Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal And Other Occasional Musics And Cultures

Dr. Abner Mality

Album Reviews

Album Review: Accept – Too Mean To Die

When you get to the elevated level that ACCEPT is at, your albums are pretty much critic proof. The band is going to write what they want and the fans will be there. In this case, Too Mean To Die practically writes itself, following all the hallowed and well worn traditions of ACCEPT. But it doesn’t seem fair to criticize them for sticking to a well worn path when everybody is going batshit crazy over the utter traditionalism of AC/DC’s PWR Up. This is a pure ACCEPT album down to the last note, and the last atom. It follows the […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Inquisition – Black Mass For A Mass Grave

I must say I was extremely surprised to see this album released. After all the bad business that main songwriter Dagon was involved in, I thought no real record company would touch INQUISITION. Well, here comes Black Mass For A Mass Grave on no less than long-running Agonia Records and with this mystical project sounding bigger and more cosmic than ever. This is almost a double album in length (the vinyl actually is a double LP) and sees the duo executing their most ambitious sounds yet. If you can put the accusations of sexual perversion and outright fascism to one […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Dipygus – Bushmeat

Not many who hear this album will realize the significance of the track ‘St. Augustine, FL 1896’ but with the Good Doctor’s abiding interest in cryptozoology and all things bizarre, I immediately recognized what this date and time meant. That was when the carcass of some enormous sea beast washed up on the Floridian shore, with many believing it to be the body of a titanic octopus. Ah ha, so DIPYGUS are kindred spirits! That’s confirmed by the title of the next song here, ‘The Khunjung Scalp’, which is the purported scalp of the Himalayan Yeti. Yessir, DIPYGUS, whoever they […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Eximperitus – Sahrartu

This is my first experience with BUNDLE OF STICKS from the troubled land of Belarus. Oh, wait, their name is Eximperituserqethhzebibšiptugakkathšulweliarzaxułum. BUNDLE OF STICKS is better. OK, let’s shorten it to EXIMPERITUS. Better yet!With the ridiculous name and logo, I was prepared for crappy goregrind, but instead my eyes and ears are opened to some amazing Egyptian-sounding death metal that is as heavy and imposing as the pyramids themselves. In a year full of great death metal, here is another winner. The comparisons to NILE are unavoidable, but EXIMPERITUS is so good at what they do, they actually surpass their […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Wayfarer – A Romance With Violence

My search for something new brings me to the dusty plains of the mythical American West, where we find WAYFARER spinning tales of gunslingers, railroads and sudden death. The bloody true history of the West, and the more romanticized version of movies and TV offers a lot of fertile ground for an enterprising metal band to explore. With WAYFARER we get something that’s part Morricone and part PRIMORDIAL, part Americana and part raging metal. It’s a sound that I may not always be 100% into, but for sure it’s carved out its own territory, which is nothing to sneeze at. […]

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: 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: 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: 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 […]

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