Sick! Sick!"? Or both?
Though each of these five mostly long songs gets its own Latin scientific-name subtitle, you'll be hard-pressed to decipher their paleontological specifics with the undulating mullah-like boy-and-girl vocals. But that detracts little from Giant Squid's congruent Middle Eastern drones, which somehow link goth, psych and Krautrock into modern metal. One track, "Snakehead (Channidae erectus)," turns cello parts and an Eastern European gypsy two-step into swirling chamber metal that somehow channels obscure old art-bohos such as Certain General and Azalia Snail.
Though their fungus-caked and grumble-grunted background-metal gunk of the Northwest forest-yurt underworld is consistently enveloping, not to mention morose, these Olympia, Wash., farm-dwellers fare best on their fourth studio album whenever Aaron Weaver's synths step in. They clang like lonely wind chimes, gnaw like hungry meat-grinders, abrade like knives under canine-howled new age mantras. The two shorter tracks are the most avant-garde, though the medievally plain-chanted "Woodland Cathedral" comes close. The final 21 minutes -- that's just two songs -- are a bit of a slog, however.
These Denver melodic death metal ninjas have been turning heads since their self-titled EP surfaced in 2008. Their schizoid combination of highly technical death metal with gurgling vocals that at times veer into serious melodies makes Vale of Pnath's debut full-length distinctive, to say the least. Not quite as slide-ruler-demanding as Gorguts, or as far out as Nile -- but certainly cut from a similarly nerdy cloth -- the band really comes together on "Mental Crucifixion," an orgy of metalcore ribboning, insistently catchy cookie-monsterisms and brutal shifts in tempo.
As might be expected, the 2011 release from these Nashville experimental-metal veterans (their first in four years) is a non-stop tidal wave of straight-rockin' noise metal (whatever that is) and horrendous volumes. Informing the machine-gun spray of sonic viciousness with a personal nature in the lyrics department, Today Is the Day have always worked somewhere left of center, and Pain Is a Warning, despite bedrock riffs, is just as far out as their Amphetamine Reptile material. It is certainly anything but the product of a band with nothing left to say.
Monster drum grooves (slammed out on an enormous John Bonham-style kit) and verdant, searching soloing is what sets this power trio apart from most Sabbath-doom types. In some ways they're more a heavy hippie band, stretching out every one of their second album's five elongated (about 9 to 12 minutes apiece) songs with blues-based jam interplay that mimics the album art's drug-dream vistas, and occasionally blasts into a deep-space black hole. In parts of the title track they even sound like the mid-'80s, Dead-and-Neil-Young-infused Meat Puppets -- perhaps absorbed via J Mascis.
One of the first (and best) bands to be labeled as part of the New Wave of American Heavy Metal movement, Machine Head follow up their critically acclaimed 2007 album The Blackening with this equally legitimate, and loud as all hell, mixture of black and death metal. While it may not be so advisable to open the record with a piece subtitled "Sonata in C#," singer Robb Flynn and guitarist Phil Demmel make up for it with wriggling riffs galore and decidedly hairy vocals. Don't miss "Locust" -- it's like Pantera with pop moves at the chorus, no lie.
