Windir is most often celebrated for their later albums, but I have to say. after exploring back through their discography this winter, that...

Unchain the Wolves is an improvement on the EP in several ways, as the band converts more directly into a black metal sound with influences...

Full disclosure: Unbleed is my favorite Dawnbringer album, but that does come with a few caveats. The production here leaves a lot to be d...

If the masks, costumes and title don't tip you off, La Masquerade Infernale is the point when Arcturus decided to widen the net of the...

Cryptic Writings  was hardly the abrupt faceplant many of our favorite bands had experienced across the decades, but it was nonetheless a ma...

Somewhere along the line, Jeff Waters started listening to a lot of White Zombie and Ministry , probably some of Prong 's transformativ...

Ironically, the sophomore Embracing album Dreams Left Behind had slightly superior production to the debut, and in addition I thought that...

Non Serviam was another Invasion Records act which was attempting to service a number of the dominant Scandinavian metal trends of the time...

Indungeon seems like it had the potential to be the sickest thing ever. A cool portmanteau band moniker. A clear nod to Warhammer 40K or s...

I would be remiss to think of anything possibly quirkier than the track "Panacea" from Sirrah 's debut, but I think in general...

Regenerated might not look like much, in fact Sleeping Gods has never had a decent album cover whatsoever, but if you want to know how much...

It's always interested me that so many of the Carcass alumni spent their time during their mainstay's hiatus forming or joining ban...

Stream of Dispraised Soul is a melodic death metal EP, from Sweden, in 1997. Can you guess already what this is going to sound like? Well, ...

Not only is Blood from Stone one of the better melodic black/death metal albums you've never heard of in that crowded Swedish scene, bu...

The one with the boobs flopping out. The Dawn of Flames arrived to me first as a promo when I was doing the paper zine thing back in the 90...

Poems - Burn the Past moves even closer to its Swedish peers than the Opera of the Damned EP, and this definitely feels like an album you...

Although a number of the Italian black metal acts conformed quite heavily to the obvious Scandinavian influencers, there were a few exceptio...

The third in my series of Victor Records import EPs from Rage , Live from the Vault is a fairly early example of a commercial performance g...

Why does Japan get all the nice things? Alright, the adjective 'nice' is debatable when discussing any of Machine Head 's garb...

Where Burn My Eyes sounded like it might have at least been extracted from some fossilized metal DNA of integrity somewhere along the pat...