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: 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 […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: At The Plates – Omnivore

I’ve never been much of one for gimmicks, and even less for theme-based bands, BONGZILLA and a few others notwithstanding. GWAR? Alright, but nothing I’m ever in a specific mood for. LORDI? Same. Even CANNABIS CORPSE, don’t really feel it, which is surprising, even to me. Enter AT THE PLATES. Yes, AT THE PLATES. ‘Nuff said, let’s dig into Omnivore, the band’s “second course” full-length. Sorry, I had to. And I’m not done yet. I’m guessing 2020’s Starch Enemy was founder/head chef Tony Rouse’s audition process, because he’s taken two of the guests from that album and now AT THE […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Fuming Mouth – Last Day Of Sun

FUMING MOUTH from Massachusetts was one of the “buzz bands” that played Milwaukee Metalfest earlier this year, but I was unable to catch them. Boy, are these guys an awkward mish-mash of styles. When they are on point, they are extremely crushing, but when they experiment, the results are often clunky if not down right cringeable. Can you imagine a band that mixes Swedish death metal in the classic Stockholm style with choruses you’d find on radio rock nu-metal? You get it with FUMING MOUTH. Let us descend into their maelstrom. Last Day Of Sun is huge and rather bloated, […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Woe – Legacies Of Frailty

I felt a not a small trepidation when the PR info for WOE’s fifth mentioned “many layers of overdubs”, given founder/songwriter Chris Grigg’s propensity for scaled back and tightly wound blackness just this side of primitive, but when ‘Fresh Chaos Greets The Dawn’ rose slowly in the sable sky, only to be wound in multi-tracked guitars and rhythmic pulses, I wanted to be sold. I really, really wanted to be sold. There are moments when things sounding out of control and deranged is ideal, is not only welcomed, but vital. This just sounds slipshod and unbalanced, containing very little to […]

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