Very inventive, great sci-fi themed album with the dimensional gateways and devouring your consciousness and all that. I'll bet this album would be great to listen to on acid. "Magical Matrix Of Dimensional Continuum" is black metal with a lot of industrial sound FX, elements of grind but heavy with outer space synths. I think a good description of...

26/02/2009

Avant metal and what does it mean to you? Well, in the case of Minsk it's a hypnotic mix of tribal rhythms and layered instrumentation with psychedelic effects and vocals that wash over the listener "The Ritual Fires OF Abandonment" is the follow-up to 2005's "Out Of A Center Which Is Neither Dead Nor Alive" and was produced by the singer/bass p...

26/02/2009

Waltari are if anything unpredictable -- in large part melodic metal with many crossover elements. Their album "Release Date" contains a mini-rock opera Cityshamaani which sounds as if it were the collaboration of Andrew Lloyd Weber and Lenny Kravitz. "Release Date" is impressive in many ways, very tight, very well produced but perhaps just a bi...

26/02/2009

"All This And Hieronymus Bosch" by the Vocokesh is an eclectic blend of surf rock and psychedelic rock, featuring a wide variety of instrumentation. The band features great sounding fuzz and clean guitar with trippy fx, harmonica, tambo, sitar. It's all there. Motifs are developed into themes and the themes are embellished and expanded upon, cul...

26/02/2009

Farewell To Words is a metalcore band with a flare for the melodic and the dramatic. "Tear Down This Wall" is full of thought-provoking lyrics, catchy hooks, and technically proficient performances in all areas, brilliant guitars and battery work, with great screaming and sweet choruses. There are mostly heavy songs with one slow one, the last trac...

26/02/2009

"A Lullaby For A Dying" by Embrace My Ruin is an excellent gothic doom-metal EP with growling and singing, not unlike Swedish goth-metal band Draconian, except that all vocals are female, and the music is more doom, less goth. Comparisons to Embrace My Ruin's sound could also be drawn to My Dying Bride or maybe November's Doom. Walls of tragical...

26/02/2009

Malnatt is folk black metal with a kind of symphonic fury to it. This band has 6 members to give a nice robust sound. They sound kinda like Therion, or Satyricon, maybe Naglfar, a little more synthy than those bands though. The piano parts are very fitting and the horns sound authentic. "Happy Days" is the the third full-length release from Maln...

26/02/2009

Love the piano parts, beautiful atmospheric moody music, almost reminiscent of a Philip Glass composition. Nice schizo segments of guitar and synth that somehow fit, yet manage to completely change the mood of the song from somber and reflective to a melo-dramatic and tension-filled piece and back again in a short time -- shades of "Opeth". Grea...

26/02/2009

EXTREME BELGIAN SICKNESS -- kinda like roundboy Hercule Poirot after devouring one too many belgian waffles at an all you can eat breakfast buffet. Emeth is deathcore at its finest. Think Himsa meets Ion Dissonance. "Reticulated" is the much-anticipated follow-up to Emeth's first release, "Insidious" which came out in 2004. The seventh track on...

26/02/2009

Shock and awe. The horrific death metal growls, the menacing guitar riff-engine and percussive pounding of your skull, nothing less than annihilation of your senses will do with this one. There are elements of black, thrash and death metal all present in the macabre music of Thornafire. "Exacerbated Gnostic Manifestation" is the debut full-length C...

26/02/2009

If you ever wondered what Deep Purple would sound like with Joe Satriani on guitar, you might get something along the lines of Richard Andersson's Space Odyssey. Macho power vocalist David Fremberg (who Andersson compares to David Coverdale) brings a lot of energy and emotion to the album, and guitarist Magnus Nilsson is friken amazing as is Anders...

26/02/2009

Ochimamma -- wow, wow, wow!!! How's that for a review. Oh all right, well that is my first impression. Now let me try to put it into a little more tangible verbal expression of what this MUSIC makes me feel! It's all there folks. Massive guitar riffs, pumping bass and pummeling drums, finished off with growls from the guttural region that can only...

26/02/2009