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Grave Desecrator
Insult (Hell’s Headbangers) by Phil Freeman Buy from Amazon What do you think an album by a band called Grave Desecrator, from Brazil, is gonna sound like? That’s right. This is the second full-length...
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Deicide
To Hell With God (Century Media) by Phil Freeman Buy it from Amazon This is the 10th studio album by Florida’s Deicide, one of the first death metal bands and one that’s undergone a startling...
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Cults, “Go Outside”
I don’t like this song very much. It’s catchy; it’s sticking in my head. But this kind of shimmery pop doesn’t work as a soundtrack to any life experiences I’d enjoy having, and as a lifelong wearer of...
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Death
Human (Relapse) Buy it from Amazon by Phil Freeman The early 1990s were a weird time for metal. Some of the genre’s biggest bands were fracturing and faltering—vocalist Rob Halford left Judas Priest in...
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Terrorizer
Hordes of Zombies (Season of Mist) by Phil Freeman Buy it from Amazon Terrorizer isn’t a band as much as it’s a brand. And that brand means something very different in 2012 than it meant in 1989. In...
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John Butcher
John Butcher Bell Trove Spools (Northern Spy) John Butcher & Matthew Shipp At Oto (Fataka) by Phil Freeman Music is organized sound. We (players and listeners) know this, but we don’t think about...
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Interview: Terrance Hobbs
by Phil Freeman Suffocation are one of the most important American death metal bands; it’s impossible to really embrace the genre without exploring their discography. Their debut album, 1991′s Effigy...
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Dying Embrace
Era of Tribulation (Armée De La Mort) by MacDara Conroy It’s temping to judge the merits of music produced in the developing world through the tinted lens of cultural sensitivity: to let certain...
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A Taxonomy Of Extreme Metal Vocals
Since its inception in the 1970s, metal has been a proving ground for vocalists. First there were the operatic screams of genre pioneers like Ronnie James Dio (of Rainbow, Black Sabbath and a lengthy...
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The Virtues Of Consistency: Pathology’s Lords Of Rephaim
Pathology are a death metal band from San Diego, California, formed in 2006 by drummer Dave Astor, formerly of Cattle Decapitation and The Locust. Their first album, Surgically Hacked, featured Nick...
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The Best Metal Albums Of 2013: #10-6
We’re now officially in the home stretch of our countdown of the 25 best rock/metal albums of 2013. (Click here to see #s 25-21; click here to see #s 20-16; click here to see #s 15-11.) All caught up?...
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Incantation
Incantation are one of American death metal’s greatest bands, and that’s almost entirely due to the single-minded brilliance of guitarist John McEntee, their only remaining founding member. Over the...
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Best Metal Of 2014: 10-6
Burning Ambulance’s week-long countdown of the year’s best metal albums continues with the first half of the top 10. Here we go! 10. Cannibal Corpse, A Skeletal Domain (Buy It) Cannibal Corpse’s first...
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Tribulation
The third album by Swedish metal band Tribulation, The Children of the Night, is out this week, and it’s one of the best albums of 2015. (Get it on Amazon.) They’ve evolved substantially with each...
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Sacred Goat
Sacred Goat are a metal band from Bogota, Colombia, who’ve been at it since 2010; their debut album, Sinful Self, was released earlier this month. (Buy it from CDBaby.) Their music is a fast, ferocious...
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Three From Unique Leader
Ten years ago or so, the technical death metal label of the moment was Pennsylvania’s Willowtip Records, who put out brilliant albums by Arsis, Illogicist, Malignancy, Neuraxis, and Spawn of...
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Hannes Grossmann
Drummer Hannes Grossmann is one of the most admired players in the world of technical death metal. At 21, he joined Necrophagist, playing on the band’s first (and so far only) album for Relapse,...
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Immolation
Immolation are one of the original death metal bands, rising to prominence in the late ’80s as part of the same East Coast scene as Cannibal Corpse, Incantation, and Suffocation. They’ve made 10 albums...
View ArticleThe Year In Metal: 2017
In the 21st century, metal is defined by its sub-sub-microgenres…at least, if you ask most American metal critics. Blackened crust. OSDM (that stands for old school death metal, but it’s got to be...
View ArticleThe Black Dahlia Murder
It can be hard to tell The Black Dahlia Murder‘s albums apart. That’s at least partly by design. Although they’ve had uncommonly frequent and severe membership turnover — vocalist Trevor Strnad and...
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