DGR’S YEAR-END REVIEW ROUNDUP (PART 1): THE BREATHING PROCESS, BERZERKER LEGION, COSMITORIUM, THE RITUAL AURA

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Dec 182023
 

(This isn’t DGR‘s annual year-end list. That might yet come. This is the first Part of a four-Part collection of reviews, focusing on 2023 albums we hadn’t managed to review before.)

Every year we do this; the final clearing of the slate before the annual list-making season begins. This year will be no different, because like every other year, I’m also opening this with an apology to the bands included.

Normally my reviews tend to be long-winded and wordy as can get because I enjoy the long-form dissection of an album – no matter how repetitive in my choice of phrases as I may get – and the final clearing tends to be shorter. It was my intent not to do so this year but life happened.

Not only that, life happened hard and life happened in such a way that I’m going to have a very, very difficult time talking about it for a long time and I’m not entirely convinced that we’ll ever be any definition of ‘okay’ again around here, so much as we are just getting by and in a permanent state of ‘recovering’. It’s been tough.

But, I haven’t forgotten about this because as much as we’ve spoken about how life and work kick our asses and the website takes a backseat, this is one of my few outlets. As a result, I’m not sure if I have it in me to do my usual end of the year clusterfuck – though I will try – but I do want to at least get some words out about the last remaining groups of releases that have haunted my ‘to review’ notes over the year. Continue reading »

A DOUBLE REVIEW (PART 1): BERZERKER LEGION — “OBLITERATE THE WEAK”

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Mar 192020
 

 

(DGR turned in a double-review, but in his own inimitable fashion he wrote so many words about each of the two albums that your humble editor decided to split it in two, and the second review will be posted a bit later today.)

Over the many years that we’ve spent in our comfortable little corner of the internet, one of the things we’ve learned how to get real good at is identifying genre-fare: the sort of musical red meat where it is clear the crew behind them just want to add to the overall cauldron that is their music of choice. Not necessarily the most ambitious or ‘paradigm changing’ — though the times where a group lands on that sort of lightning-in-a-bottle formula is always great — but music that is enjoyable for what it is, well-executed within the blueprint of its chosen genre.

One of the examples of this which practically fuels this website is the sort of rock-stupid, pulsating thud of death metal that gets by purely by appealing to the early cave-dweller parts of our brain, and another is the type of music that is so predisposed to headbanging guitar work that you can’t help but want to tag along, whether or not you have the long hair for it.

In today’s case it’s weird that these two albums feel like catching up a bit, since these two projects share a vocalist whom we’ve written about numerous times before and both of them are right in that wheelhouse described above. One is more modern and melody-focused despite its overall insistence on how world-ending it paints its protagonists in the songs, and the other is flavored with apocalyptic flair but with the chainsaw guitar aimed at a more old-school crowd. And thus we find ourselves catching up with Berzerker Legion and a crew more familiar to our site’s readers, Wombbath. Continue reading »