Back in the era of the Great Plague (2021), I was exposed to the debut by long-lurking Bay Area death metal scuzzers Laceration. Demise was an entertaining old school platter of sensory destruction, borrowing from legends like Immolation and early days Death to deliver the hammer to the locked-down, infected masses. It showed high levels of technical finesse and songwriting chops and I looked forward to hearing what came next for them. What comes next is sophomore outing I Erode, and it finds Laceration even more proficient, confident, and ready to kick teeth and crack bones. Still borrowing f ..read more

In emergence to the full-length foray now ten years ago, Artificial Brain launched into orbit a novel style of knotted and screeching death metal that brought with it a slingshotting mass of a tangible cosmic horror. And though it’s up for debate whether they’ve yet to best that offering, it’s easy to declare that the Artificial Brain attack is one that has largely remained singular, definitive, and pushing adjacent bands—like cousin Afterbirth—to corners of space not cast from shadow to light. But as a distant sun shines about the gravity of that modern act, time tells us that eventually, som ..read more

From the seemingly boundless nightmare realm that is the melting pot of extreme, dissonant black and blackened death metal, Occulta Veritas arises. The creation of Daniele Vergine, guitarist of Noise Trail Immersion, it veers off on its own experimental path with that project as a starting point. Blending post, atmospheric, and the most chaotically inaccessible black metal into an unusual, confrontational whole, Irreducible Fear of the Sublime presents its own challenge. The world the album takes its listener into is one that—perhaps typically, but very appropriately—purports to delve deep int ..read more

Germany’s Act of Creation has been around for over a decade yet it seems no one around these parts has ever heard of them. After looking into their discog and history, they’ve been down an interesting road in the last fourteen years—specifically regarding vocalists. The vocals were handled by male voices for the band’s first three releases, with the occasional guest vocalist(s). Twenty-twenty’s The Uncertain Light saw them shift to a female vocalist, Jess, who is by far their best vocalist to date. Unlike acts like Opera IX, who transitioned from the mighty vocals of their female counterpart t ..read more

My third review ever for this site covered Swedeath quartet Vanhelgd’s fifth outing Deimos Sanktuarium. I was still a n00b then, and my reference points for a great many albums then pales in comparison to the arsenal of touchstones at my disposal today. Six years after my inevitable installment as Grand Spongus of Angry Metal Guy, Vanhelgd marks my first repeat band from my n00b era as they prepare to unleash their sixth salvo, Atropos Doctrina. There’s no time like the present to revisit a band from my critical upbringing. Onwards, to Atropos Doctrina! Six years between albums changed Vanhelg ..read more

Barring a short sample, one of numerous scattered across the album, “Get fucked” is the first lyric spewed forth on fifth LP Die For Us from Australian extreme metal anarchists, Werewolves. It’s a fitting introduction to the vitriolic assault on the senses the Australian trio unleash on their latest opus of controlled chaos and destruction. Comprising a trio of accomplished underground musicians, sporting a combined resume that includes time spent in The Antichrist Imperium, The Amenta, Psycroptic, Ruins, King and Faustian among other recognizable names, Werewolves have carved a prolifically e ..read more

Look at this, another metal exploration by the horror-loving guitarist and drum programmer, Horror Illogium. While staying busy between his efforts as founder of Portal and guitarist of Vomitor, this Australian native seems incapable of sitting still for long. With the help of the vocalist and guitarists of Australia’s newest Pustilence, Illogium is out to ravage the annals of black, death, thrash, and speed metal with Mages Terror’s debut record, Damnation’s Sight. While the man is not new to writing thrashy licks for Vomitor, Mages Terror is an old-school tribute to the sounds of olde. Strip ..read more

When first I heard Indianapolis OSDM fiends Obscene on their 2020 The Inhabitable Dark debut, I was quite impressed by the raw, nasty sound they wielded like a blood-soaked cudgel. It was like the best bits of early Pestilence, Asphyx, and Obituary distilled into something extra gruesome and then leaked into the beer supply. It offered nothing I hadn’t heard prior, but it kicked much ass and took many a name. I was considerably less enamored with the 2022s From Dead Horizon to Dead Horizon, which felt less impactful and memorable, although the basic template and style remained the same. It see ..read more

Pleroma is a kaleidoscope of colors and emotions, composed like an odyssey. It showers listeners with haunting arpeggios, winding riffs, and chamber instruments, adorned with a crown of myriad vocal styles both harsh and soothing, male and female – a far-reaching and royally ambitious sum and completion of its divine components. For an act that saturates its assault with all the decadence and bombast of a metal opera, Orgone is deeply entrenched in subtlety and restraint. Songwriting takes front and center, and nary a moment is wasted. It’s an exclamatory manifesto and toppling breeze of compl ..read more

It awakens. Hope dies. Well-rested after an eight-year slumber since Krighsu, Wormed boots up. Programmed for violence, its processor whirs as it hones in on your location. It finds you in minutes; hiding in the alley behind St. Vitus wasn’t your best move. As soon as you spot its piercing red eyes, you realize the jig is up. In that split second, you see Wormed’s sculpted metal features gleaming in the midnight neon, like a steel diagram of the muscular system. You don’t know its Origin. All you know is that you have to run. So you run. It chases. You cut southeast to throw it off, but Omegon ..read more