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: Zebadiah Crowe – The Cloven Hand [EP]

Remember when bands like DIE KRUPPS, the mighty GODFLESH and PITCH SHIFTER used to take on remixes of straightforward metal bands and mangle the songs, turning them inside out, so that what came forth from your speakers was nothing whatsoever like the original? It was liberating to hear, at least to these ears. But when those aforementioned would allow the scalpel to be taken to their own tracks, all bets were off, and what often happened was no less than a dissection and a piecing back together, an electronic Frankenstein’s monster with a result no less bleak than Shelley’s doomed […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Prometheus – Resonant Echoes From Cosmos Of Old

Named after the god who brought fire and wisdom to mankind, PROMETHEUS comes across as a band with a bit of an identity crisis. There are six songs on their long-winded album, and the first three differ quite a bit from the last three. Their sound touches upon crushingly dark death metal, epic black metal and a kind of cosmic ambience. The first three songs are by far the more interesting and punishing. ‘Gravitons Passing Through Yog-Sothoth’ goes for the jugular with a brutal rush of old school death in the vein of early MORBID ANGEL and ABSU. It’s a […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: White Dog – White Dog

There’s really no reason at all why I shouldn’t be frothing at the mouth over Austin, TX pack WHITE DOG. I mean they tick ALL the boxes. From the Southern US, named after an animal, twin guitar harmonies (scratch that – “guitarmonies”, as the band say), guitars, long hair, hats, AND the quintet looks like 5/6 of the ALLMAN BROTHERS BAND or the classic lineup of MOLLY HATCHET shat them out their ass in the promo photos. So yeah, absolutely no reason. Oh, and and they’re on Rise Above, one of the most reliable labels going since it began. But […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: ILSA – Preyer

Ugly, mean, depressing…ILSA is all of these things. But what else is new? These morose cats from DC have been dishing out sludgy death metal with nary a ray of light for quite some time now, and Preyer sees them at their most misanthropic and disturbing. The album starts with a truly unsettling monologue from one Sean Sellers, devout Satanist and the youngest killer to ever be executed on death row, detailing the cold blooded murder of a convenience store clerk. That gets the album off to a nice brisk start and things don’t get much more cheerful from there. […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Undeath – Lesions Of A Different Kind

It takes a lot of either courage, confidence, or flat out balls for a new death metal band to release a debut album. Sometimes it’s all of one of the aforementioned, sometimes an equal blend of all three. Nonetheless, when the promo sheet from Prosthetic Records hails your album as “a whole new level [Insert Obligatory “of confidence and powarrr!” Here] of skull crushing intensity, you’d best know what you’re about. I’m also a little concerned that, within a little over 1 ½ years, New York’s UNDEATH has managed to crank out 2 digital demos, a vinyl split, a compilation, […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: White Magician – Dealers Of Divinity

They say that no one has really been able to duplicate the sound of 70’s BLUE OYSTER CULT. Well, the claim has been made that GHOST has done it, but no honest music fan takes that seriously. I can say that Detroit’s WHITE MAGICIAN has probably made the best stab at emulating BOC that I can remember. That’s not to say they equal the CULT in full flow, because almost nobody can do that. But the BOC fingerprints are all over Dealers Of Divinity, and it makes for a pretty unique album. This really does have the authentic ’70s feel […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Gearea – Limbo

It worried me when I saw that Portugal’s GAEREA had not-one-not-two-but-three (count ‘em!) songs past the 9-minute mark on its sophomore release, Limbo. Now I’m all for exploration, sonic and otherwise, but I’d truly enjoyed the 40-odd minutes of Unsettling Whispers in 2018, and its been my considered opinion that genre-wide, black metal slips most easily into wandering tangents when it should stay right where it is, and stop trying to be so fancy. I’m looking at you, UADA. Hence, when GAEREA pulled not one single punch, getting down to the monolithic, tower of fuckoff that is the beginning of […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Benediction – Scriptures

Brethren, let us open the Book of Armageddon to the Chapter of BENEDICTION and read the Scriptures therein. I have been a devotee for many years, and my heart has been empty for want of BENEDICTION. After an extended drought, these metal brothers are back, and lo and behold, their prophet Dave Ingram has returned to lead them back to the promised land of Nuclear Blast. This is a record I’ve been really looking forward to, as this band has always been a favorite of mine. Scriptures is an album for creating warm fuzzies and glows of nostalgia, not to […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Messiah – Fracmont

The return of Switzerland’s MESSIAH is welcome indeed. Coming from the same fertile scene that birthed CELTIC FROST and CORONER, they were an ’80s band that almost reached those same heights. They had their own unique sound that had some relation to both those seminal acts without falling into worship or mimicry. But that was then…this is now. Is Fracmont a comeback that lives up to its promise? You will certainly find similarities to MESSIAH’s classic sound here, but they’ve added some new tricks as well. I call the style on Fracmont “elegant primitivism”. The riffs are thick, heavy and […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: In Flames – Clayman (20th Anniversary Edition)

By the time IN FLAMES delivered Clayman at the dawn of the new millennium, the band had already morphed from one of the founding fathers of the Gothenburg melodic death metal sound into…well, I had already begun to wander, let’s say. Granted, I love me some DEPECHE MODE, but ‘Everything Counts’ from Whoracle of three years hence signaled more than good taste in covers from Jesper Stromblad & co. ‘Bullet Ride’ sounded positively jovial in ’00, and is no less so here, strange and ill-suited as an opening track. Faring no better were ‘Pinball Map’, and we can begin to […]

Older Posts