Rebel Extravaganza

Heavy Metal And Other Occasional Musics And Cultures

lord randall

Album Reviews

Album Review: Full Of Hell – Weeping Choir

Depending on whom you’re speaking to, FULL OF HELL is either a merchant of modern death/grind of the highest order, or a marketing-funded merch machine masquerading as a band on the level of JOB FOR A COWBOY. For myself, I’ve always thought the Maryland quartet passable, but no great shakes in the grand scheme of things. Just seemed a bit too groomed for the Summer Slaughter circuit for me.It’s comforting, strangely, to know that some things never change. While opener ‘Burning Myrrh’ is SSDD when it comes to FOH, ‘Haunted Arches’ ups the ante, a bit of the ol’ power-faux-lence […]

Album Reviews

ALBUM Review: BERTHOLD CITY – What Time Takes

Igniting with all the energy of JUDGE, XREPRESENTX and early SICK OF IT ALL, Los Angeles’ BERTHOLD CITY lets you know what it’s about in the first 10 seconds of What Time Takes…which is good, as we only have 7 minutes to work with here. Slashing guitars, drums on full auto, and vocals that demand to be not only heard, but respected. ‘No One To Blame’ flails, but focused, a clear sense of direction and self-introspection snarl-spitting into a mirror held up to modern society. “I’ve seen the ugly truth! Got you figured out!” is confrontational in the way only […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Warmrain – Here Comes The Rain Again

Britain’s WARMRAIN moves in like its namesake, the title track (yes, it’s the EURYTHMICS cover) showering down, tasteful leads and downtempo taking the place of the original version’s synth-laden throb. It takes confidence to title a release after a cover, much less to transform someone else’s work with what seems like effortlessness to make it your own…and WARMRAIN does here. ‘Shadowline Paradigm’ follows, plaintive, yet seductively so, wandering in the realms of GREEN CARNATION’s The Acoustic Verses or early BLACKFIELD, while ‘Keep Going’ is driven along by understated, yet persistent rhythm patterns. The one fault that I can find within […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Victims – The Horse And Sparrow Theory

D-beat may have first been shot forth from the uterus of hardcore punk in the UK (BUZZCOCKS, DISCHARGE), but its continuation and thriving as a sub-genre owes a lot to Sweden, where bands such as ANTI CIMEX and MOB 47 joined the kangpunk gangbang, thereby spawning hundreds of blindingly fast, sloppier than a $2 whore, heavier than Messiah Marcolin children, and at least a dozen DARKTHRONE songs. Kicking out 8 tunes in 28 minutes, it’s clear VICTIMS comes from the VARUKERS / SKITSYSTEM school of “blast first, ask questions later”, which serves the quartet well over most of The Horse […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Ringworm – Death Becomes My Voice

You know, there are a few bands who so settled into who their identity, into what a/an [Insert Band Name Here] album should sound like, that diversion seems almost unthinkable. AC/DC and MOTORHEAD come to mind, RAMONES, NAPALM DEATH. Far from a slight, though, at least in the aforementioned instances, what we’re given goes beyond simple “branding”, revealing bands who don’t know how to be anything except themselves – it comes from within. It’s the marrow in their bones, for better or worse. Cleveland’s RINGWORM is one such band, and thus on its eighth, Death Becomes My Voice, most of […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Lost Dog Street Band – Weight Of A Trigger

‘To Heaven And Back’ leads off LOST DOG STREET BAND’s fifth full-length, and seems to have all the boxes ticked for legitimacy in the Americana engine that’s been gathering steam over the past decade or so. Twang? Check! Jubilant, jugband feel? Gotcher covered, mister! Hard travelin’ lyrics ‘bout that long, rocky road to salvation? Amen! Still, the whole thing seems a bit too…clean, for lack of a better term; a little more antiseptic than what at least I’m looking for when it comes to this type of music. ‘Given Up Faith’ is a contemplative, lovelorn hymn to and of regret […]

Album Reviews

Album Review: Bitchhammer – Offenders Of The Faith

Formed just over a decade ago, by Bastard Priest and Majesty Ov Hell of the negligibly-more-clean ANTYRA, and augmented by the guitars of Jack Frost, Leipzig’s BITCHHAMMER bring the black and the thrash in equal force on their debut. Had Offenders Of The Faith come out on Hells Headbangers, not an eye would have been batted as far as style goes, but released as it is on the more traditional heavy/speed metal-leaning Iron Shield Records, the trio wastes no time in kicking down the door with ‘Funeral Sorcery’, establishing BITCHHAMMER as the unruly, drunken cousin at the party. ‘Satanic Violence’ […]

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 […]

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