(DGR is attempting to clear out a backlog of reviews he has been planning for some time, beginning today with a collection of writings for four bands who released records in May of this year.)

You could probably set your watch by this – right down to the opening sentence even – but it seems once again that the back half of the year has crept up faster than one might expect, which means it is now time for the honoured tradition known as ‘clearing the slate’.

These are quicker, more stream of consciousness reviews than I generally prefer to do, and although the brevity is certainly appreciated, it does still kind of bother me personally that I’m not quite diving as deep into an album as I would generally like to.

This may come as shocking but even though I’ve had extended periods of radio silence on the site throughout the years, that doesn’t mean I’ve necessarily stopped listening to music. Instead, the musical net behind the good ship DGR remains constantly deployed, and full, even after I’ve removed and returned any protected species to the their homes in the wild.

What you see here are albums that’ve slowly built up in the collection over the year, some recent and others very clearly and assuredly not so recent. Some of these are even releases that I intended to write about before fucking off for the entirety of May, when I jammed out something like eleven or twelve reviews so the site wouldn’t go completely dark while we were all out in the wild that is both Terror Fest and Deathfest.

Either way, if I don’t at least attempt to kick this boulder downhill, the act of leaving so many releases I’ve been listening to without at least something to help get them to a wider audience is going to bother me until December… when I’ll be doing this again during year-end list season. Continue reading »