“For Your Vulgar Delectation” is prime latter-day COF, bringing a rock ‘n’ roll sensibility that sets them far apart from more “true” black metal recordings.
Want your artwork to overshadow your band’s musical accomplishments? Feature two bloody naked chicks making out while hooded, skull-faced phantoms watch.
Doom titans My Dying Bride hit all the right notes on 2009’s crushingly bleak For Lies I Sire, and its proper follow up treads along that same darkened path.
Dark Ages was a supremely confident slice of sludge metal. Perhaps emboldened by the praise it received, the band gets little adventurous on Lovelessness.
Metalcore stalwarts As I Lay Dying make good, sometimes not great, melodic metal. Their catalog feels a little clogged with solid rather than stellar material.
Once past the disappointment that this isn’t an Alice Cooper cover, “Bed of Nails” is a pretty cool slice of lean metalcore from this young Pennsylvania crew.
“Lucky Animals” from his latest, Epicloud, continues the bizarre carnival. Are we really hearing Pink Floyd, Mr. Bungle, and Strapping Young Lad all at once?
“Kunnia,” a track from the Finnish folk metallers’ new album, Manala, may not reach quite the same high as “Vodka,” but it makes us want to party nonetheless.
Seriously chunky, pit-friendly fare. They’re looking to expand beyond the north east of England, and killer beatdowns like “Warface” should help them do that.
Extreme progressive metal OGs Enslaved have rocketed past 20 years of existence as a band and are showing no signs of abandoning their adventurous spirit.
Italian doomsters The Foreshadowing get props from Katatonia’s Anders Nyström for being “one of the finest quality doom acts around these days.” High praise indeed.
It’s hard not to have a sweet spot for all of the killer riffs of the “Gothenburg sound.” Darkness by Oath even snags The Haunted’s Anders Bjorler for a solo.