EDEMA: Default

Released: 2009

Edema is a heavy band from Italy, a country whose metal scene, rather like that of France, seems to be burgeoning but not well appreciated outside the county itself beyond obvious participants like Lacuna Coil and Rhapsody of Fire. Default is the first album from this eclectic Piacentini four piece and strikes an interesting balance between divergent styles.

This band's music has been categorised as almost everything from deathcore (which is most certainly isn't) to post-metal (which is also isn't) to nu-metal (vaguely) to progressive death metal, and even that doesn't really seem very accurate. The harsh and garbled vocals are the most significantly death metal aspect in Edema's sound, which draws from a lot of influences and makes for an interesting if somewhat contrived listen, as no two songs are much alike. It's as if the band has made every conceivable effort to make every song they do as stylistically different to the one before.

"Crawling Unseen" begins the album with the buzzing of flies before a similarly buzzing guitar line plays out alongside a stumbling riff, then deviates through alterna-prog style slap-bass and polyrhythmic interludes with half-sung, indistinct vocals. "Generator" is a much more straight-forward death/thrash track until a quieter, jangly section two-thirds in. With "Purchasing Your Own Illness" you can see where the nu-metal reference comes from right down to the title, the heavily bass-driven plod and the Korn-style breakdown; the wandering, genre-defying "Onirical" sounds something like a cross between Meshuggah and Skinlab. Then there's "My Sweetest Whore" which is an almost structure-less, time-signature defying death metal song! It is, quite honestly, an album full of surprises, a pot-pourri of styles and influences. The slightly muddy production lets it down a little though and by dropping noodly passages with half-spoken vocals into a song like the title track in a way that Pantera and Machine Head totally wouldn't do it, it's clear that Edema is sometimes trying too hard to be progressive at the expense of truly good hooks.

Nonetheless, Default is only the band's debut album and few bands get everything right first time. They aren't afraid to mix things up and certainly have some good ideas. The vocals need work however if anyone's ever to make sense of them and they will need to tweak their songs in future to make them a little more memorable. Certainly worth a listen though.

1. Crawling Unreason
2. Generator
3. Onirical
4. Default
5. Purchasing Your Own Illness
6. My Sweetest Whore
7. Unequal Desease

Rating: 68%

SLAYER: World Painted Blood

Produced by Greg Fidelman
Released October 30, 2009

It may come as a surprise to some readers of this blog to learn that Slayer has never been one of my favourite bands. I've never failed to see them live when I've had the chance, I still wear a shirt I got from their 1998 tour, I've always checked out their albums (although I skipped about the last decade's worth and apparently haven't missed that much), and I won't deny their influence on metal and outright awesomeness at what they do. It's just that whenever I've had to think about a list of ten or twenty bands that I like most, Slayer has never featured. Hell, I even suggested that Reign in Blood might not actually be the greatest thrash album of all time. So my approach to a new Slayer album isn't the same as it would be to, say, a new Alchemist CD. That is, I don't go into it really anticipating anything one way or another. And with that said, after one listen through of World Painted Blood, I found myself really digging it enough to spin it a second time right away.

Of course there's going to be a section of Slayer's fanbase who will argue that they've once again failed to deliver, but there's always that element that seems to expect too much, especially when it comes to the idea of blokes in their late 40s being able to pull off the same rebellious energy they had in their early 20s. The truth is, there's something almost intimately familiar about World Painted Blood that people who over-analyse or over-expect are going to miss. Whether it's Tom Araya's frenzied unsung shouting (especially in "Psychopathy Red" when he sounds like he's gone insane), the bursts of guitar savagery in places you don't expect them to be, Dave Lombardo's Heruclean drum fusillade or lyrics that shamelessly veer from the meaningless, cartoonish violence of "Beauty Through Order" to surprisingly incisive social commentary like "Americon" without any sense of irony, World Painted Blood has it all.

This is the most brutal Slayer album in ages: "Psychopathy Red" is absolutely crushing and in its frantic riffing "Unit 731" ends up sounding a little like "Reborn". There's a non-linear structure apparent in a lot of the tracks, with unexpected time- and tempo- changes and haphazard arrangements that also recall their earlier days. Yet for every neckbreaking thrash assault like "Snuff" or "Hate Worldwide" there's a mid-paced groove track like "Beauty Through Order" and "Human Strain" with their interesting uses of dynamics and control, or "Americon" that almost has a rock feel. Near the end is "Playing With Dolls", an experimental track that doesn't quite come off and one that will perhaps be the most contentious inclusion on an album that in every respect really is a mixed bag. Production-wise, the drums are forward in the mix, just to remind everyone that the key to Slayer's relentless assault is Dave Lombardo's furious and precise timekeeping. The solos of course are nothing special and the themes are mainly comic book violence and the usual serving of Kerry King's Christbaiting bullshit, but no one ever listened to Slayer for lyrical depth.

World Painted Blood seems to be aiming for the middle ground between Slayer's classic thrash period and their later groove era. Fans who only like their old stuff will only like about half the album and fans of their last few albums will like the other half. Everyone else will probably take it or leave it, even though this is easily the best Slayer album since Divine Intervention.

1. World Painted Blood
2. Unit 731
3. Snuff
4. Beauty Through Order
5. Hate Worldwide
6. Public Display of Dismemberment
7. Human Strain
8. Americon
9. Psychopathy Red
10. Playing With Dolls
11. Not of This God

Rating: 78%

HELLOWEEN: Unarmed - Best of 25th Anniversary

Produced by Charlie Bauerfeind

Released: 29 January

Have you ever been slapped in the face by someone you love? If you're a Helloween fan, that's what this album is like. More than once over the course of their storied career, Helloween has left their audience wondering as to what the Hell they had been thinking. While they've pretty much led the European power metal brigade since arriving on the scene, after Kai Hansen left back in '89 they churned out Pink Bubbles Go Ape and Chameleon, albums so oddly un-Helloween they've left fans scratching their heads in amazement ever since. The former of the pair is just bad heavy metal but perhaps forgiveable for a band recovering from having its creative heart ripped out; the latter an oddball collection of experiments in all sorts of musical styles that was virtually not metal at all.

Considering Chameleon almost ended the band and remains the most reviled of their albums by both critics and fans, it's difficult to understand the reasoning behind Unarmed. Helloween isn't beyond some experimentation from time to time, but above and beyond everything else, they're the world's best known power metal band. People like them because they play power metal! So what does this most revered and fanatically-followed arch-power metal band do to celebrate 25 years as a recording artist? With obviously little thought to the idea that it is, in fact, a really bad idea, they kick off Unarmed with an acoustic pop-rock version of "Dr Stein" -- with a horns section! Seriously, how could they top that? Well, how about taking the huge booming drums and galloping guitars completely out of "Eagle Fly Free" and turning it into an acoustic ballad? I won't even mention what they've done to "I Want Out". It's almost as if someone abducted Helloween and replaced them with a second-rate Eurovision entrant from Belarus. It really is that bad. If this is supposed to be a thank you to the fans, I'd hate to see what an insult would be like.

Somewhat amazingly, however, "The Keeper's Trilogy", a 17-minute orchestral medley of "Halloween", "Keeper of the 7 Keys" and "The King for a 1000 Years" is actually pretty good, mainly because they translate well to a symphonic treatment due to their original epic nature. It doesn't save the rest of the album though, because the rest of it is harebrained beyond imagining.

1. Dr Stein
2. Future World
3. If I Could Fly
4. Where the Rain Grows
5. The Keeper's Trilogy (Halloween/Keeper of the 7 Keys/The King For a 1000 Years)
6. Eagle Fly Free
7. Perfect Gentleman
8. Forever & One
9. I Want Out
10. Fallen to Pieces
11. A Tale That Wasn't Right

Rating: 35%

iNFeCTeD: crawlspace

Produced by iNFeCTeD and Andrew Wright

Released: 1994, re-issue October 2009

By rights, iNFeCTeD should have got much bigger than they did. Distinctively different from most of the rest of the Australian death metal scene at the time, they got a two-album deal with Thrust on the strength of a demo, played supports with everyone that mattered and even appeared at the Big Day Out. But their breakthrough never really came. Being from Perth at a time when even east coast bands found it tough to tour much and unable to consolidate a deal with Roadrunner, iNFeCTeD finally ground to halt in late 1996, leaving their recorded legacy to wallow in obscurity. It took me ages to find a copy of crawlspace, eventually tracking one down online a few years back. That's a terrible shame, but the hunt should be easier now because this seminal album was recently re-mastered and re-issued and if you missed it the first time, don't make the same mistake again.

Recorded in 1993 and released the following year (with the cover on the left), crawlspace sounds like few other domestic metal bands of the period. While Morbid Angel, Cannibal Corpse and Carcass were the terms of reference for most of the death metal brigade, iNFeCTeD were taking their cues from Godflesh and Fear Factory. The results may not have been wholly original, but they were certainly inspired and effective. Right away, "The Sleeper" let the listener know that they're about to hear something unconventional for the time, with a harsh, grinding guitar sound and an angry, snarling vocal.

With "Truthkill" the band sounds most like it is channeling the dark energy of Streetcleaner with its coarse, angular riffs and droning, distorted bass and the title track is reminiscent of something like "Martyr" or "Scumgrief" from Soul of New Machine. The chunky, chugging breakdown riff in the middle of "Once More" foreshadows the basic alterna-metal sound that would later flood the scene, but here Gareth Morris fills it up with clattering drums like an outbreak of sniper fire. Guitarist Matthew Jefferson throws up riffs that churn and stumble into each other and then scatters minimalistic, dissonant solos into random songs without bothering to lay down a rhythm track underneath, leaving James Campbell's bass to crash against them with a raw thud. Joe Kapiteyn's vocals are also a distinctively unique element of iNFeCTeD's sound, more of a hoarse, punkish bark like Justin Broadrick than anything approximating the Vincent-esque roaring growl other bands employ. Stylistically, this is a band way ahead of its time, and the re-mastered version, featuring a remix of "Assimilate" that displays their industrial pretentions, makes crawlspace sound like it was recorded in 2009, not 17 years ago.

crawlspace truly is an Australian death metal classic, relegated to forgotten realms no more. Seek it out.

1. The Sleeper
2. Rage Flower
3. Hole Inside
4. Truthkill
5. Crawlspace
6. Once More
7. Predetermined
8. Smother
9. Assimilate
10. Never
11. Assimilate (goldDust remix)

Rating: 92%

NAZXUL: Iconoclast

Released: July 2009

The dark masters of Australian black metal rise once more with the long-foretold Iconoclast. In spite of long bouts of inactivity, member changes and the tragic loss of their guitarist on the eve of the album's completion, this is everything that was promised it would be.

For those not familiar with the inner workings of the band, the booklet offers no insight. There's no recording credits, no member details, no liner notes of any kind, only lyrics, some iconography, and a dull photo of six hooded figures. Individual identity has no place in the ideology of Nazxul: the band is an entity unto itself. So it is then that despite half the band being replaced (some members more than once) since the monumental "Black Seed" EP, nothing about their vision has changed. Iconoclast takes up directly where that recording left off, a portentous, epic slab of soul-scarring symphonic black metal.

Over the decade since "Black Seed", this form of music has been gradually diluted through the auspices of Cradle of Filth and Dimmu Borgir into realms of near-commercial acceptance, but Iconoclast is true to its name, pandering to no trend but its own. After the dark, ominous strings of "Apoptosis", Nazxul unleashes the hellish fury of "Dargon Dispitous", evoking the kind of cold, barbaric atmosphere of early Emperor. While the tremolo-picking sets-to with a fury, the drumming sets a steady, almost ponderous pace that builds an aestethic of epicness. The vocals are like curses, delivered in croaks and hoarse, icy near-whispers. Melody comes from the keyboards, massive and prominent, yet balanced, neither drowning the savage fury of the guitars nor surrending to them.

"Set in Array" marks the true flowering of Nazxul's symphonic intentions, enhancing its violence with string orchestration. In "Symbol of Night & Winter" the keys pull back a little from the chugging metal riffs until the grand "Oath (Fides Resurrectio)" enters the picture. A solemn and haunting track, "Oath" rolls out in slow majesty as a high point to stand alongside the inimitable "Vow of Vengeance", a masterpiece on a meisterwerk. The album closes with the sinister snarling vocal and surging riffs of "World Oblivion" as The Great Dragon finally arises and engulfs the universe, leaving only the dark atmospheric finale of "Threnody".

Iconoclast is a prodigious and oppressive album of lingering malevolence, the logical consummation of Nazxul's existence to this point.

1. Apoptosis
2. Dragon Dispitous
3. III
4. Black Wings
5. V
6. Iconoclast
7. I
8. Set in Array
9. II
10. Symbol of Night & Winter (Ancient Lords)
11. Oath (Fides Resurrectio)
12. Stain of Harrow
13. World Oblivion
14. Threnody

Rating: 96%

SADISTIK EXEKUTION: K.A.O.S.

Released: 1997

Yesterday I postulated that Portal could well be the purest manifestation of dissonant, inaccessible death metal, and if such a crown exists then it is from Sadistik Exekution from whom it has been wrested. The similarities are numerous, not the least of which is the apparent intention to be as extreme as possible with few or no thought to listenable sensibilities; the major difference is that Portal, despite wearing pieces of antique furniture as stage costumes and singing through gramophone horns, take themselves incredibly seriously. Sadistik Exekution has always known they were a circus. Their first two albums at least had some coherent material, but by the time of K.A.O.S. they had obviously decided that writing songs that were in any way memorable, catchy, subtle or even structured was simply not for them.

What they therefore released was 42 minutes of appropriately-titled mayhem. "Dejekta Infinitus" is a thoroughly exhausting holocaust of light-speed riffs and what can only be described as superhuman drumming. This is ridiculously, almost impossibly fast, as fast as or even faster than any grindcore in existence. And it goes for 5 and a half minutes! Over the top of this insane soundtrack, Rok shouts and slurs seemingly random words like a dangerously deranged drunk. After one track like this, most bands would shift gear or unleash some other kind of hell from their arsenal. On K.A.O.S., Sadistik Exekution has only one gear--overdrive. No sooner does the first track finish then Rok bellows "VI-OH-LENCE!" and the next one begins with almost no variation whatever. Dynamics account for precisely zero of this album's content and structure is almost as elusive; chaos is very much the essence of K.A.O.S., the sheer, unrestrained violence and unpredictable ethos of Reign in Blood but amplified a million times and with no restraint whatsoever.

So while K.A.O.S. succeeds in being extreme for its own sake, it fails for precisely the same reason. There's really no incentive to listen to any more than one track because that's enough to have heard everything that Sadistik Exekution is going to do on all the other songs. Unlike We are Death... Fukk You! and the seriously evil The Magus, the band does nothing more than play as fast as possible again and again and again. It's a neat trick and Rok's demented rantings are pure entertainment, but it does gets tiresome quickly.

1. Ultra Maximizer of Agony
2. Dejekta Infinitus
3. Volkanik Violence
4. Burning Blasphemy
5. Demon With Wings II
6. Voltage by Sadism
7. Horror Inferno
8. Sadistik Elektrokution
9. The Return of Proxima
10. Korpse on the Grave
11. Fukked Up and Buried

Rating: 35%

PORTAL: Swarth

Produced by Aphotic
Released: 2009

If the true essence of death metal is dissonance, inaccessibility and disharmonious noise terror beyond most limits of taste, then Brisbane's Portal is its purest embodiment. What this band does is not so much create music -- indeed, music is hardly a word to describe what they do -- but evoke an atmosphere of harrowing discomfort. If horror and disgust can be translated into a sonic form, then Portal is that medium.

With their third album, this group has at last refined their sound, if a noise that suggests an invasion by nightmares from another dimension can actually be refined, and the result is the best definition yet of Portal's objective, which appears to be to make the most unlistenable racket imaginable. On Seepia they sounded like a bunch of unhinged lunatics smashing up a music store; Outre was so distorted that it was as if it had been backmasked. If it's actually possible, Swarth stands somewhere in between: less murky and slightly less nihilistic. But make no mistake. This is still the cacophonous, unpredictable, deranged clamour that only Portal generates. The production distorts everything massively, especially the guitars to the expense of all else. The bass is minimalist to the point of non-existence except for an occasional throb in "Writhen" for example, where the circular miasma of guitar noise pauses for a second or two to actually generate something approximating riffs. Unaccentuated blastbeats thud along endlessly, but sound like they're being played on a kit comprising only an untuned snare and hi-hats that have been clamped shut. The Curator's vocals are surprisingly effective however, evil-sounding grunts and whispers that manage to rise above the furious din. The actual lyrics are indecipherable, but as they are most likely incomprehensible non-sequiturs cribbed from a drug-addled re-write of Lovecraft, this doesn't really matter.

Swarth is the most complete vision of Portal's goal so far. It's horrible to the point of abhorrence, awful beyond comprehension. It is essentially noise for the sake of it, a vile, wretched, meaningless noise that batters and batters for 40 minutes straight for no reason at all.

1. Swarth
2. Larvae
3. Illoomorpheme
4. The Sweyy
5. Writhen
6. Omenknow
7. Werships
8. Marityme

Rating: 20%

OVERKILL: Ironbound

Released: January 29, 2010

Overkill have never really made a bad record, and as the years go by and peers and contemporaries falter and disappear, these dudes just seem to get better. Their 2003 effort Killbox 13 is one of the best thrash albums of all and while Ironbound doesn't quite match it, it sure as shit makes a pretty good effort. Anything that starts off with a twisting and turning, eight minute neckbreaker like "The Green and Black" is going to have something going for it, and Ironbound delivers the consistency and merciless thrash metal madness that Overkill has always stood for--in spades.

In the three years since Immortalis Overkill has probably toured harder and more frequently than at any time in their past, and that energy has transferred straight onto plastic. While Ironbound has that thick, heavy and modern production that their past few effort have possessed, the songs have an immediacy and a vitality that one would expect from a bunch of guys half their age and if you didn't know better you would almost pick them for one of the better groups leading the New Wave of Thrash. Bobby Blitz still screeches like a demon, and the now-veteran pairing of Dave Linsk and Derek Tailer throw up a never-ending array of violent yet catchy riffs, then fire off blistering leads like the best in the business. Here and there, some of the riffs sound familiar or regurgitated--"Bring Me the Night" sounds like Metallica's cover of "Helpless"--and there isn't much that isn't played at breakneck speed, but that doesn't really matter. Overkill started out as a punk band, and so for them it has always been about feel and intensity before anything else, and Ironbound strays little from that time-honoured path.

Only the strangely commercial-sounding "Give a Little" varies the diet from the pounding, intense thrash metal that is otherwise stamped all over this album. Ironbound isn't even out yet, and it's already in the running for Best Thrash Album of 2010, if not one of the best metal releases overall. I shit you not.

1. The Green and Black
2. Ironbound
3. Bring Me the Night
4. The Goat is Your Soul
5. Give a Little
6. Endless War
7. The Head and Heart
8. In Vain
9. Killing for a Living
10. The SRC

Rating: 94%

DEVIN TOWNSEND PROJECT: Addicted

Produced by Devin Townsend

Released: November 21, 2009

DTP's album from earlier this year was something of an oddity, even for an artist like Devin Townsend, who once recorded a concept album based on a science fiction story he wrote when he was a child. Ki was so far removed from anything he's done before that it was almost hard to associate it with Devin Townsend. Frustratingly uneven, it was Devin throwing his fans a curveball just for the sake of it, but it did announce in no uncertain terms that he intended the Project to be a separate entity from his previous outlets.

So it is both strange and satisfying (and very Townsendian) that on Addicted, Devin has retraced his steps to his blustering metal days once again. You know you're back in familiar territory as "Addicted!" rises up like a colossos, crushing its way forward on an immense bank of guitar violence and manic vocals. Indeed, the opening third sounds like what Strapping Young Lad should have done instead of The New Black, but Townsend tempers the outrageous violence with undercurrents of groove, drum loops, danceable beats and insidious melodies. Then he brings out his secret weapon, The Gathering's Anneke van Giersbergen, who takes the vocal mantle for a good percentage of the album, including a reworked version of "Hyperdrive!" (from Ziltoid the Omniscient). The songwriting and style is more in-tune with his earlier solo releases like Ocean Machine and Infinity mixed with influences from the Wildhearts ("Resolve!"), disco (everything) and commercially-laced pop music ("Ih-ah"), not to mention a song about Bender from Futurama. van Giersbergen's vocals both compliment and are a foil to Townsend's, whose performance here ranks as perhaps his most diverse ever, which says a lot.

The inclusion of van Giersbergen on Addicted is a trump card that DTP plays strongly, but Townsend's constant experimentation with vastly different musical elements also helps to make this one of his better albums, and certainly the best since Alien. Devin Townsend is back. Be afraid.

1. Addicted!
2. Universe in a Ball!
3. Bend it Like Bender!
4. Supercrush!
5. Hyperdrive!
6. Resolve!
7. Ih-ah!
8. The Way Home!
9. Numbered!
10. Awake!

Rating: 89%

DENIED: ...When the Slate Becomes Diamonds

Released: June 2008

Anyone who's followed this blog closely will know just how much I love power metal, and Italian power metal in particular. Denied (or perhaps just singer Stefano Bottari, who's apparently the only person left in the band these days) obviously know this because ...When the Slate Becomes Diamonds seems to be sending up their country's ridiculously awful power metal scene. Just check out that cover. In case you can't see it very well, it's a dude in spiky armour smashing a guitar into the ground with so much force that diamonds are flying out. And they have a song called "Ride to the Land of the Machine Guns"! If that isn't the greatest power metal song-title of all time then I don't know what is. While some bands are clearly unintentional self-parodies with idiotic names it seems that Denied at least knows how silly this whole schtick really is and don't try to play it all that straight. After all, they do have a song about riding to a land full of machine guns that has one of the most rousing choruses in the history of bad heavy metal.

Musically, Denied tap the Maiden-crossed-with-Helloween Euro-power vein mercilessly until every song sounds pretty much alike and by the brilliantly-named "Before Then After Later" you've really heard everything this band is ever likely to do (and dragging out the last track for almost ten minutes is over-playing an already over-played hand beyond most limits of patience). Still, for a one-trick pony, Denied are amusing enough that you might listen to this album all the way through and even put it on again once in a while, even if it's just to blare it loudly in the background while you swill beer. It's dumb in a way that so many band pretend they're not, and because of this it's totally inoffensive and somewhat likeable. For a little while anyway.

1. The Dawn
2. When the Slate Becomes Diamonds
3. Denied
4. The Waste Remains and Kills
5. Ride to the Land of the Machine Guns
6. Before Then After Later
7. Horrorama
8. Quest for Deliverance
9. Circle of Fire
10. Bearers of the Slate

Rating: 40%