Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal And Other Occasional Musics And Cultures

Dr. Abner Mality

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 […]

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: 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 […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Havukruunu – Uinuos Syomein Sota

This is the discovery of the year for me so far. I ran across this quite by accident on Youtube and I’m quite ashamed to say it’s the first I’ve heard of Finland’s HAVUKRUUNU. This is their 3rd full length album, in addition to numerous splits and demos. All of which I now intend to track down diligently, because this is some of the most soaring and brilliant black metal I have heard not just this year, but any year. Finnish is one of the most jaw-breaking languages around and I won’t insult you by trying to cope with the […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Incantation – Sect Of Vile Divinities

INCANTATION have inspired so many death metal bands, they sometimes almost sound like they are following in their own footsteps, as strange as that may sound. It’s not exactly fair to them. They marked out their territory a long time ago and have stayed in those boundaries. They are determined to be the best they can be within those borders and leave experimentation to others. Most of the bands picking up on their sound are easy to spot as mere knockoffs. Sect Of Vile Divinities shows INCANTATION is still totally devoted to the cryptic, cavernous death metal sound they practically […]

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