CLEARING THE SLATE PART IV: THE WILD, WILD, (w)REST

 Album Reviews  No Responses »
Dec 162025
 

(This is the fourth and final Part of a series of record-review collections by DGR — collections of multiple reviews that are somewhat shorter by his standards than what you usually see from him — all of them intended to clear the slate in preparation for his year-end lists that will be coming soon.)

This started with the intention of me absolutely smashing out four of these and then diving head-first with wanton abandon into my year-end list collective. A final freeing of thoughts so that I could then look backward through the year and fry my brain one more time while rediscovering all of the music I had enjoyed since the beginning of 2025.

Then your pet gets sick and you wind up being told that she has three or four different things happening all at once and you now have a twice daily, six rotating medications regimen to stick to and things get sort of waylaid until you’re back to wavering on the precipice of stability and you can weasel a little time out to write something. That’s where I’m at now, I think. I should probably check on the cat again just to be safe.

Today’s final collective is a wild one, a combination of releases that kept getting back-burnered, opening and closing paragraphs rewritten multiple times, and discoveries that happened while perusing different label Bandcamp pages while writing the previous three entries in this series. In combination with my year-end list – which I do already have basically laid out albums-wise, just not written – these things have started to congeal into one mass of ideas that I’m not sure apply to each album. In order to prevent random wires being crossed I’ve somewhat sequestered this article from the year-end shenanigans, and as such, must finish this before the true descent into madness begins. Continue reading »

THY DISEASE: “THE COSTUME OF TECHNOCRACY”

 Album Reviews  4 Responses »
Apr 072014
 

(DGR reviews the sixth studio album by Poland’s Thy Disease, released in February 2014.)

Industrial hybrid genres are an oddball entity to write about when it comes to heavy metal. Often it feels like bands don’t have enough industrial elements and at other times it feels like those are are overwhelming the others to the extent that the remaining piece of the descriptor might as well not even be there. There are people who do get it correct, but it seems to have become the go-to for any band that adds some distorted whirs, buzzes, keyboards, and such, that they wind up with an “industrial” in front of their name.

Industrial Death often finds itself in that weird push-pull dynamic, having morphed into a groove-focused genre with very little of the actual death metal side present — namely, just growled vocals  and the occasional blast-beat battering. It’s also a very wide genre that has become a huge umbrella term for bands who might otherwise be characterized as symphonic or something else entirely. Long story short, it’s hard to tell if seeing a band described as Industrial Death Metal actually means anything at first glance, other than allowing you to infer that at some point there will be electronics in the mix.

Poland’s Thy Disease are one such band, a group who have adopted the “industrial death metal” descriptor as part of their image, playing up the “music made by and for Terminators” aspect of it while incorporating many of the aforementioned groove-heavy and instantly neck-bobbing riffs in their music. The band have been long-time staples of my personal Last.fm recommendations — one of the groups that I feel like I’ve listened to more on that site despite having a copy of Anshur-Za (their 2009 release) lying around in my house. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: MANTAR, MORFIN, SVARTTJERN, THY DISEASE, WORDS OF FAREWELL

 RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  6 Responses »
Jan 282014
 

I was going to post this yesterday, but we had so many other things to do yesterday that I ran out of time. But although a day late, the five songs collected here are still fairly new. All of them premiered since last Friday and all of them caught my ears in a vice-like grip and shook my head like a maraca, producing a similar rattling sound with the small object inside my skull. As usual for these collections, the styles of metal are different, but it’s all good. The bands are presented in alphabetical order.

MANTAR

Mantar are a new two-piece band, half German and half Turkish, whose debut album Death By Burning is scheduled for release by Svart Records, on February 7. I hadn’t heard any of their music before, but the strange cover art drew me into CVLT Nation’s debut of a new track named “Spit”.

Interestingly, the only instruments used on the album are guitar and drums (no bass), but “Spit” is still plenty heavy. Comparisons have been drawn to the likes of Melvins, Motorhead, and Darkthrone. “Spit” is a black, hammering rocker with a boatload of fat, distorted riffs and a drum attack that seems bent on dismantling skulls. It’s catchy as fuck, and Mantar’s vocalist has the kind of raw, scarring tone that leaves faces in shreds. Excellent nastiness. Continue reading »