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: Atronos – Erwachen

Enter in ATRONOS of Germany for its second full length, despite being together less than three years. Chalk at least some of that up to lyricist/vocalist Baptist and (now) skinbasher Valfor doing double duty in underrated EISENKULT. Still, ATRONOS be helmed by Henker, who is responsible for music, guitars and bass, so no laurels to rest upon here. ‘Was uns so schrecklich hasst’ begins, fully formed and hoisting the banner of pagan black metal proudly. Baptist’s delivery here is markedly different from his style with EISENKULT, more mid-late ‘90s, reminiscences of when the genre was stepping out of the shadow […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Engulf – The Dying Planet Weeps

While the solitary black metal entity has become a known genre trope – almost to laughably sad proportions – over decades, often losing part of what made it special in the first place in the sheer glut of what should never have been a “scene”, death metal has yet to trip over that stumbling block. Hence, when a death metal project arises where one person is responsible, win or lose, I’ll at least approach with an open mind. After three EPs, New Jersey’s ENGULF (in the form of Hal Microutscicos) marks its first full-length with The Dying Planet Weeps. ‘Withered […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Plaguemace – Reptilian Warlords

In case you just woke up after being asleep for 10 years, death metal is a big deal again. Really. We are in the second great age of the gnarly subgenre and it is arguably producing more material than the first wave in the early ’90s. With this windfall, though, there are obviously good bands….and just as obviously bands that are bandwagon jumpers and also-rans. PLAGUEMACE is part of this second wave. Where do they fall on the spectrum of worthless to godlike? Well, it’s somewhere in the middle part….the lower middle part. This bunch hails for Denmark, which is […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: ÚLFARR – Orlegsceaft

Ever get tired of the lyrics of your favorite black metal bands being written in some obscure “eldritch” dialect that with a short visit to Google Translate becomes known as modern Norse or High German? Do you see Chaucer as a false for using Middle English in Canterbury Tales? Feel like Cascadian black metal’s “alright if you like that sort of thing”, but long for something evoking your eldritch and Cumbrian ancestral home? Behealdan ÚLFARR! Birthed and guided by founder Dominus (aka Hfran), in 2011, ÚLFARR has unchained new material regularly since, yet Orlegsceaft be its first march into the […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Vemod – The Deepening

Time. It does what it does. It marches, onward and steady, each of us warring against or accepting, but still at its grim behest and beneath its law. Art – for those who create such – is a means to capture a moment or period from Time and leave a mark. “I was here.” “This is how I saw the world or myself.” When we rush to make that statement, that claim, it can be done poorly, or not fully thought through, yet it remains in the universe, the half-work of a creator who couldn’t comprehend what they were experiencing. […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Iron Front – Hooked

It’s easy to judge someone’s skill, technical ability and “deservedness” to be on a label putting out music in their teens. And quite honestly the judgement is often on point. Shit, think of the first garage band you were in. Could 30 or even 40-year-old you play those “songs” with a smile on your face not born completely of nostalgia or should you just tank them, never to be spoken of or heard again. None of us are the same people we were in our teens, and if we are, we have some growing to fuckin’ do. Oakland, California’s IRON […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Megaton Leviathan – Magick Helmet

When a band (or solo act, in this case) bio begins with “creating a sound that would stump critics and come to be known as Doomgaze”, my eyes begin to itch, and I feel that familiar sick-to-the-back-teeth taste that comes when a single entity claims to have “created” a new sub-subgenre. Wait, isn’t “Doomgaze” a sub-sub-subgenre, then? All I know that sole member Reuscher – doing business as MEGATON LEVIATHAN – has his work cut out for him on Magick Helmet. So, let’s put this right out front; it seems the paramount reason for the existence of MEGATON LEVIATHAN’s 4th […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Bull Elephant – The Long War

Alright, kids, let’s open our history books to the section on WWII, remembering when a giant pachyderm went berserker mode on the Nazis after starting out defending the weary Berliners from the incoming onslaught? You don’t? Well, BULL ELEPHANT sure do, as they’ve spent two albums before now telling the tales of our hero’s majestic and elephantine glory. Having dropped its self-titled debut a scant few months before the world went to dung – or at least more noticeably -, the Londoners unleashed Created From Death less than a year later, and then…silence from the studio. Yet, at long last, […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: SHYLMAGOGHNAR – Convergence

I first noticed SHYLMAGOGHNAR a couple of years ago, but never looked any further than their bizarre name. I thought it was silly at the time and figured they wouldn’t be worth my time. Curiosity finally compelled me to look further into this one-man outfit from Holland and I must confess, I was unfair to the band. This is quite a sonic adventure and an amazing achievement considering it was all done by one guy using a home studio. Convergence is really a perfect name for what SHYLMAGOGHNAR have come up with here. This record covers so many styles of […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Ginnungagap – Heliacal Arising

The yawning maw of Signal Rex opens wider, near-unhinging, and from this void springs forth Heliacal Arising, the first full, intentional movement of Portuguese cult GINNUNGAGAP. Four years it did take to form what now travels ‘neath the ‘Majestic Throne Of The Sky’, wrapped in a layered cloak of guitars and keys, organ-like in tone, and lending a vital air of the mystic to this excursion, a throat laid open and scraped raw and bleeding over gravel declares our path. Arising heliacal, the title track indeed shimmers distant, ever fettered to the Solar King, despite desire, for Nature is immovable […]

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