Based in Birmingham, UK, Cattle Hammer was formed by vocalist/guitarist Duncan Wilkins (Fukpig, Mistress) in 2023. He’s joined by I Cartwright on drums, J Wyles on guitar, and D Von Donovan on bass. Together, they mix a caustic brew of drone, doom, and sludge, but each track on Dark Thoughts with Lights Out has its own identity. “Gloomsower” leans stony, and Wilkins oscillates between deep roars and strangled croaks reminiscent of Weedeater. “Rotting” features short tremolos, although they don’t do much besides check the “blackened” box on the PR sheet. The ambient, noise-tinged intro to “Watchmen, Alone” caught my attention, but repetition of the vocal sample stunts its ability to build tension. Similarly, “Body Puzzle” ends on some interesting synths, but it’s a tough sell so late in the album. If you can’t tell, I’m really reaching for positives here, but there’s not a one that isn’t ultimately a disappointment.

Every time I thought Cattle Hammer might do something interesting or better texturize Dark Thoughts with Lights Out, they shrank from the occasion. The early lead guitar in “Gloomsower” is a bright change of pace amidst thick, doomy passages, but instead of playing a countermelody or variation on the theme or literally anything else, it just plays the same fucking riff in a higher register. This same-riff-different-instrument/key tactic is fairly common (“Rotting,” “Watchmen, Alone”). Organ (“Watchmen, Alone,” “Body Puzzle”) and piano (“Rotting”) make appearances, but fail to deliver anything justifying their inclusion. Static and feedback crop up frequently, but in Cattle Hammer’s hands, they are merely unpleasant and banal. While I was intrigued by the first sample² and always appreciate Sheri Moon Zombie,³ Cattle Hammer’s sample usage is ham-fisted and melodramatic. Each of these ornaments gave me hope that I might soon feel something besides boredom and frustration, but invariably, Dark Thoughts with Lights Out dashed my hopes and shuffled on.

What astounds me most on Dark Thoughts with Lights Out is how avoidable many of these blunders seem. Percussion is a little lackluster, and the instruments seem a bit compressed in the mix, leaving the vocals too far in front. These aren’t deal breakers, but playing fewer riffs—I’m being generous, calling them that—in 45 minutes than I have fingers is. Structuring the front half of a song to sound like a narrative climax with no build-up or release is (“Watchmen, Alone,” “Body Puzzle”). Rhythmic density rivaling the emptiness of space is. Ambient, feedback-laden outros enough to compile an EP is. This album is ostensibly meant to convey misery and suffering, but devoid of creativity or artistic abstraction, it misses the mark that acts like Primitive Man, The Body, or Sumac hit so well. It’s as if Cattle Hammer has crafted some misguided meta experience, in which the act of listening to the music imparts the misery normally communicated through the music itself.

If there’s one thing Cattle Hammer truly excels at, it’s squandering potential. Every criticism in this review is a place where I saw an opportunity for Dark Thoughts with Lights Out to get better, only for it to stay the course. What’s even more frustrating is that, if any one of these problems weren’t a problem, it could have at least partially salvaged the album. Amidst deeply uninteresting riffs played slow enough for inter-note naps, song constructions that fail to launch, underutilized instrumentation, an impressive lack of variation, repetition ad nauseum, and a totally unjustified runtime, Dark Thoughts with Lights Out isn’t simply unremarkable or uninteresting; it’s a literal chore to listen through. Based on the promo sheet, maybe that’s the point, but whether Cattle Hammer achieved their goal is irrelevant.⁴ Dark Thoughts with Lights Out is a bad album.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 10 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Road to Masochist
Websites: Bandcamp | Ampwall | Facebook | Instagram
Releases Worldwide: February 6th, 2026

The post Cattle Hammer – Dark Thoughts with Lights Out appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Abhorrent Expanse has a solid lineup, including caliber from Zebulon Pike, Celestiial, Obsequiae, and The Blight – even if its sound feels entirely convoluted. Following the controversial debut Gateways to Resplendence, Enter the Misanthropocene is largely the same, but its scope is larger, significantly reducing its drone content in favor of jazzy noodling, grind intensity, sprawling ambiance, and deconstructed death metal jaggedness. The drone that exists within is a short-lived sprawl that pops up periodically, giving a more abstract feel than its predecessor’s “dissodeath meeting drone metal in a dark alley behind the Kmart” vibe. Forty-eight minutes of whiplash-inducing tonal and tempo shifts, off-key twanging, random stoner sprawls, and an undeserved love for improv awaits – and I need a nap.

Say it with me: improv is bad. I get the whole avant-garde approach that John Zorn would drool over, that an improvised performance is a “never see it the same way twice” kind of deal, but that doesn’t mean it’s good. As we’ve seen with typically good bands like Neptunian Maximalism or Bunsenburner, relying on group chemistry instead of thoughtful songwriting to create a singular experience hardly pans out – and Enter the Misanthropocene is no exception. Moments of avant-garde clarity in which the instruments align shine in the twitching obscure grind (title track, “Assail the Density Matrix,” “Dissonant Aggressors”), short-lived minimalist drone (“Praise for Chaos,” “Dissonant Aggressors,” “Ascension Symptom Acceleration”), haunting ritualism (“Waves of Graves”), and ambient calm (“Kairos”). Death growls are sparse. Enter the Misanthropocene is so free jazz and avant-garde it forcibly drags nonconsenting listeners into what seems like obscenely high art…

…Or incompetent musicianship. Much of Abhorrent Expanse’s sound is rooted in utter nonsense, and one that often gets played really fast. While there’s certainly artistic discomfort aplenty to be found on this record, in which I can see some merit (“Waves of Graves,” “Drenched Onyx”), these are scattered moments among what sound like the plonks and twunks of a novice fiddling with a new guitar at Guitar Center. Atonal noodling and off-beat drumming accounts for the majority of its forty-eight minute runtime, sounding entirely random. The drone-doom moments feel off-beat and misaligned (“Praise for Chaos”), some ambient moments are so subtle and minimalist that they just cover John Cage’s 4’33” for a bit before eventually becoming audible (“Nephilim Disinterred”), and by the end of the ten-minute closer “Prostrate Before Chthonic Devourment” you might feel like you’ve been through a prostrate exam.

The promotion around Abhorrent Expanse relies on similarities to dissonant acts like Portal and Imperial Triumphant – but in order to do that, they’d actually have to write some songs first. Gateways to Resplendence was challenging and avant-garde but anchored to a respectable degree; Enter the Misanthropocene is a leaf on the wind, being blown by one avant-garde gust to another with no semblance of gravity to save it. Its high-art status is a divisive issue, as the directionless noodling can be seen as either a challenging piece of art or four dudes who don’t know how to play their instruments. But isn’t that the nature of art itself? Abhorrent Expanse holds a mirror to art itself, making us question what is drivel and what is erudite – through the improvised off-key noodling of someone who has arguably never picked up a guitar before.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 9 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Amalgam Music
Websites: abhorrentexpanse.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: August 15th, 2025

The post Abhorrent Expanse – Enter the Misanthropocene Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Unrelapsed proves that old habits die hard. In typical Tommy fashion, the epic prog of Hexenzirkel has been napalmed by an eclectic mix of blackened hardcore that oscillates between industrial (“Anger”), black metal (“Denial”), thrash (“Ambivalent”), drum and bass (“Depression,” “Unrecognisable”) and even trip-hop (“Debt”).² For Unrelapsed’s thirty minutes, Tommy blazes through twenty-two songs of short, emotionally violent arrangements that are frenzied and chaotic. Tommy’s guttural and dissonant vocals convey hostility (“Psycho”), anguish (“Relapse”), depression (“Blame”), and even desperation (“Lost”) as they drift over technically proficient—yet asymmetric—instrumentation that fuses Imperial Trimphant’s experimental chaos with The Locust’s breakneck fluctuations. Piercing drums—with enough snare to wake the dead—form the core of Tommy’s madness, sitting center stage in a peaking mix as the interplay of effects, subtle organ passages, and meandering guitars further amplify the intense emotions that beleaguered Tommy’s journey to sobriety. Together, these elements forge an intensely personal record rooted in adversity, reflection, and catharsis.

Intense and personal may be the point, because Unreleapsed is a whirlwind of chaos and disorder. Tracks like “Paranoia” and “Abandoned” arrive and disappear rapidly without any sense of direction. Many others barely hold any semblance of song structure before buckling under their own weight and crumbling into audible storms of phaser (“Lying”), odd noises (“Blackout”), wandering guitar (“Unrecognisable”) and hectic beats (“Depression”). And in the instances when Tommy manages to settle into a coherent song structure for longer than thirty seconds, he frequently derails everything with nomadic jazz fusion or psychedelic guitar noodling that drains Unrelapsed’s scant reserves of flow and momentum.

Accordingly, Unrelapsed is a difficult and toilsome listen that drove me to contemplate my exit within ten minutes of pressing play. Although Tommy Concrete’s performances show prowess and the underlying emotion is derived from real-life experience, the frenetic energy of the compositions, coupled with Tommy’s deeply personal themes, creates an overwhelming experience. While the potent one-two punch of Unrelapsed’s themes and its avant-garde assembly should be a strength, they become too overpowering too quickly, leaving me feeling frayed and confused instead of appreciating Tommy’s authenticity and creativity. Tommy’s choice to remain self-produced was also dicey but, ironically, the album’s production may be its saving grace. Yes, the drums are overpowering and everything is way too loud, but the mix is balanced and adds some much-needed depth and complexity to Unrelapsed’s sonic onslaught.

Unrelapsed offers a cathartic exploration of addiction and little else. It’s a chaotic and fragmented frenzy that quickly exhausted me by its lack of cohesion, overwhelming pace, and constant sensory overload. At the same time, however, Unrelapsed mirrors a struggle that many have endured but few can comprehend, and I genuinely hope Tomas found solace in its creation. Perhaps that alone should be deserving of a higher score. But the fact remains that Unrelapsed is plagued by persistent troubles— both old and new— and will only resonate with those who have a high tolerance for disorder and raw emotional expression.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Howling Invocations
Websites: tommyconcrete.bandcamp.com | instagram.com/TommyConcrete
Releases Worldwide: November 1, 2024

The post Tommy Concrete – Unrelapsed Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Oscillotron is a project of David Johansson, frontman of Steel Druhm–gorilla-themed Swedish doom rock act Kongh, and live guitarist for Cult of Luna since 2013. If you’re hoping that Oscillotron incorporates any of that shit, aside from thick-as-booty-cheeks heavy, you’ll be sorely disappointed. Oblivion is Johansson’s first offering under the moniker in eight years, promising more drone-influenced sprawls than the atmospheric doom and electronic emphases of 2016’s Cataclysm or 2012’s Eclipse. In this way, Oblivion lives up to its name—mightily. Your ears will be greeted by an hour-long track composed of an unceasing wall of noise made of droning guitars and Moog synthesizers. Without a serious pair of headphones or an ounce of masochism, Oscillotron will offer you the album to drift off to. It’s about as exciting as you can imagine.

Oscillotron is meticulous in its sound design, with each layer of density and shuddering radiant carefully constructed and included. In true drone spirit, Oblivion’s spotlight is on the heft. Oscillotron offers no vocals or percussion and no chord progressions in a stark (and tragic) departure from their Sunny genremates. It’s one sprawling and unmoving beast whose only sign of life is some periodic strumming movement, the electronic warbles and beeps from the synth, or the gradual collapse of the wall somewhere near the forty-five-minute mark. Johansson steers away from the Sabbathian orange fuzz of Earth, the dynamics of early Boris, and the evocative movements of Nadja. It’s truly Oblivion, an emptiness that envelopes the ears in encompassing saturation of total emptiness. It’s almost astounding, as repeated listens grant layers of noise peeled back with each iteration, a trip to the void that feels ruinously apathetic and aphotic. It will drive you mad, for better or for worse.

Perhaps most obviously, Oscillotron is drone—stubbornly more-vacant-than-usual-drone—for a whole fuckin’ hour with nothing going for it. Good drone is meant to swallow you whole, but Oblivion is so devoted to expansion that it neglects any form of accessibility or, dare I say music. Distortion is front and center, and for funsies you can sing along by humming the same note for a whole fucking hour. As such, there is no direction or defined purpose, no beginning, middle, or conclusion, aside from the shuddering density. Oblivion cannot stand on its own, as there isn’t even a lead-in or a fade-out—it just starts abruptly and ends abruptly. I can admire Oscillotron’s motives to create something rawer and more visceral than the cinematic facades constructed in years past, but to turn away from the very basics of music into truly a sprawling static stand-still of noise? That is truly puzzling.

I will use Oscillotron’s breed of noise-mongering as background noise for reading or sleep aid, but Oblivion is minimalist decadence for absolutely no one’s benefit. It lacks basic musical wherewithal and earns its status as “just noise.” Yeah, I love drone, but I also like drone to feel a bit more like, I don’t know, music? I can see its uses and get lost in the labyrinth where all walls look the same, but Dave, my guy, I’m gonna be made the laughingstock of AMG HQ if you keep this up. At least put in a couple more chords, a sustained high note, drums, vocals—something. If not, the ADHD Metal Guy, Second Most High Gorilla, Idiotic Cowpoke Grier, and the other Fvneral Fvkking bastards are coming for me. For my sake. Be a friend. Please.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 3 | Format Reviewed: 320 kb/s mp3
Label: Self-Released
Website: oscillotron.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/oscillotron
Releases Worldwide: September 20th, 2024

The post Oscillotron – Oblivion Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Italy’s Corpsefucking Art has been around in some form or another since 1993. While earlier works were run-of-the-bloody-mill gorefests of grimy brutal death, it wasn’t until 2003’s Splatter Deluxe that they cut out the gravy and derailed into goofy territory.¹ Likewise, the idea of sentient “tomators” overthrowing humanity dates back to the song “Voracious Tomatoes” from 2014’s Quel Cimitero Accanto Alla Villa. So really, I shouldn’t have been surprised by Tomatized, but don’t let tomatoes distract you from the fact that Corpsefucking Art hits with a sloppy megaton groove that’ll get your head bobbing sometimes. Bottom-scraping growls, downtuned riffs, plodding drumming – it sure is there. And nothing else.

Corpsefucking Art’s breed of goregrind/brutal death metal is about as bare bones as you get. There’s no technicality, no variation to the commanding roar – all in favor of the groove. Tracks like “Hell of the Living Dead,” “Phantasm” and “The Book of the Dead” all feature curb-stomping riffs with a hint of slam that recall the reasons you started listening to Carcass or Cannibal Corpse, while more blazing tremolo populates “Alien vs. Tomator” and “A Nightmare on Tomato Street.” For better or for worse, Tomatized is a remarkably straightforward, knuckle-dragging goregrind affair that offers no technicality or variation. While offering absolutely nothing to the most seasoned listeners and brutal death newcomers alike, something is refreshing about its dumb simplicity.² The shifty rhythm in “The Book of the Dead” and layered harmony of “Escape from Alpha City” add a brief jolt of energy, while the ambient interlude spoken word and horror audio segment in “Dead Sushi” is a reprieve, if not a cringeworthy one.

Even for its brief thirty-minute runtime, Corpsefucking Art starts sounding ridiculously tired early on. While it features dummy thicc guitar, that’s about all it’s got. Every track features some variation of the same three Carcass riffs and chord progressions with death growls exclusively dominating the proceedings, lacking variety or charisma. The guitars, despite their proclamation of slimy, still feel sterile and over-produced. I also never thought I would say that I wished Tomatized had pong, but here we are, because the dull “thunk” of the snare gets lost immediately in the sea of tomato-infested booty riffs. It feels like a joke; it’s a fun sound you can trap your friend into listening to an album about sentient tomatoes, but the novelty wears off almost immediately. Tracks sound identical thanks to its monotonal palette, leaning too much on the tomato-themed theme and robbing Corpsefucking Art of the opportunity to prove their versatility after over thirty years of experience.

Tomatized is the audio equivalent of mixing tomato paste and water and calling it marinara.³ Corpsefucking Art sure is brutal and they can groove, but repeated spins poke holes in the sound. It’s about as exciting as early Abominable Putridity, Fatuous Rump, or Devangelic: flaunting that knuckle-dragging groove but lacking the technicality, variation, or songwriting chops to support it. The comedy is a nice change-up from the semi-serious barbarity of the style, but that doesn’t mean much. Tomatized is about tomatoes that dethrone mankind, but Corpsefucking Art ain’t dethroning goregrind, brutal death, or slam royalty anytime soon.

Rating: 1.5/5.0
DR: 5 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Comatose Music
Website: facebook.com/corpseeffingart
Releases Worldwide: October 4th, 2024

The post Corpsefucking Art – Tomatized Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

For Mushroomhead, Call the Devil follows the recent trend of the much-needed incorporation of newer vocalist Jackie LaPonza to compensate for utter lack of charisma. Vocalists Steve Rauckhurst and Scott “xtriker” Beck trade grungy cleans, growls, and raps, while guitarists, bassists, and percussionists are tossed around like a swarm of attacking bees to round out the lineup to a whopping nine members. Groove remains a nu-metal priority throughout and Call the Devil benefits from LaPonza’s more pronounced presence. However, the glaringly inconsistent palettes of over-the-top, largely failed experimentation with the more straightforward and direly boring metal riffs lands Mushroomhead in one of the more bafflingly obnoxious and misguidedly ambitious listens of the year.

Mushroomhead’s best moments are rooted in two things: rad groove and LaPonza’s vocals. “We Don’t Care” is likely the closest union, with its pulsing guitar riffs touched by southern rock colliding with her hypnotic and sultry verses. Meanwhile, opener “Eye to Eye,” “Torn in Two,” and “Hallelucination” feature a nice groove that hits hard for a little while. “Fall in Line,” “Hallelucination,” “Hideous,” and “Shame in a Basket” are solid if not tragically limited exposés on LaPonza’s vocals, her range showcased from a sirenic and haunting mezzo-soprano to a smoky and femme fatale alto. However, as solid as these isolated moments are, they are surrounded by a deep sea of testosterone and a Vaudeville carnival theme so over the top, that it would make Avatar blush. The fanfare surrounding LaPonza’s vocals in “We Don’t Care,” for instance, quickly dissipates due to Rauckhurst and Beck doing their best worst impressions of Five Finger Death Punch’s Ivan Moody. Even the riffs in Call the Devil’s solid moments, although initially a welcome jolt of energy and pummel, begin to feel anticlimactic and limp after so many iterations and lack of variation. All attacks are done through a solid mix, provided by Matt Wallace (Faith No More, 3 Doors Down), so the guitars have a solid crunch, the drums are aptly pummeling, and the melodic elements shine across. It’s just a bummer that the attacks are toothless.

Perhaps most baffling about Call the Devil is Mushroomhead’s inability to keep a consistent sound, particularly when it benefits them to do so. LaPonza is a rare beam of light but is used far too sparingly, often disappearing entire. The band’s riffs get tired over so many dad-rock repetitions, while Rauckhurst and Beck are indistinguishable and as dangerous as a sub sandwich at a Baptist potluck. Tracks like “Emptiness” and “Grand Gesture” try to take on the heavy ballad approach but end up bland, and the full immersion of the spooky carnival music sees tracks like “UIOP (The Final Reprieve),” “Decomposition,” and “Prepackaged” fall into just a weird muck. Like Slipknot, Mushroomhead features a veritable legion of members, but aside from the industrial atmosphere and Vaudeville vibes, what exactly are the nine musicians doing at any given moment? They have a bevy of potential talent, but choose to waste it on an excessive version nu-metal, one that furthermore hasn’t changed much since the ’90s in spite of every opportunity to do so.

Mushroomhead tried really hard with Call the Devil. They’ve got a seed of hope in LaPonza and some killer riffs, but if Skinny and Company haven’t tried anything new aside from batshit unnecessariness since ’93, this review won’t change any minds. It’s self-indulgent, painfully pretentious, and its hour length feels like being dragged through broken glass at a carnival devoted to masculinity. Slipknot has long been accused of stealing Mushroomhead’s look, but when that’s more important than creating quality music, there’s a problem. Yeah, call the Devil, Mushroomhead – he’ll make a better album than this.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: N/A | Format Reviewed: STREAM
Label: Napalm Records
Websites: mushroomhead.com | facebook.com/mushroomheadofficial
Releases Worldwide: August 9th, 2024

The post Mushroomhead – Call the Devil Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Unfortunately, my first listen through The Orcish Eclipse immediately challenged that resolution, because the album sounds so weird that you’re almost forced to remind yourself that most of its decisions weren’t made by humans. At first glance, it’s standard power metal, with chugging riffs and harsh vocals, and opener “When I Fall” sounds fairly straightforward. Then “Orcs Don’t Cry” opens with three seconds of synths before diving into a gritty riff that’s completely at odds with the song’s whimsical/nonsensical title and theme. It has one of the best choruses on the album, but the lyrics are so absurd that it’s hard to enjoy it. Then there’s “Beauty of the Night,” which opts to use a tremolo guitar that sounds so much like burbling² I’m not fully convinced it’s really a guitar. This kind of thing keeps happening. Again and again, Frostbite Orckings makes bizarre, unexpected, off-putting choices that make it hard to ignore the fact that no humans were harmed in the making of this album.

The most unforgivable thing about The Orcish Eclipse, however, is its utter tepidity, its absolute lack of emotion, and its entirely unsuccessful attempts to make up for it. I have never listened to an album that made me feel nothing before this. It has all the right things in all the right places to emulate an energetic power metal experience—choral vocals layered over choruses, shouted ear-worm phrases, keyboard flourishes in all the right spots, all done with all the elegance of a paint-by-numbers kit. “Coming Home” is the worst offender, opening with robotic clean chanting (none of the clean singing on this album sounds natural) and replaying it every time the title phrase is shouted. It tries so hard to emulate folk metal, but it fails, because folk metal is sung and played with feeling. There’s a good song in there, but the actual performance does not live up.

An offshoot of this issue is the sterile songwriting and production choices that further rob the album of its energy. The drumming may as well have been done by MIDI for all the power it adds to the music, and the guitar chugs are little more than background noise. Meanwhile, the songs are predictable to a fault; each one ends on a chorus, sometimes modulated from the last one, and nearly every chorus ends with the name of the song. After a while, you get really good at predicting what’s going to happen next… until the curveball conclusion that is “Endless Love.” Here, we have a song that is so clearly AI-generated and so stylistically out-of-place from the rest of the album that it breaks through the tepidity of the whole in the worst way possible.

The Orcish Eclipse is fascinating. Played in the background, you wouldn’t notice anything odd about it. It hits all the right notes and emulates power metal well. The more you pay attention to it, the more you notice the cracks. You notice the basically-missing bass, the near-absent guitar leads,³ the weak drumming, and the fact that the lyrics rarely make any sense at all.⁴.= I believe that no one dreamed of making this album; it seems to exist only as an experiment, a premise, and for that, I am left extremely disappointed.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Metalverse⁵
Websites: frostbiteorckings.bandcamp.com | facebook.com/frostbiteorckings
Releases Worldwide: December 22nd, 2023

The post Frostbite Orckings – The Orcish Eclipse Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Look, I love drone. I love getting lost in the swaths of noise and soundscapes that pervade its classics, as albums like Earth’s Earth 2, Sunn O)))’s Black One, and Boris’ Flood offer otherworldly and mammoth wilderness to explore. Riffs don’t offer adrenaline, but mountains instead, while vocals and percussion, if there are any, are the last semblance of humanity amid the utter saturation of sound. Its utter overwhelm of sound makes it controversial, its void of relatability offers little reprieve, and its slow depiction of devastation is hypnotic. All that to say, while I was maybe hoping for the next Holy Fawn with Megaton Leviathan’s talk of shoegaze, drone, and doom, I don’t know what the fuck to make of Magick Helmet.

While the gone-but-unforgotten Huck offered an optimistic 2.5 for the act’s third full-length 2018’s Mage, praising the song “Within the Threshold” for its ability to fuse sprawling drone with psychedelic soundscapes, things change in five years. Most notably, Megaton Leviathan is now a solo project of mastermind Andrew James Costa Reuscher (credited as Reuscher), responsible for every aspect of the hour-long monstrosity of Magick Helmet. As such, gone are the vocals and drone entirely in favor of an instrumental psychedelic rock session, comprised of fuzzed-out bass, wailing guitars, and pounding drums, attempting to channel “a maximum Doomgaze and minimalist approach embracing change and employing [Reuscher’s] love for things gritty, CVLT, and mind-altering.” It’s a minimalist approach to be sure, but the only thing conjured here is a maximalist headache.

Megaton Leviathan still manages to be drone, but to be frank, it’s in the bad way your parents describe your favorite music. Four tracks, over an hour long, with two tracks comprising over forty-six minutes of the runtime – it all sounds like something Sunn O))) would do. But if mammoth waves of drone is what you’re after, you will be sorely disappointed. Megaton Leviathan’s songwriting is comprised of a single fuzzed-out bassline and drum pattern that courses through the entirety of a song, while scathingly bright guitar wails comprise the melody. Magick Hammer is minimalist and rooted in vintage tones of psychedelic rock, which is Reuscher’s intention – I love that for him. Its only real highlight consists of centerpiece “The Belly of the Beast,” which departs the formula in favor of a Swans– or Merzbow-esque descent into noise and madness, which feels darker and more intense than anything Reuscher has accomplished. The flipside of this highlight, however, is that while Swans’ song “The Seer,” for instance, layered performances atop itself with an intense collusion of vocals, guitar, bass, drums, and noise, Megaton Leviathan’s noisy tendencies sound more like a new guitar player trying out a pedal at a Guitar Center – only guitar trilling away, feeling random and directionless.

The two sides of Magick Helmet are damning, because one sees the bass and drums locked into an unwavering and wearisome sequence, while the other is psychedelic upper fretboard brain-scorching randomness that is supposed to be the main attraction. While this certainly achieves a drug-fueled psychedelia, it also is derailed by a bad combination of boredom and tinnitus. The bulk of Magick Helmet consists of the aforementioned dully repeated basslines and scathing Jimi Hendrix-esque upper fretboard gymnastics interpretive dancing, making the nearly thirty-minute long “Helios Creed Magick Helmet” and openers “The Final Form of Nothing is Final” and its utterly unnecessary sequel “The Final Form of Nothing is Final (A Slight Reprise)” unbearable. While many more atmospheric or post-rock acts rely on a single motif to build a dynamic or crescendo upon, it is a building process. Megaton Leviathan’s is not: just repetition in hopes the guitar does the heavy lifting. Psychedelia is also a worthy aspiration, but other adjacent acts like Dark Buddha Rising or Space Coke do it better.

Megaton Leviathan talks a big game, with talk of “doomgaze” and “industrial drone” spilling out of previous releases. While often misguided, previous releases capitalized upon this ambition with sprawling compositions with many players’ formidable talents. While I understand the minimalist ambition, simple songwriting techniques need to be employed beyond “playing this shrill psychedelia until I get tired of it.” The Magick Helmet refers to the throbbing that covers my entire head upon listening, so maybe Megaton Leviathan should provide a dose of Tylenol with each purchase.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 6¹ | Format Reviewed: 256 kbps mp3
Label: Volatile Rock Recordings
Websites: megatonleviathan.bandcamp.com | megatonleviathan.com | facebook.com/MegatonLeviathan
Releases Worldwide: December 8th, 2023

The post Megaton Leviathan – Magick Helmet Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

Although the record also features a couple of softer ballads, the most typical music is a form of black metal fused with loungey rock. While this might sound fun, the leisurely pace largely imitates the tempo of the source material. Simply layering electric guitars and harsh vocals over the original melodies and rhythms results in a series of unimaginative covers. Despite generally preferring heavy metal to chamber music, I’m less enthused by The Black Nativity than I am when hearing an amateur choir around Christmas. Though most tracks fall into this bucket, it’s the exceptions that highlight the rule. For example, “Stille Nacht” reinterprets the famously muted “Silent Night” into a proper black metal song, rather than just a carol performed with metal instruments. Likewise, the cover of “Auld Lang Syne” is a surprisingly delicate acoustic interlude and the closest I reached to an emotional connection with A Hill to Die Upon. These moments of deviation from the tempo of the original material offer the record’s best moments.

The loungey pace at which the music renders something like black metal also results in The Black Nativity feeling like a deeply strange album. “Hymn to Marduk”¹ offers a sparse, barren opening with atonal guitar plucking and discordant background synths. It’s a strikingly un-striking opening, beginning the album on an unsettling, moody note. This contrasts jarringly with “VENIVENIEMMANVEL” (“Veni, Veni, Emmanuel”?) which begins with an upbeat, crunchy riff with gurgled vocals on top. It doesn’t even sound like the same band, let alone the same album. “Minuit Chretien” demonstrates this eccentricity once more, closing The Black Nativity with what sounds like a female French singer recorded at a distance and through a wall. I don’t doubt this was intentional but what this intention is baffles me.

This strangeness which is initially intriguing is only a veneer that cannot ultimately mask other fundamental weaknesses. The lilting tempo refuses to accelerate to metal speeds, even while using black metal instrumentation. And the clean singer is perfectly competent but somehow fails to convey any emotion whatsoever, with a distinctly bland tone. The combination of these two elements leaves a lethargic, emotionless, and dull taste long after the strangeness has faded. Moreover, The Black Nativity reeks of incompletion. The tracks are discordantly arranged (as outlined above) and 4 of them run for just 2 minutes, leaving fragments that don’t feel like full songs. They don’t have the room to grow into anything more than 1 or 2 half-baked passages haphazardly stitched together. Even on the fuller tracks, some aspects feel poorly conceived, such as the additional layer of vocals over a couple of lines towards the end of “Hymn to Marduk.” It sounds like A Hill to Die Upon remembered to include the additional vocals on some lines but not others.

A Hill to Die Upon has failed to buck the trend of terrible Christmas metal albums, but even in such company The Black Nativity is especially devoid of creativity and excitement. The band was evidently more entertained by the prospect of blackened covers of Christmas carols than any listener will ever be hearing them. Beyond the deficient music, I even question the purpose of this type of release. Is there really such an overlap of carol lovers and metalheads that an album of blackened carols was needed? The Black Nativity is poor in conception and poor in execution.

Rating: 1.0/5.0
DR: 12 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps
Label: Rottweiler Records
Websites: facebook.com/ahilltodieupon | ahilltodieupon.bandcamp.com
Releases Worldwide: November 24th, 2023

The post A Hill to Die Upon – The Black Nativity Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.

As we’ve established, Silent Tiger are a band that excels at album cover artwork. Their 2020 debut, Ready for Attack, saw their feline mascot stealthily emerging from the chilled, blue haze of a Bob Ross painting. Not to rest on the laurels of that bar-setting accomplishment, Silent Tiger crushed all other comers with the artwork to Twist of Fate. On this album jacket, there is no hesitation in the tiger’s step as it lunges out from what can only be described as the poster for an Asian action movie. Its eyes are thirsty for blood and its body is ready to strike. It’s safe to say, Silent Tiger isn’t fucking around. They’ve paid their dues and they’re ready to take on the world with this record. But then there’s the music…

What follows are ten tracks of some of the most cliched saccharine ear syrup you’d ever want to hear. I never realized just how insecure the 80s were until I heard them as regurgitated by Silent Tiger. The lyric sheet to Twist of Fate reads like a list of AI-generated musical tropes from Skynet that are best left forgotten like so many Terminator sequels. Seemingly, we were all holding on to our broken hearts, walking alone, keeping our dreams alive, and waiting for a new start.¹ The music on Twist of Fate is a self-neutered soft rock that fancies itself harder than it is. Like Night Ranger without Brad Gillis, it’s more “Sister Christian” than “(You Can Still) Rock in America.” Songs like “Wings of a Dream” start out with a decent riff but quickly collapse into sentimental drivel with any remaining fire doused by the excessive 1984 keyboards. There’s almost a sense of tension between a guitar player who wants to rock and a singer who just wants to play some nice songs his mother will appreciate.

Silent Tiger has a curious origin. They were started by a Honduran guitarist and drummer and then joined by an American singer. Their goal was to pay homage to bands like Def Leppard, Europe, Bon Jovi, Ratt, Dokken and Scorpions but ended up sounding more like REO Speedwagon and Survivor. I’m somewhat of a YouTube junkie and the other day while I was watching a video about primitive survival, it occurred to me that the guy on the TV wearing a reindeer hide wasn’t that different than the dudes from Silent Tiger. Both are fascinated by how people lived during a different time. Where one coaxes fire out of a bowed stick, sinew, and knuckle bone, the other coaxes songs out of Charvel guitars and Roland synthesizers. However, when it comes to homage, you have to make it compelling rather than obnoxious. Exhibit A: the title track. “Twist of Fate” is essentially a remake of “Waiting for a Star to Fall” by Boy Meets Girl and no one needs that. At least throw some Ratt in the mix.

It’s truly astounding how many of these types of homage acts I keep finding in the promo bin. Maybe it’s my own 80’s insecurity that compels me to review them. There are few if any moments worth defending here. “Last of the True Believers” is almost good…until the singer comes in. Had I listened to Silent Tiger before committing, maybe I would have thought twice, but damn—that album cover!

Rating: 1.0/5.0 (5.0/5.0 for cover art)
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps MP3
Label: Pride and Joy Music
Website: Facebook.com/silenttigerband
Releases Worldwide: November 24th, 2023

The post Silent Tiger – Twist of Fate Review appeared first on Angry Metal Guy.