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.