High-octane, well-heeled burr-under-the-saddle blues attack rock and roll. One of the five best live bands I’ve seen, and I saw Nuge/Black Oak Arkansas in ’78.
Like Van Halen and the Crüe, they were the house band at L.A. hair metal haven, Gazarri’s, albeit only crafting one major label record, making them a footnote.
Eliminating the open environments and trick/mission-based challenges and focusing on downhill races, Downhill Jam creates a fast, funny, attractive racer.
Like Paradise Lost, Amorphis seems bent on encompassing their catalogue and compressing it into diamonds of progressive, note-dense, mostly quite heavy tracks.
Tori at her most flexible and multi-faceted. The sheer length of the album could be a turn off to people who don’t have the time or perseverance to harvest it.
The rich hooks and ringing guitars are still here, but now so are dance beats that bring out a whole new color, and recall OMD, The Cure, and Morrissey.
Beginning life as a poisonous black metal cabal, moving through luminous, magical industrial metal, through too much techno, and now, back to a heavy medium.