A DGR REVIEW ARCHIVE, PART I: BETWEEN REALMS, LAMENTARI, TRAIL OF TEARS, AS THE SUN FALLS

 Album Reviews  1 Response »
Aug 162024
 

(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 »

TRAIL OF TEARS: “OSCILLATION”

 Album Reviews, Exceptions to the Rule  5 Responses »
May 282013
 

(In this post, DGR reviews the latest — and last — album by Norway’s Trail of Tears, which is due for release in North America on June 11 by Massacre Records.)

Listening to Oscillation, Norwegian group Trail of Tears’ seventh and ostensibly final album, is something of a bittersweet experience. The group’s acrimonious breakup played out in a pretty public fashion (reported here, for example), and once you read stories about how the working environment within the band had been difficult for a year prior, you can’t help but let it color your perceptions of the disc — especially if you’re the type to pontificate on each choice as it exists on an album, its overall effect on the sound, how you think things went down. Instead of seeing this as a remarkably risky album for a group who have been relatively conservative with their formula, you instead find yourself thinking,”Wow, they must have been fighting this whole time,” and it really does put a damper on what should be thought of as – and empirically is – a pretty good batch of Trail of Tears songs.

So that’s why this is something of a difficult review, because there are things on Oscillation that you could reason away or just simply describe that are now somewhat tainted by the group’s somewhat dramatic breakup. As a result, this review will be considering the disc in a vacuum, written by someone who liked Existenia and Bloodstained Endurance. Those two discs albums are probably the closest comparison to Oscillation, because this new one feels like the continuation of the two previous releases, with enough experimentation and shifts in sound that it still stands on its own. But it could just as easily be polarizing, simply based on which of the two warring vocalists is in the front of the band for most of the songs. Continue reading »

ROUND-UP: ROTTING CHRIST, HYPOCRISY, TRAIL OF TEARS, VHÖL

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Feb 232013
 

When it comes to music debuts and hot breaking news, Friday’s aren’t usually very eventful. But yesterday was an exception. I posted a lot of new things yesterday as they were happening, but still didn’t cover everything, due to day-job bullshit. Today I’m catching up, with a collection of more sweet new items.

ROTTING CHRIST

These Greek heavyweights have been rolling out many new songs from their new album Kata Ton Daimona Eaytoy, which Season Of Mist will be releasing next week. But yesterday, the entire album became available for streaming on several sites, including Metal Hammer.

I’m completely sold on this album, though I’ve been holding fire on explaining why because we do have a review in the works. I will once again merely say that you should hear this album. And now you can — via the player I’ve embedded right after the jump. Continue reading »

NEWSNEWSNEWS

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  3 Responses »
Jan 142013
 

(Here’s a newsy post from DGR.)

Normally Islander is like a sponge when it comes to a lot of the news that is happening around the web; however, like a lot of us he has a job outside of the website (some of you may have already met him!) so some stuff may have flown by him that happened throughout the week. Well not anymore, as I present a round up of stuff that caught my eye that unfortunately never got yacked about here on NCS.

We’re running through a glut of all sorts of things this week from music videos, lyric videos, free tuneage (almost typed this as free tuna! – didn’t want to overpromise to you folks, we’re not that rich…yet), to album announcements, to a limited-time charity deal if you like electronica-rock, to the ever-lovely melodrama of a band as members leave and use the loveliness of Facebook to get those last few barbs in. Have your coffees at the ready to slam into your face as we work our way through the stuff we missed that might be of interest to you.

Aborted

Aborted (above) rang in 2012 pretty early with the release of Global Flatline and that disc quickly became a favorite around NCS. It appeared on a couple of our lists and really reminded people why we all thought Aborted were a great band. Late last week the group released a lyric video for the song “Vermincular, Obscene, and Obese” that animates their cover art for Global Flatline in the background so you can actually see what the heck Sven is saying when he growls out the closing lines of each sentence. Continue reading »

INTO THE PIT: NEWS YOU MIGHT HAVE MISSED

 Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC  4 Responses »
Jan 262012
 

(DemiGodRaven helps catch us up on metal news.)

Hey folks, I’ve planted my ass in the underworld for a brief period of time in order to round up all the smaller (and maybe not so small) news stories that may have fallen through the cracks in one way or another. Some of them are simple things like album streams, others are album teasers, there’s some tour news, and hey, occasionally you’ll even get a free song or two, ya hear? Also, if you aren’t reading this in a 50’s news reporters voice after seeing the picture of the hat above YOU ARE DOING IT WRONG. First up is a pretty simple album stream, and then we’ll go on from there.

Lamb of God’s latest album Resolution saw release recently, and so they decided to run a full album stream over at AOL Music to give people a chance to get in a good listen before they decide whether to buy or not. I’ve enjoyed this release much more than Wrath, but it is still largely iterative on the sound that they started building in Sacrament.

It’s a good listen all the way through, but I can imagine it would be pretty dull if you picked a random song instead of the five or six really great ones. In other words, this is not an album built for Ipod shuffle like Amon Amarth’s stuff usually is (for example), so you’ll have to be in a really Lamb of God mood in order to really get into this one.

Also, they used the shotgun blast sample again. The same one they used on Sacrament. I was just waiting for the GOD-DAMN before it. Full review incoming soon. In the meantime, while you wait for me to validate your opinion and tell you how awesome of a metal listener you are, you can stream that fucker over here. Continue reading »