Acephalix sifts through the filth and muck of old school death metal by carving out their own crossroads where Autopsy meets Entombed and the Swedish HM-2 brigade. Decreation has a bit more groove and swing in its pockets than you would expect though, and opener “Upon This Alter,” despite having all the requisite guitar squeals and borderline unintelligible grunting pops with a killer hook in its chorus. Continue reading “Acephalix: Decreation (2017)”
Somewhere in the West, in the days after, there’s a busted and broken shack in the middle of the desert. In the middle of nowhere. You can’t see it, but emanating out from the shack are radio waves, the last call of a dying and possibly insane man trying to communicate to a world he can no longer see or recognize in the only language he can speak: rock and roll. Whether it reaches anyone is besides the point: between the fires and radiation the landscape for either music or understanding is barren. But still the waves spread outward, because even talking to the emptiness is still talking.
Somewhere, in another West, in the days now, there’s a garage filled with amplifiers and cabinets. Between the clipped fury of a guitar a signal emerges, much to the surprise of the man holding the guitar. It’s in a language he understands, and it draws him closer to the mesh of the speaker even as his hands find the record button on a nearby tape deck.
Welcome to the Black Kite Broadcasts. Continue reading “Qoheleth: Black Kite Broadcasts (2018)”
At some point everyone got tired of post-metal, and if your band name wasn’t ISIS or Neurosis you were simply dubbed Neur-ISIS and shunted off to a corner to learn some humility while the rest of the music listening world went bananas over the next big thing. Luckily Rosetta never took any of that to heart, and their fourth album, The Anaesthete, is a dynamic … Continue reading Rosetta: The Anaesthete (2013)
Short but sweet. The reason why John and I have been Facebook friends for so many years is something I’ll never remember, although I *think* it had to do with a science fiction book review site I used to write for. Regardless, once I became acquainted with John I discovered his one-man DIY rock/pop confections, songs that so beautifully capture the harmonies and emotions of … Continue reading John Anealio: The Summer EP (2013)
By the time of 2017’s Crossover Ministry Iron Reagan lost a lot of lustre for me. By then I had devoured crossover thrash from my youth and the intervening years that the music hit all the beats but missed all the crucial elements that made the band such a vital voice, leaving the band to feel more and more like Municipal Waste without the sense … Continue reading Iron Reagan: Demo 2012 (2012)
I realize I’m not the only who loved Minor Threat, but one of the things that was so amazing about their music was that discovering it felt so personal, like it didn’t matter how many people told you about it; when you first heard something like “Filler” (my first Minor Threat song) or “Out of Step” or the blistering “Seeing Red” it felt like a … Continue reading Satanic Threat: In To Hell (2013)
Consuming the Tangible (test) 