“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.