RECOMMENDED

There’s no shortage of metal in Chicago. Some leans toward the ghoulish. Some apes an artistic bent, and some is plain ridiculous. Whatever the proper balance between metaldom’s disparate aspects, Columbus, Ohio-born and Windy City-bred Sun Splitter has settled upon it. The trio, which has been issuing recordings for the past several years, doesn’t revel in slow tempos as much as seemingly unmoving ones. The first track on the troupe’s eponymous tape stands still, as a guitar chugs out quarter notes. Read the rest of this entry »

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Of the two Cleveland bands set to deliver well-worn metal and hardcore to audiences at the Cobra Lounge, Ringworm’s the better-known act, having worked with Victory Records during the better part of its career. And as a connection with that label hints, Ringworm takes itself as serious as its labelmates take animal liberation. Dedication is well and good, but occasionally makes the band hard to palate. “Angelfuck,” from last year’s “Scars” is tough to take in, but near classics like “13 Knots” just go down easy while aping a bit of thrash. Smart-ass uncaring runs through Keelhaul, though. Album titles like 2009’s “Triumphant Return to Obscurity” and a single from the same year called “You Waited 5 Years for This?” point to the level of professionalism the band holds itself to. Read the rest of this entry »

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Four full-length albums into its career, Athens, Ohio’s Skeletonwitch can’t have too much new musical landscape to traverse after plundering metal’s previous eras pretty thoroughly. Of course, hailing from a town where it’s just as likely to be heckled by a yokel while walking down the street as it is to see a hilljack buy dope off a college hippie should provide at least a bit of inspiration. Skeletonwitch’s purview, though, isn’t the earthly realm; it’s some evil cartoon hellscape littered with doomed souls, misbehaving heathens and people being put upon by evil. Read the rest of this entry »

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Continuing in the tradition of immaculately named stoner metal bands like Weedeater, High on Fire and Bongzilla, Chicago’s Bongripper has been dispensing heavy-handed instrumentals for more than six years at this point. Despite an ill-fated, cancelled tour earlier this year, the quartet’s lined up a jaunt to Europe, as any good metal band should, next spring. Kicking around locally so persistently, though, has enabled Bongripper to develop its approach to music in a methodical manner matched only by the slowly unfolding compositions it performs. Read the rest of this entry »

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Without Fishbone, Sublime and No Doubt would have wound up being drug-addled SoCal footnotes. Whatever eventually became the American conception of ska music didn’t begin with Angelo Moore and Norwood, but their group’s all-inclusive approach to songwriting influenced a generation of weird bands. It’d actually be reasonably easy to round up Fishbone’s Jamaican-related efforts onto a single disc–the six-minute “Party at Ground Zero” being an epic accomplishment made even more stunning by the fact that the song was issued as a part of the band’s first EP back in 1985. Read the rest of this entry »

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If you ever wanted to revisit the first three Iron Maiden albums—just heavier and without all that lamentable wailing that passes for singing—Saviours are probably going to fill that void in your life. What makes the Bay Area group as engaging as their British predecessors, albeit dramatically less important historically, are their brief flirtations with some of the more avant leanings of their metal brethren. There aren’t any twenty-minute excursions through drone listeners would expect on an offering from Om, but Saviours hint at such predilections. Read the rest of this entry »

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Pinpointing the birth of metal, and its subsequent doomy offspring, frequently falls upon the shoulders of just a few groups. Sabbath and Blue Cheer are rightly heralded. As is Virginia’s Pentagram. While this latter group aptly distills the aforementioned bands in their sixties incarnations, its singer, Bobby Liebling, chooses to emulate Cheer’s Dickie Peterson on the mic more so than his British counterpart. Arriving at an American confluence of psych-inflected guitar soloing, quick tempos and subject matter embracing evil women as much as an evil Lord should have resulted in Pentagram’s emergence as radio-regulars during the band’s heyday. It didn’t. The fact that the band’s held together in some form over the last forty years is a remarkable feat on its own, but especially considering the first decade of the ensemble’s career passed without any long-playing records. Read the rest of this entry »

If Hendrix were a weirdo-SoCal resident dressed up with a KFC carry-out container on his head, he’d have been Buckethead. The masked performer has been releasing albums since the early nineties, a ridiculous number. But since no two recordings sound all that similar, there’s actually a reason for such output. With a wild variety of sounds coming from Buckethead and whoever he’s decided to include as his backing group, the guitarist’s core audience is any manner of stoic music geek interested in collaborations with the funk cognoscenti, to some stoner metal-heads who get off at seeing a bucket-wearing gear-hound play arpeggios. Early on during the guitarist’s career, he was already reasonably renowned for shredding and tapped to join Praxis, which included bassist Bootsy Collins, keyboard player Bernie Worrell and Primus’ drummer Brain. The recordings that ensued reined in some of Buckethead’s more indulgent inclinations, resulting in the band’s ability to smoothly assimilate the guitarist’s soloing, the rhythm section’s funk and a handful of dub. The concoction, on paper, sounds like a number of other ill-fated super groups and countless crossover attempts. But a balance is struck on tracks like “Dead Man Walking,” which retains a nervy sense of aggression while mining deeply grooved rhythms. Read the rest of this entry »

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Pretty much every band proclaims that the recording of a new album entails trying something utterly new. For the most part, that’s nonsense. North Carolina’s Corrosion of Conformity, as its name hints, actively works towards confounding listeners, moving from its early thrash to metal and, as of 2005’s “In The Arms Of God,” even including a bit of funky percussion from Stanton Moore, best known for his contributions to NOLA’s Galactic. Despite the endless procession of stylistic shift-ups, COC’s still best remembered as being one of the early eighties’ metal/hardcore crossover provocateurs. 1983′s “Eye for an Eye” put the Southerners squarely at hardcore’s apex, drawing from the harDCore thing in the nation’s capitol as much from delinquent skateboarders on the West Coast. Read the rest of this entry »

RECOMMENDED

The Miami four-piece Torche is one of those “Dirty Southern” metal bands that can easily be filed alongside the likes of Baroness, Mastodon and Kylesa. What these bands have in common is that they are all unashamedly heavy, with their feet firmly planted in the sludge metal genre, but are progressive enough in their outlook to engulf myriad other influences to create a sound that appeals beyond the typical metal fan base. Torche’s crushingly heavy drop-tuned riffs and thunderous bass parts, which have made up their back catalog, blend with a sense of melody and pop sensibility that makes their songs exceedingly catchy. Read the rest of this entry »