I think what makes this such a remarkable record and certainly one of the year’s best and brightest is the fact that its ensemble is so acrobatic; you can’t help but see the players physically (or arduously) shifting themselves between instruments or disciplines, multitasking to achieve what you so seamlessly hear… Their efforts obviously a …
Vale of Pnath long ago found the niche between melodic and technical death metal as easily as Spawn of Possession did inside 2006′s Noctambulant; this is where the riff reigns supreme, and brutality is a matter of composition and careful writing. I stress that, from its opening seconds, “Legacy of Loss” has that real heft …
Dads – Brush Your Teeth ; ) The marriage between emo and math rock would have overstayed its welcome (it really was something to welcome with Cap’n Jazz) had the occasional masterwork (We Were Skeletons, Giraffes? Giraffes!, etc) not been released with surprising regularity – The other good thing is that I haven’t found a …
Atrophy is definitely an album that wants to be heard and one that lets its own writing speak on behalf of it. Then again, it’s not a disc I want to subsume to tablature and pore over the skeleton; it feels too authored and complete for that. Jason Roe, Scott Addison, and Andrew Hawkins play …
I think the word of the night was “mazes”; the charmingly underlit Lee’s Palace, its ziggurat main floor, tangled (effects board) cabling like climbing vines… John LaMonica unraveled tracks of artisanal dreampop for the mash-up age, more a supervisor of his digital concoctions than performer of them. No, he maintained an upper hand with a …
Not so much chronicling as point-and-shooting a few (working) hours in the lives of celebrity impersonators, Just About Famous is a short doc that works as a proof-of-concept for a potentially meaningful examination. The project has wrangled up an impressive number of the self-professed entertainers, and a good deal of them are uncanny (Palin and …
Parting the Sea Between Brightness and Me, the mouthful, is as much an overstatement as Touché Amoré‘s self-assured school of hardcore knocks. Though overwhelmingly been-there, you’d be hard pressed to find a band that plays done-that with this much bravado. Meeting at the same ends as last year’s confused Lucky Me (from the tragically defunct …
Deafheaven have mounted an ambitious black metal LP and one that is a heartwarming release from the brutally earnest Deathwish Records. Ambitious in the way that Roads to Judah maintains a more purist Nordic BM concoction while skillfully sidelining the four tracks with contemporary Stateside experimentation; don’t get me wrong, I’m not missing the news …
Last night my country had another unrequited election; I know the parliamentary majority of voters had their say, but the cynics who lost (of which I am one) were quick to pan the eligible kids who slept in or didn’t want to go back to their old public schools. Most people are gripping the present …
It was when Krallice members Nick McMaster, Lev Weinstein, and Mick Barr folded their hands over their instruments as Colin Marston rounded out the end of new track “Telluric Rings” with rung out string picking – James of Titan put it best, being “dedicated to metal”, wry as it was – Any doubt in the …
