Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal And Other Occasional Musics And Cultures

Album Reviews

ALBUM REVIEW RATING SCALE:
**Please note that this rating scale serves as a reference for albums reviewed prior to 2023.
Numbered ratings will not be added going forward, in hopes that the writer’s impression of the work will suffice.
It will have to.** 

6 – Rarely bestowed. An honor reserved for undeniable classics (or those that should be). The Apex Predator.
5 – Impressive.
4 – Worthy of special recognition.
3 – A solid effort.
2 – The participation trophy.
1 – These are the albums that the 2s beat up on the way home from school.
0 – A waste of both our time and yours.

Album Reviews

Album Review: Enslaved – Mið

Vikingligr Veldi still lives in my car. Monumension and Below The Lights still find occasional play, but if I am to be honest – I’ve been sleeping with the Earth a little too long and the last new release I bought from ENSLAVED was Isa. It’s been a long tyme since then. The newest ENSLAVED offering haes a curious beginning, but once the guitars begin to twiddle in I found myself thinking “Okay, I think I can get into this”. Mið doesn’t really come alive until ‘Spirit Helper’, but when it does, it bursts forth in deep blacks and vibrant […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: SEK – Wallensteins Garage

Though SEK is a new entity, members Stoyan, Edert, and Kazzer (get it?) have been churning in the Berlin gristmills for ages. It’s these crossed paths, shared bills and bands, and a desire to create with one another specifically that has brought them together, and hence Wallensteins Garage, the band’s debut on – where else? – Exile On Mainstream. The Thirty Years War intertwines with memories of the Battle of Lützen, the cost of glory, the glorification of war, and the sometimes-tenuous thread that binds legend to truth are a heady blend of subject matter for any album, much less […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Azatoth – Carnal Lust Of Blasphemy

A stench from an open grave reaches your nostrils…must be something new from Extremely Rotten Productions on the stereo. And so it is! With an album title like this, we are in for one knee-slapping laugh riot of putrid death, courtesy of this young Finnish band, who are seen in a graveyard staring at their shoes and turning their hands into claws. Finland has a great tradition of extra-rancid old school death metal and AZATOTH do their best to live up to it here. The record sounds like it was recorded in a cavern deep below a graveyard, with minimal […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Desolat – People As Idiots & Idiots As Leaders

Vienna’s DESOLAT are back, and they’re hungry. Hungry to scream in the faces of both sides of extremism. Hungry to wake up a society of sheep content to “live” asleep as they amble drowsily towards their own doom. Hopefully hungry to make some badass noise in the process. If their past two slabs are any indication, that’s what’s coming up with People As Idiots & Idiots As Leaders. ‘Idiots As Leaders’ lumbers forth, doom-laden with the weight of nations (and a bit of early PENTAGRAM) before the snarling sneer of vocalist/guitarist Alfred Satani is kicked into life by the Klaus/Mentl […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: The Barbarians Of California – Megatons

I went outside my comfort zone with this one and gotta say, the result is much more entertaining than I thought it would be. THE BARBARIANS OF CALIFORNIA are described as “West Coast hardcore” but there’s more to them than that. I always preferred the street-tough NYHC to the poppier Orange County stuff, but these guys are a trip. Yes, there’s some of that catchy WCHC punk in Megatons but they toss in a lot of other influences. Not to mention that this record can be as heavy as the title indicates. This is good goofy fun and not to […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Blood Of The Earth – Beneath A Sky That Breaks [EP]

Tampa’s BLOOD OF THE EARTH returns two years after its initial and respectable outing …And The Pillars Shook with a second EP, Beneath A Sky That Breaks. The first noticeable change from …Pillars is the lineup augmentation courtesy vocalist J. Costa, also of THY WILL BE DONE. While the debut was interesting, its instrumental path akin to that of, say, a heavier PELICAN or more ragamuffin AMENRA, Costa’s presence here adds to the already sturdy weight crafted by musicians Jeff and Katie Golden. The title track immediately conjures sonic thunder, vocal lightning hurled forth from the summit of Mount Doom […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Wharflurch – Mycodeath And Rebirth In The Outer Clusters

Slime-drenched and foul, the fetid fungal fiends of WHARFLURCH were splat forth in 2019, sent to belch forth their tale down the earholes of pitiful humanity. Regrettably, forces in and beyond their control resulted in banishment to from whence they came shortly after Psychedelic Realms Ov Hell of 2021. Months followed, years – aeons in the time of a band – accumulated until, reformed, the limbs of this creature that is WHARFLURCH, severed and sewn back in another configuration have again arrived from its planet of pus to bring us Mycodeath And Rebirth In The Outer Clusters. ‘Death Toll Horror’ […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Lord Gryphus – Summoning The King Of Death

The ‘90s were both a wonderous and tragic time for brutal death metal. On the one hand, bands such as GORGUTS, IMMOLATION and ENTOMBED were carving literal canyons in the earth in their pangs to twist this intentionally misshapen toddler that was Death Metal into an even more malformed being. And on the other, bands whose names aren’t deserving of mention were playing Pick Your Bandwagon with whatever sound seemed to shift the most units, and usually getting screwed over by their record labels to make room for the miasma of dung that was to be 1994 or so and […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Windswept – A Sign Of The Cloven Hoof

WINDSWEPT came first to our ears through headphones and computers. During this first listen and maiden voyage the production felt tall, near toweryng, and a little teetery, like it could topple any moment. The vocals felt more technique than raw emotion, but the riffs were solid and the beats as well. Upon second listen, and a following third, now on a proper stereo – A Sign Of The Cloven Hoof did not tremble, it did not topple upon us. Nor did the vocals disrupt but felt genuinely rife with blasphemy. Now familiar, almost an olde friend, this album became a […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Critical Defiance – Rivers Of Blood

From Brazil’s VULCANO and MX, as well as PENTAGRAM (Chile), There’s just something about South American thrash that brings a fire and intensity rivalling mid-‘80s Germany in raw passion and speed. After three full lengths on Unspeakable Axe Records, Chile’s CRITICAL DEFIANCE returns under the banner of Dying Victims Productions with Rivers Of Blood. Alright, now this is what I’m talking about. Even had I never heard the quintet, they would already have earned points from me for ‘Red Omen’. Don’t call it an “intro” in the same sense of disjointed, sound-effect mucking about, or some attempt at sonically recreating […]

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