Posts

Six Feet Under - Commandment (2007) Death Metal Album Review

Image
  The follow-up to 2005's 13, 2007's Commandment is decent, but falls flat. It has great riffs and a sick guitar tone, but on this album Chris Barnes' vocals really start to deteriorate.  It opens with "Doomsday", which has great crushing guitar riffs and their guitars sound very good, but once the vocals start you can tell Barnes' is struggling. It's still a cool song due to the guitar work, but it is held back in the vocal department. However, the vocals aren't that  bad! I've heard much worse and honestly once you get used to them the music is pretty enjoyable, just not up to the standard set by much better previous albums like Haunted, 13, and Maximum Violence. By www.sfu420.com, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=22790397 This is one of those albums where the songs all sound the same, they just blend together and I can't tell one apart from the other despite the fact that I listen to a lot of death metal and am a big fan

Six Feet Under - 13 (2005) Death Metal Album Review

Image
  Six Feet Under's 13, released in 2005 had a definite impact on me. I was 15 and just starting to get into death metal and extreme metal. In 2004 I discovered the highly underrated band Fear Factory. I started with Obsolete and select songs from Archetype and Digimortal, then worked my way back eventually discovering Soul of a New Machine, the first time I ever heard "death" vocals.  I wasn't impressed lol. I thought it was stupid. But over time I moved away from the rock and nu-metal (Drowning Pool, Disturbed), and began listening to heavier and faster genres of metal. I discovered old Metallica and became obsessed with thrash metal especially Sepultura and Slayer. This introduced me to more extreme metal, namely Bloodbath, Kataklysm, Emperor, and yes, Six Feet Under. On windows media I searched and found an mp3 of the song "Feasting On the Blood of the Insane", I really liked the death vocals and lyrics for the song, it almost sounds like he's rapping

Sinister - Hate (1995) Death Metal Review

Image
 The follow-up to 93's Diabolical Summoning, Hate delivers more top-notch 90's brutal death metal. The cover art is badass. It shows a horned-demon with multiple arms like a Hindu god (e.g. Kali) holding skull with nothing but the spine is attached as if he just performed a Mortal Kombat fatality. The demon stands a top a giant skeleton with a human in its mouth, reminiscent of Lucifer devouring Judas in Dante's Inferno. The album artwork perfectly encapsulates what the music on this album sounds like. Sick and brutal, heavy and violent. Sinister truly put the "death" in death metal! "Art of the Damned" is one of the best, it has killer thrashy guitar riffs and sick drumming by Aad Kloosterwaard. I think Mike van Mastrigt's vocals sound better on this album.  "18th Century Hellfire" has some of my favorite riffage on the album. This is the ideal death metal song! "To Mega Therion" is an excellent cover of extreme metal-pioneers Ce

Monster Voodoo Machine - Suffersystem (1994) Industrial Metal Review

Image
 I didn't find out about this 90's industrial band from Canada until relatively recently. Someone mentioned them in the comment section of a Fear Factory video and being a huge FF I had to check 'em out! Suffersystem was released in 1994. Source: discogs.com "Threat By Example" is an awesome track, it definitely reminds me of FF but it has a lot of hardcore punk influence too which I love. It also features a sound sample of the monster Anguirus from the Biotech is Godzilla series! "Motionless" is pretty heavy, sort of doomy like Black Sabbath. I don't care as much for the vocal style on this song.  "Inside These Walls" has some really awesome native-sounding drums which reminds me of Sepultura on their Roots album. It has some nice gang-shouts that remind me of 80's thrash though I suppose thrash was heavily influenced by hardcore punk and not the other way around. "Adding Insult to Injury" is a faster-paced thrashy sounding

Hath - All That Was Promised (2022) Metal Album Review Part 1

Image
Just released this year (2022), New Jeresy band Hath's All That Was Promised, delivers the promise of extreme metal, but how good is the metal? Read on to find out.  The cover art really reminds me of Slayer's 1988 album South of Heaven. Not just the skull, but the whole style.  Track one, "The Million Violations", begins with a soft intro that sounds like bagpipes before giving way to some nice clean electric guitar picking. By 40 secs the distorted guitar comes crashing in with "Battery" type vibes. But this isn't thrash metal, it is death metal with black metal influences, blackened death metal. Yet it is often doomy as well. A nice mixture, though maybe "nice" is an inappropriate word to describe music such as this. Next up is "Kenosis". I had never heard of this term before so I looked it up. In Christian theology it means the self-emptying of Jesus' own will, becoming entirely receptive to God's divine will. The song is

A Short History of Fear Factory in Video Game Soundtracks

Image
A Short History of Fear Factory in Video Games  Fear Factory's particular brand of techno-industrial nu-metal makes them absolutely perfect for video game soundtracks, so it comes as no surprise that they were featured in a verifiable shit-ton (scientific term) of video game soundtracks in the late 90's early 2000's. This is a short history of the video game soundtracks Fear Factory was featured in. 1997 - The first game to feature them was the computer game Carmageddon. It featured instrumental versions of three tracks off the masterpiece 1995 album Demanufacture, "Demanufacture" "Zero Signal" and "Body Hammer." I absolutely love these instrumentals, it really shows what great musicians Dino Cazeres, Christian Olde Wolbers, and drummer Raymond Herrera are!  1998 - In 1998, NFL Xtreme for Sony Playstation featured "Body Hammer." Test Drive Off-Road 2 (Test Drive 4X4), also for the Playstation, featured "Shock" from the newly

Sinister - Diabolical Summoning (1993) Death Metal Review

Image
 In 1993, Dutch death metal band Sinister, released their album "Diabolical Summoning" with the Nuclear Blast label and it is easily their best. The album has very eye-catching artwork which drew me to it. It reminds me of something out of the Mortal Kombat game series. I often played albums such as this one and Slayer's "Hell Awaits" while playing the game. Just great artwork and the music matches it. The opening track, "Sadistic Intent" (later to become a band name), is my favorite. It opens with a sick bassline before pummeling you with ultra-heavy guitars and guttural vocals. I'm not super big on "cookie monster" vocals but it works for the music here which is intense and played at breakneck speed. Actually, Mike van Mastrigt is above average for this type of vocal. I guess one could complain that all the songs sound the same, but to quote the Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator from Austrian Death Machine's masterpiece album "