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: 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 […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Bangladeafy – Housefly

The last time I encountered BANGLADEAFY, they were a mind-melting avant-garde bass-and-drum assault that probed the limits of fusion playing. Strike that memory of BANGLADEAFY. Delete it and wipe it from your memory core. This version of BANGLADEAFY is a completely different beast. And it’s a totally refreshing one. For those who don’t know, the band is a duo. Powerhouse drummer Atif Haq originally hails from Bangladesh and bassist/vocalist Jon Ehlers has hearing impairment…hence the name. Housefly finds them reinventing themselves as a synth-driven rhythm bulldozer and erasing their former electric bass gymnastics. In fact, the bass does not exist […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: In Malice’s Wake – The Blindness Of Faith

Australia (at least within the metal circles in which I move) is much more known for its black/death output than thrash, so I can say without shame that The Blindness Of Faith is my first encounter with IN MALICE’S WAKE, who have apparently been tearing up the band’s local Melbourne scene and beyond for nearly 18 years, and in recorded form for a bit less, the album we speak of today being its fourth since 2008. Coming five years after Light Upon The Wicked, we find the quartet also now two albums deep into its current lineup – and it […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Pimmit Hills – Heathens & Prophets [EP]

The phrase “born from the ashes of” when referring to a band formed after the end of another usually denotes some sort of catastrophe, some event – or string of events – that caused the upheaval. Not so PIMMIT HILLS, which was birthed out of founding rhythm guitarist Dave Kowalski’s decision to leave stalwart Southern troubadours KING GIANT due to family/life obligations. Simple as that. The remaining members were encouraged to continue, and have, this time under the banner of a name taken from the band’s native Pimmit Hills, Virginia. Originally intended as a full-length debut, as thee darke spectre […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Big Scenic Nowhere – Lavender Blues [EP]

I would’ve skipped on BIG SCENIC NOWHERE’s Vision Beyond Horizon of earlier this year by virtue of not only the terms “stoner rock” and (even worse) “desert rock” being bandied about, but the trifecta of disinterest was reached with the knowledge that a member of FU MANCHU figured heavily into the band’s makeup. That band and their sonic cohorts in the Dune Buggy/Shaggin’ Wagon set of fun-in-the-sun weed worshippers are just not my type of stoner anything, rock or otherwise. They’re simply doing it wrong. The announcement of the release of Lavender Blues, however, caught my eye in a big […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Artillery – The Last Journey [Single]

While I’d normally not bother with reviewing a single release here, ARTILLERY is one of Denmark’s greatest musical contributions to the world of metal, another being MERCYFUL FATE, and another not being Lars Ulrich. But that’s another story. ARTILLERY is also one of the first heavier bands I discovered on my own, “liberating” Metal Mania magazine off the rack at the grocer’s in Alabama in the mid-‘80s under my denim jacket, which I didn’t realize was already part of the metal “uniform”. The pic of the band beside the Terror Squad write-up had the brothers Stützer & co. brandishing firearms, […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: UADA – Djinn

To say Portland’s UADA has “blown up” during the two years between Cult Of A Dying Sun and what we now have before us in the form of its all-important third album is the height of understatement. High profile tours (remember tours?), the made-for-mass-consumption safety of its music, and the band’s ridiculous “left hand presence” photos of late have taken what I believe was a decent “enough” second album, and sculpted the quartet into basically melodic black metal’s GHOST. The title track begins sounding like some bastard wedding of Morricone high on bath salts and an even more tremolo-heavy ALESTORM, […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Manticora – To Live To Kill To Live

Power metal doesn’t get much more epic than this. Bowing deeply at the altar of BLIND GUARDIAN, MANTICORA holds nothing back here. This Swedish band has been around for a while, but their exposure in America has been almost non-existent except for a single performance at the ProgPower Festival. This is the second album of a grand concept and the follow up to the logically titled To Kill To Live To Kill. When you open your album with a 14-minute-plus, over the top power/thrash opus, you lay all your cards on the table right away. They sustain the intensity remarkably […]

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