This post collects the reviews posted to Instagram for the week. They cover mostly metal, but other genres might be considered. Blog exclusive reviews from other writers are featured, as well.
Scuttlegoat's Curmudgeonly Critiques
Blind Guardian - The God Machine
Genre: Power Metal
Label: Nuclear Blast
It's been a long time since 2015's Beyond the Red Mirror, but a band like Blind Guardian doesn't just go away. I appreciate it if a band slows down with age - a single group of humans can only have so many ideas and late period albums of big acts often sound uninspired or uninteresting. I had begun to write Blind Guardian off, as Red Mirror had been such an album. Heavy on the symphonics and widely devoid of any interesting guitar work, it presented the band at their most workmanlike - not something that suits a band that normally plays heavily with a kind of purposeful excess. This new album, however, signals some exciting new things for Blind Guardian and explores sides of the band I haven't heard in forever - if ever. This potentially ties in with the album cover as well, which is fittingly different but still fits Blind Guardian like a glove.
The God Machine is more guitar oriented than most of their albums. Even synth patterns like in "Secrets of the American Gods" are decidedly guitaristic and fit very well together with the guitar parts. A lot of the material is surprisingly technical and shows instrumental curiosity like we have not heard in forever - almost to a progressive degree. This comes with the added benefit that the album is much more aggressive than a lot of their earlier material, but without falling into the trap of returning to the overly simplistic pseudo-thrash of their early years. Becoming more heavy and more progressive at the same time is an unexpected move, but such a great show especially considering the landscape of power metal in 2022, which mostly seems to be obsessed with digging deeper and deeper for the lowest common denominator. The album has very few weaknesses: Hansi's voice shows some strain here and there and the album is definitely frontloaded. Overall a great and unexpected effort.
Rating: 7/10
Machine Head - ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN
Genre: Groove Metal
Label: Nuclear Blast
After 2018's Catharsis, an album with a rightfully horrendous reputation, Machine Head probably made a good choice taking a longer break. It took them 4 years to make this album and marks a definite improvement. It is evident from the get go that ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN isn't half-assed in the way Catharsis was. The bands first concept album, it is openly inspired by the Attack on Titan anime and yet, you could listen to this album without ever noticing. While the band and particularly Rob Flynn seem to have found something to be passionate about again, at least, it also seems like they didn't quite knew what they wanted this album to be. In some ways, I am impressed by the stylistic diversity on display here but I am too often presented with something I am just not after to be invested in the album.
The atmospheric (and surprisingly spacial) opening to the album is in a stark contrast to the track proper, which has some of their more aggressive recent material in it. The trademark jerky riffs full with natural harmonics, supported by almost industrial drums, are something that doesn't really grow old if executed well. It is all the surroundings that lead to the album not really working. The opening track is 10 minutes, but seems like he only has about 6 minutes of quintessential material in it. Machine Head are the strongest when they play their industrial neo-thrash, not when they try to be emotional. The unfortunate Nu metal part of their DNA is still very present here and they do not manage to avoid drifting into horrible alt rock sections or misplaced gothic rock sections either. It is hard not to compare ØF KINGDØM AND CRØWN to the bands best album, The Blackening that had similarly varied and long songs. The Blackening was tied together by an intense and constant feeling of anger. This new album does not have that.
Rating: 5/10
Chat Pile - God's Country
Genre: Sludge
Label: The Flenser
Dealing with the theme of urban despair and disenfranchisement as a band is a complicated ordeal. On one end of the spectrum is making only the most obvious statements that, while everyone will likely agree with them, end up feeling not very profound. On the other end of the spectrum is getting too high in the ivory tower and, once again, losing most of the meaning. It's a theme that in recent years, has been explored more and more by metal acts. Only this year, we had White Ward and Ashenspire deal with it (both reviewed on the blog) with differing results. Having now heard Chat Pile, I believe a lot of it is actually in the delivery.
Vocalist Raygun Bush in particular nails one of the hardest vocal styles in extreme music. Always just distorting his voice slightly and adding a melodic quality to his voice, but almost always intentionally missing or avoiding any kind of tune, his vocals appear more like a man having an anxiety attack than an actual vocalist. Together with his blunt but utterly strange lyrics, I can actually connect with his emotions. I know that Raygun has similar feelings about this society as I do, but with it comes the understanding that likely, things will never change. A hopelessness that is shared by the music, luckily. There is a certain amount of artifice to the way the album sounds and maybe even to how it is written. In particular the drum production is one of the strangest I have heard in a while. The reverb applied to the drums, or maybe a tight delay with repeats clustered directly after the source, makes it sound like the drums inhabit a completely fictitious space. Strangely suffocating but still feeling too big for what it is, maybe the drums are a good indicator for the headspace Chat Pile operate from. We do have the resources and people do not need to live outside...but why do I feel like I am suffocating?
Rating: (high) 7/10
Metalligatorrr's Additional Album Assesments
Dawnwalker - House of Sand
Genre: Rock / Post Metal
Label: Independent / Self Released
Straight from the onset of listening to House of Sand I could hear that there was something special about it. It's an album of rock songs, really, but also of small details and an overwhelming feeling of self inflicted misery. Used sparingly as a tool for contrast you'll also find some post metal riffs and repetition complete with some harsh growls. I have not quite heard these elements combined like this before. To see this as a simple and light album would be wrong though, as below the surface there's actually a lot to this release. A good example of this is the song "False Doors". It starts out as a folksy song with a pretty chorus only to morph past the midpoint into doom-fuelled post metal. This is done by the guitar taking on a tone that sounds like something out of a horror game (I'm reminded of a track from the first Silent Hill) to signal that something's wrong before the song turns very dark with a heavy doom riff.
The album is full of moments like this where a simple song idea is twisted into something completely different, a skill I've seen only a few bands handle lately (Unto Others comes to mind). I mentioned before that the choruses sound pretty albeit sad. This does not go for the lyrics, however. The subject matter here is a concept story of a man being left by his family or perhaps forcing them out, to live his life in painful solitude. The theme of struggling with meaninglessness all alone is heavy indeed and well executed here. This kind of psychological drama of a character's descent into personal hell makes the promo text's mention of bands like Opeth apt. Just before the albums midpoint there's a cover of Elvis Presley's "House of Sand", only it sounds like it's being played through a broken cassette player. The song takes on a distorted effect that displays a truly inspired sense of irony with its placement in the middle of an album like this.
Finally, the production is what seals the deal here. The band describes the process as stripped back and recorded as live as possible, without click-tracks and synthesized instruments. The raw and human sound that results makes the album claustrophobic yet full of life. There's instruments like piano and violin being used here but they are understated, showing that the band aren't trying to show off. Instead, each piece of the puzzle informs the whole of this slow despair-fuelled journey into death. A small point of critique I'd like to offer is that the spoken word used throughout the album sometimes takes me out of the mood. The main character bits are what feels a bit too fake to my ears. But this is a small flaw that I can overlook. Albums like this make me smash the play button just as soon as they are over so don't be surprised to see this again when list season rolls around the corner.
Rating: 8/10
Ashenspire - Hostile Architecture
Genre: Progressvie Black Metal
Label: Code666 Records
First impressions can make or break an album in the moment and my perception of Hostile Architecture was slightly broken by experiencing it as a YouTube stream the first time. This is an album that makes use of classical instruments to augment some pretty grimy black metal. Right out of the gate "The Law of Asbestos" shows a band that sound adept at using instruments such as a violin to make the metal hit differently than it otherwise would. It's used, not to add beauty, but to add tension and a sense of tragedy apt to the theme it represents. The song racks up in intensity and goes through a few movements building up to a decent climax. The following two songs follow suit with smartly used moments of calm and rage dispersed evenly.
While I usually consider lyrics of secondary importance to the music itself, this is a release you'll be either drawn to or not because of them. That said I find these three first tracks effective at a sort of observational horror fitting of black metal. Very real instead of all the Satan that usually goes around. At just before the midpoint of the tracklist something happens though. The band loses the plot, or rather it becomes all about the plot. The music, while still having moments, turns less structured and makes way for what feels like angry political rants. "Apathy as Arsenic Lethargy as Lead" reads as a tired repeat of the "false consciousness" -argument and "Cable Street Again" tries to scare you into picking a side in a coming undefined conflict. Worst of the bunch is "How the Mighty Have Vision", a song that tries to make a sort of church choir song about a single statement. It's cheesy and always jarring when it arrives.
All this takes me to where I started. The YouTube stream obscured the music and made me hyper-focused on the albums single worst element: the vocals. The vocalist here has some lines that work effectively when built up by the music but most of the time he spends in a kind of ranting mode that sounds truly dead in expression. Whatever poetry that could have been transferred from these lyrics is promptly killed by what sounds like a desperate YouTuber's rant. I think it's a shame as these flaws bring down an album that could easily have topped my year end list if it had been handled more carefully. But care isn't what Ashenspire want. They want war, with all that entails.
Rating: 6/10
Aeternam - Heir of the Rising Sun
Genre: Melodic Death Metal
Label: Independent / Self Released
As proved once again by the month of August, contemporary melodic death metal is a stale genre in desperate need of some sparks of life. One such spark was Aeternam's 2020 album Al Qassam, my first exposure to the band. It managed to be dramatic, beautiful and brutal at the same time without resorting to sickly sweet pop refrains and core. There were moments with clean vocals, of course, and these moments are expanded upon in Heir of the Rising Sun. Expanded is the word, as a lot of the material here seems to be developed to be a grander affair with spoken word and increased symphonic and folk elements. This also unfortunately means that the record as a whole moves slower, not a flaw in itself but I find that Aeternam doesn't handle this shift well enough. The hooks aren't there in the slower parts and this makes the songs feel longer than their already substantial runtimes.
Making a concept album always comes with risks. Artists can easily lose sight of what they're good at and this is such a case in my estimate. The blazing hooks and danger present on Al Qassam is watered out by the band trying to tell a longer story. It's nice to see them trying new things (I assume since I haven't heard their work prior to these two albums) but there are no bangers like "Ithyphallic Spirits of Procreation" or "Hanan Pacha" to be found here. A big part of this material not working for me is that the production is still way too loud. This is particularly noticeable in songs like "The Fall of Constantinople" which is supposed to finish the album off in a huge moment but ends up sounding flat in its delivery. Don't get me wrong, I think the songwriting on here is uninspired but the band isn't doing themselves any favors by not letting the softer parts breathe. Combined, these two flaws make me zone out often and this is death to a genre that relies largely on hooks.
Rating: 5/10
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