• SHRT REVWS • This condensed version of short(er) reviews focuses on releases arriving in the final week of September covering death metal, atmospheric black metal, gothic rock, and cyber metal/chipwave. // In an attempt to be more conversational these are more easygoing and casual than longform reviews, so relax and think for yourself. — If you find something you dig go tell the band on social media and support them with a purchase! If you’d like your music reviewed, read the FAQ and send promos to: grizzlybutts@hotmail.com

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German death metal trio TEMPLE OF DREAD took a few stabs at melodic death, arabesque guitar work, and keyboard driven movement on their previous record and it kinda worked at a glance as they continued to push beyond the Obituary, Morgoth and Death feeling digs they’d started with. For this follow-up and fifth album overall they’ve scaled back to their original aim at straight forward ~4-5 minute early 90’s styled groove-driven death metal songs. The bones of this type of riffcraft typically centers around derivations of late 80’s thrash metal aggression a la classic Tampa death metal sounds yet for my own taste the riffs never stand out, never quite hit big beyond providing a secured sense of sub-genre. Jens Finger‘s vocals direct most of the flow and bring most of the ear-grabbing action leaving the guitars understated in the mix for my taste. That said I think the death/thrash attack at the core of their sound is still satisfying on the most basic level as songs like “Black Scream” and “Prophetic Misanthropy” keep things flowing steady with classic sensibilities intact.

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While we could definitely praise ABRAMELIN as an early participant in terms of the Melbourne, Australia area pure death metal scenery early on this version of the band steps away from that connection a bit more now that key member/songwriter Tim Aldridge has left the band, leaving only vocalist Simon Dower from the original Acheron-derived line-up. These guys were always best known for their brutality between their underrated self-titled record from the mid-90’s and the Aldridge-lead ‘Deadspeak‘ circa 2000 and because I’d discovered the band around their second album this new vision of the band after reforming in 2016 doesn’t fully make sense to me. At the very least the three guitarists contributing here (including members of Psycroptic and Werewolves) speak a similar language where technical death and melodic death/thrash butt up against a brutal clip but this ends up leading to a kind of bouncing and kinetic strike rather than the coldly abrupt, murderous sound that we’d heard on ‘Never Enough Snuff‘ back in 2020. Most of this observation can be boiled down to production values being different but since I’d showed up looking for brutality it’d felt like they were kinda dodging the “stupid” edge of brutal death for the sake of something more thoughtful and diverse in its execution. It wasn’t what I was looking for but it wasn’t a bad album either.

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Essen, Germany-based atmospheric black metal trio HÄXENZIJRKELL is largely the vision of guitarist/vocalist M.K. (Rraaumm) who has pulled in members of Frigoris and Oerheks to round out the line-up for this third LP. ‘Portal‘ is an intensely cold album, slow and deliberate in its ringing dissociation to the point that the psychic discomfort conveyed nearly overtakes the general shape of each song. With some patience for the actual shape of things as it forms each of these pieces generally crafts some reasonably valuable experience, typically conveying what I’d read as dreadlike tension, frustration and mesmerizing loft. “Yetzirah” has a slight Urfaust feeling brazenness to it here and there but also isolates some of the too-frequent use of spoken word to punctuate certain movements, creating immersion and then breaking it before the momentum had built didn’t make a whole lot of sense to me but of course that is entirely subjective in experience. If I had even a slight grasp upon the German language I am sure some of this might’ve been more profound but as such the heady, dire stretches of atmospheric guitars were too often interrupted to fully overtake the mind.

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I don’t know how you can put out a brutal death metal album themed around sentient tomatoes taking over the Earth and not directly reference Attack of the Killer Tomatoes but to be fair I wasn’t paying all that much attention to the details as the Mortician inspired meat-and-potatoes chunking slap of ‘Tomatized‘ grooved its way through a very simple, brutal-enough chunk of nine death metal songs in the space of about a half hour. Rome, Italy-based quintet CORPSEFUCKING ART tried the melodramatic, serious side of death metal in the early 90’s under different names but they’ve been all about gory, “fun” brutality since about 1996. They’ve definitely taken a more extreme approach in the past depending on the album but this comic book/B-movie approach to horror death metal keeps things as direct as possible. Use of distorted bass guitar tones, scooped rhythm guitar chugs and all that should sound classic enough for anyone looking for a mid-to-late 90’s brutal death metal standard though this album doesn’t necessarily touch upon the post-millennium era in terms of style, sticking to an ‘old school’ dynamic. I appreciated the simple, readable chug-fest and all of the riffs served here and I think any fan of pure death metal would, though I continue to hate “fun” in music and can only cross my arms and frown deeply in response to the themes.

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To see musician Vittorio D’Amore set aside his ongoing vision as frontman and main composer for industrial/alternative rock group Dope Stars Inc. and take on largely instrumental/programmed music beyond ~2015 has been interesting for the sake of some of the same software being used in the step from DSI (and other goth/cyber-rock projects) to Hacking the Wave ’til MBR. Each project carries a similar compositional hand but often a very different user base and this is most evident in the case of the chiptune/video game OST-esque style of MASTER BOOT RECORD, which has proven arguably more popular than their commercial electro-rock efforts. Now that they’re about eleven full-length records into this experiment where ancient MIDI tech is given a megaphone via modern equip the formula becomes increasingly familiar, gaining a signature voice which still entertains but begins to feel repetitious.

Between last years excellent side-project Keygen Church and this now fully live-capable MBR the artist continues to reach for custom sounds and different modes of composition to shake things up. In the case of ‘Hardwarez‘ it appears that a number of these songs insert actual guitar work for effect, making the heaviest riffs carry more consistent sustain and overall depth while also accentuating some of the synth lead work here and there. Otherwise more natural drum sample variants add to increasingly humanized results in terms of the rhythm section, stepping away from the more mecha-industrial exaggerations of their chiptune/synthwave combo. This begins moving their sound toward what I’d consider the “Redbook Audio” version of Master Boot Record which loses none of its charm and (again) signature voicing.

Of course if you were already a fan this’ll hit the spot. Master Boot Record have never sounded as big and ‘epic’ in their statement and the aforementioned upgrades offer a more three-dimensional presence. As a longtime listener I feel like this record goes for the leads, the synth-wobbling and scale pushing shred side of things more often than not (“CPU” probably has the most smoking leads overall) when a song calls for for distinction. Opener “BIOS” almost sounds like a 90’s post-‘Painkiller‘ power metal song as it kicks off an otherwise Rainbowdragoneyes-esque (The Messenger OST) use of lead synth and echoic chiptune sounds and this isn’t necessarily a complaint but doesn’t catch my ear as much as some of their earlier discography, those Thunder Force IV OST type kickers (“RAM” comes pretty close) are still there but the chipwave type songs continue to be more prominent than the glitch-riffed and faster paced songs. Beyond the brilliance of “RAM” I’d particularly enjoyed the symphonic metal/JRPG boss battle buzz of “PSU” and “MOBO” the most overall. If nothing else this album has me curious what a live record, or an “all analog” component record might sound like from the artist.

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In crafting the feeling of a cold and moonlit 80’s derived post-punk influenced gothic rock eternity French trio SOROR DOLOROSA are in absolutely no hurry, setting their efforts to a steady-walking and slowly kicked pace for the first half (and general majority) of this fourth full-length album. ‘Mond‘ begins with three dreary goth club worthy wafts of chilled sound, barely picking up to a rock level of action on “Red Love” but never fully breaking out into song until the second half of the fourth track (“Souls Collide”) where the spiritus of the band cracks open doubly wide. As they broke into the song’s more croon-worthy jam I’d double-checked that I hadn’t put on the wrong song but, no, the album simply takes its first turn loudly. Waking up into a passionate moment or two along the way they’ve generally thrived in creating an interesting medium between classic 80’s goth headspace and some kind of authentic “modern” sound dynamic. With backgrounds in black metal (Celestia, Nuit Noire) and deathrock of the late 90’s/early 2000’s it took a while for the full-fledged vision of this band to break out of its original shell into this state of greater cohesion, at least an album or two, and some drastic line-up changes have been necessary but it seems like they’re ever on top of this sound. This time around they’ve worked with Andy Kent (Perturbator) helping out with the engineering and arrangement of ‘Mond‘ and though subtle this has produced a very focused, coldly atmospheric record which a distinct feeling compared to the somewhat rootsy, all over the place ‘Apollo‘ (2017). This one is probably only for the gothic rock and goth-adjacent post-punk fan out there but I’d found most of it avoided a lot of the most embarrassing and/or poorly performed aspects of this type of music.

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