 |
| Album score: 4/5 |
Don’t let the “soundtrack to the apocalypse” tagline fool you; while Anaal Nathrakh’s mission statement is far from unique, its hybridized sound is something worth checking out. Anaal Nathrakh’s core members, Dave Hunt (vocals) and Mick Kenney (everything else), have been fine-tuning their craft for sixteen years now. In that time, they have covered ground from traditional misanthropic black metal to brutal death, industrial, grind, and noise. Desideratum, their eighth effort, is a densely layered piece of extreme metal that builds on the foundation of 2012’s Vanitas. Though its sound takes influence from the relentless assault of Emperor as much as the wordless screams of Converge, calling it particularly close to either would be somewhat misleading. At its heart, Desideratum is an album of sustained ferocity, and while works of its ilk can easily become exhausting, Anaal Nathrakh knows better than to simply bludgeon without mixing things up along the way.
 |
| Album Score: 8.5/10 |
Revocation has come a long way for a band once touted as a one-trick pony. Guitar virtuoso David Davidson is clearly still the focal point of the quartet, but his and drummer Phil Dubois-Coyne’s time studying jazz at Boston’s Berklee College of Music gives the band a veritable arsenal of songwriting techniques to play with. No album in the band’s career covers such sonic territory as Deathless, and few in any genre so effortlessly integrate unconventional songwriting techniques as Revocation does here. Each album that Revocation has so far put out has had a slightly different identity – breakthrough effort Existence Is Futile was balls-to-the-wall deathrash, while Chaos of Forms saw more experimentation in both melodic composition (“Harlot” and “Fractal Entity”) and song form (the inexorable build of highlight “Conjuring the Cataclysm”). Last year’s self-titled smoothed things out a little, but arguably lacked a dynamite single. Fortunately, Deathless fixes that and then some, with a great mix of no-frills thrash and powerhouse cuts that encompass the best Revocation has to offer.
 |
| Album Score: 6.5/10 |
Rings of Saturn have been a pretty polarizing band throughout their early career. The group began as one of those dreaded internet phenomenon, with a single song that spread virally and landed them a record contract within months, and they’re probably as notorious for a speed-doctoring controversy as they are for their hyperkinetic deathcore. Of course, there was never any substantial evidence that Rings of Saturn cheated by recording their debut at half-tempo, and their live performances have dispelled the notion that they can’t play it anyway. Now on their third LP, Rings of Saturn are starting to find a comfortable niche between mainstream death metal and the experiments of Cynic and Between the Buried and Me. While their brand of “aliencore” isn’t totally novel – Wormed, for one, have landed their spaceship here a few times – it’s also curious enough to deserve a few listens from the adventurous metal head.
