EspyRock

Armed to the teeth with spiked gauntlets, firebrands and an unhealthy daubing of corpse-paint, Throne of Katarsis are as staunchly and unashamedly black metal as a band is ever likely to be. Pulling absolutely zero punches, Ved Graven is a primal ritual that reaches deep in to your chest and drags out a pestilence-ridden, maggot-infested [...]

With any half-decent record, a strong opening track colours your perception of the rest of the album; think of how well ‘Angel of Death’ sets up ‘Reign in Blood’. So when Beyond Creation’s ‘The Aura’ opens with the muddled ‘No Request for the Corrupted’, it seems that it will be a long fifty minutes. Their [...]

Returning five years after the much-lauded ‘Voice of Omens’, Arkansas’ doom/sludge merchants Rwake present ‘Rest’, a record that expands on every aspect and concept of its predecessor with remarkable results. Rwake’s movement further away from their sludge core can be traced through each song on Rest, and first-time listeners expecting an Eyehategod/Iron Monkey-esque emotional meltdown [...]

Whenever someone says that an album is “a grower” I can’t help but feel they are just trying to hide the fact it is a poor record. Man Overboard’s self titled offering is a grower. Opener “Rare” is immediate and downright frantic – it takes a few seconds to even realise what is going on. [...]

After putting their signature to Roadrunner’s legal papers, abandoning Paul Romano’s trademark artwork and almost completely jettisoning any song longer than five minutes, some naysayers declared that the sirens had finally tempted Mastodon towards the rocky shores of commercialism and mediocrity. One listen of ‘The Hunter’ will rightly show up the naivety, short-sightedness and utter [...]

Is there no end to the creative genius behind Opeth? The answer is no. There isn’t. And we should all be very fucking thankful for that. ‘Heritage’ is yet another musical leap for the band that refuses to be pigeon-holed into genre’s. The title track gives a sense of what is yet to come with [...]

From the freezing and frost-bitten kingdom of… Texas… come Bahimiron, who, with song titles such as ‘Goathorned Messiah of the Seven Gates’ and ‘Bestial Raids of Antichrist Darkness’, are unashamedly and unmistakably a no-frills satanic black metal act. At close to ten years of raising merry hell in this particular department, Bahimiron have distilled their [...]