Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal & Extreme Music And Culture

lord randall

Album Reviews

Album Review: Totalitarian – Bloodlands

Billed as a full-length, but with only half the running time of the Italian cult’s 2017 De Arte Tragoediae Divinae, Bloodlands gets right to the point, and O, that point is sharpened. Now, don’t get me wrong, with three songs over the 13-minute mark, the debut was impressive – a band coming out of nowhere with the chutzpah to not only attempt but succeed in making such lengthy works interesting – but it’s fulfilling to hear that, when it wants to, TOTALITARIAN can “trim the fat”, as it were. The band gets down to business with the strafing of ‘1933’, […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Lonndom – Hågkomster från nordliga nejder & Norrskenritual

I first came across LONNDOM – or rather, LONNDOM came across me – courtesy of its debut release Falen Fran Norr. And here’s why that’s special to me. Not only had the duo crafted a sound the likes of which was at once new and familiar, but the album was the first release on Nordvis Produktion. The label’s credo of “Poor Music For Poor People” could not have rung more true than it did in LONNDOM, alternately frigid as Winter and soothing as Spring rain, often within the same song. And now, 12 years hence, we see the re-issue of […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: HOT LUNCH – 
Seconds

So, maybe I’m not as jaded and cynical when it comes to the state of modern music as I come across when a band like HOT LUNCH can impress me the way it has with the aptly-titled Seconds. Having missed out on the band’s 2013 debut, and with nothing more to go on than a Julian Cope comparison to MC5, I pressed Play and the snap-mare rhythm of ‘Smoke Ring’ flung my ears into grooved out rawk recalling the mighty – and mightily underrated – DIXIE WITCH and FIVE HORSE JOHNSON, while sounding directly like neither. Around halfway through, the […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: FRENZY – 
Blind Justice

In the interest of full disclosure, my enjoyment of comic books during childhood and up to today was/is limited to the classic G.I. Joe, Judge Dredd, Werewolf By Night and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series. Heavy Metal, though, hunted me down around age 12-13, and I either went willingly, or am still in some Stockholm Syndrome-like “phase” that hasn’t ended over three decades later. And, thus, when FRENZY’s debut album came across my desk, the idea of a true Heavy Metal band inspired by comics at least caught my interest, which means I’m about to either really enjoy or really hate […]