Over the past few years, Boss Keloid have been carving a career from very heavy riffs and a touch of progressive attitude, resulting in some weighty sounding music that has its own style.
On the basis of their new single ‘Chronosiam’, the band’s upcoming album – their fourth release – ‘Melted On The Inch’ could be one of their finest to date.
Pirate metal doesn’t always work. That never stopped power metallers Skeletoon giving the novelty subgenre of metal their best efforts and their debut album ‘The Curse of The Avenger’ was surprisingly enjoyable. It really helped that the album featured some great playing to balance out the themes within the songs. [Full review here.]
From it’s birth in the coldest extremes of Scandinavia, black metal slowly spread across Europe like a harsh plague, invading territories with a barrage of riffs, twig shaped logos, minimalist artwork and sounds often characterised by especially harsh, thin vocals. Over the years, the style has become more refined, mixing the purer elements with death metal depths and complexities. In allowing itself to be more inclusive of a few other extreme metal styles, it seemed to become even more influential – a huge surprise for a metal subgenre born within such extremities. In short, it’s all come a very long way from it’s roots; it’s no longer about painting your face white and considering burning a church during your spare time.
Melbourne’s Espionage don’t just fly the flag for old style heavy metal, they positively scream its praises from the Victoria rooftops with a shameless pride, not only as if the 90s never changed perspectives, but also as if Slayer had never actually existed. Hearing their second EP ‘Wings of Thunder’ for the first time, the traditional metal sounds are so rooted in the past, it’s even hard to tell whether it was recorded in 1984 (as is its core sound) or 2016 (as claimed in the sleeve notes). This, of course, isn’t necessarily a bad thing – especially considering that, even at such an early stage in their career, the Aussie rockers sound like masters of their craft.
What happens when you take two doom bands whom have a mutual respect for each other and give them one side of an LP each? Possibly one of the heaviest records ever! ‘Totems’, from Black Bow Records, combines five previously unreleased tracks – three from Slomatics and two from Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard – and presents the ultimate in doom, though somehow without things ever feeling as if they’re verging on a pointless macho pissing contest.