CD REVIEW: The HAARP Machine - "Disclosure"

UK-based death metal band, The HAARP Machine combines technical death metal and mind-bending prog with a flair for the melodic for one of the most impressive debuts to come across my desk in ages. “Disclosure” is a tech-death total package written by a band capable of crafting intriguing and dynamic tunes that rely more on intelligent structure, originality and mood than senseless fret board gymnastics to get over.

The vocals range from impassioned croons to beast-like growls. This diverse and soulful approach lends a human element to the machine. This is a nice contrast to the calculated precision with which guitarist Al Mu’min wields his instrument. One of the more intriguing guitarists in metal today, Mu’min is rarely a loss for crushing and intricate riffs, many of which he textures with hints of prog rock or exotic, Middle-Eastern flavors. These little twists and turns, along with bits of studio trickery and ambient noise, add depth to the music without becoming distracting. But even without all the bells and whistles, these guys are skilled enough songwriters that even the most dizzying display of musical showmanship is delivered tastefully. 

CD REVIEW: FINNTROLL's "Blodsvept"

The sixth chapter in the epic tale of Troll-King Rivfader, the character who serves as the common conceptual thread through the discography of Finnish metal unit Finntroll, has been told. And it’s a good one. Among the most unique creatures in the fantasy land that is folk metal, Finntroll continues the Rivfader saga with “Blodsvept.” Moving farther away from the gimmicky elements that come along with being a troll-metal band, Finntroll’s newest album sounds more developed and focused than its predecessors.  

While “Blodsvept” is unmistakably Finntroll with its traditional European folk backbone and polka flourishes, the band has made it a point to write some of the catchiest and heaviest songs the genre of folk metal has experienced thus far. The title track kicks the album off with a metallic roar flavored with a symphonic hook and folksy interludes. Much of “Blodsvept” retains the energetic, blackened melodic death/happy thrash vibe of the opening tune, but the eclectic array of non-metal elements play a major part in this record.

Big band horns, hummpa breakdowns and speed metal banjos played with enough fury to make Mumford slaughter his sons all see “Blodsvept” stand out as one of the most intense and interesting listening experiences metal fans will find this year. A credit to their skills as songwriters, Finntroll are able to blend this wide array of styles, moods and instrumentation together without sounding forced or jumbled.  The end result is an album that’s not only wholly entertaining, it’s practically addictive.

CD Review: LIKE YOU TO ME gets poppy and punk-y on their self-titled debut

Taking their name from a Set Your Goals tune and their sound from New Found Glory, Maryland’s Like You To Me are another addition to the overflowing pop punk pool. Much like their main influence, Like You To Me delivers upbeat and fast-paced tunes, barely off-key hooks, bright melodies and more good vibes than a puppy roller-blading down a ray of sunshine.

Fans looking for a throwback to the heyday of Drive-Thru Records should find plenty here to enjoy. The big, hook-y anthems and peppy are sure to blast many of you back to a time when gas was cheap and Blink-182 was about to become the next big thing. However, nostalgia is about the extent of what Like You To Me have to offer. They’re a band that proudly wears their influences on their sleeves, and in a genre as limiting as pop-punk, one really has to strive for originality. These Marylanders seem to have little concern for that.

“Sofa King Desperate” and “You’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat” are two of the disc’s biggest attention-grabbers, but there isn’t much difference between them and the rest of the album. Repetitiveness aside, Like You To Me delivers a fairly good time on their self-titled debut. If you’re a fan of energetic three-chord merriment, this one won’t muck up your collection. 

CD REVIEW: ZODIAC gets the blues on "A Bit of Devil"

The wide, wild world of rock n’ roll is one place where truly anything is possible. Dave Mustaine made peace with Metallica, Thurston Moore joined a black metal band and Keith Richards still has a pulse. As these and many other head-scratching events transpire on a routine basis, there should be nothing shocking about the spirit of southern rock rising up from the swamps of Florida and landing in the lap of the drummer from a German post-rock band.

Sounds crazy enough to work, doesn't it? Well, it does.

Backed by Long Distance Calling drummer Janosch Rathmer, Zodiac plays a sweet and soulful brand of blues-soaked classic rock that could have a 30 year coma patient believe he only took a short nap if this album were the first thing he heard upon awakening. Vocalist/guitarist Nick Van Delft delivers a whiskey-drenched croon that sounds like Wino singing an Allman Bros. tune. Anything remotely modern about “A Bit of Devil” comes from the fact it wasn't recorded straight to tape and sent directly to the vinyl plant. Otherwise, this eight-song platter of wax (nine, if you get your mitts on a version featuring the awesomely moody bonus tune “Dying Done”) comes straight from the heart of the ‘70s rock world. Fans of ZZ Top, Thin Lizzy, Rory Gallagher and Led Zeppelin should check out “A Bit of Devil.” 

CD REVIEW: MINISTRY calls it a day with "From Beer to Eternity"

In 2007, industrial metal legends Ministry released "The Last Sucker," an album that founder and mastermind Al Jourgensen claimed would be his last. Later, in 2012, the band crawled out of retirement with "Relapse," which was also purported to be a swan song. While the former was a much more fitting final chapter to the Ministry legacy than the latter, apparently it wasn’t fitting enough. Yep, Ministry has returned yet again!

It’s hard to imagine anyone complaining either as From Beer to Eternity is a great record. Ministry’s 13^th studio album was primarily written by Jourgensen and longtime co-conspirator Mike Scaccia in the months before the latter's tragic onstage death. In tribute to the groundbreaking guitarist, "From Beer to Eternity" delivers a firestorm of his trademark thrash pummel. Part of Jourgensen’s evil genius is his ability to blend Scaccia’s blistering speed/thrash assault with circuit-grinding industrial and terabyte-sized grooves and hooks. "From Beer to Eternity" does this brilliantly. 

Album opener “Hail to His Majesty (Peasants)” slithers about with a mechanized weirdness. For the next six tracks, Ministry spits venom and breathes fire with a barrage of cyber-thrash chaos. “Lessoned Unlearned” kicks out some surprisingly awesome hard rock jams complete with female backing vocals. With jazzy grooves and spoken word cynicism Jourgensen sends a wink toward Tom Waits on “Thanx, but No Thanx.” As a final good-bye (yes, this is another "last album"), “Enjoy the Quiet” sends us home with an beehive of noise and a quaint goodbye message from the surprisingly affable Jourgensen. If this is truly Ministry's last hurrah, on behalf of all of us, thank you, Al. And R.I.P. Mike.

EXTOL'S Return to Glory - an interview with Peter Espevoll

In 1993, a group of young Norwegians banded together over a shared love of heavy music. Teenagers at the time – founding members David Husvik (drums) and Christer Espevoll (guitar) both aged 16 and Espevoll’s 14-year-old brother, Peter – EXTOL spent their earliest years exploring the vastness and diversity that is the metal universe. With a fondness for the progressive approach to extreme metal and the adventurous spirit that resonated throughout the European metal community at the time and sparked many a movement that have since become cornerstones of the genre, EXTOL began to turn heads in and around Norway’s burgeoning metal scene. At a time when many metal bands tended to rely on shock value and imagery to get over, EXTOL’s primary focus was on musicianship and expanding the known boundaries of death metal. 

Breaking the stereotypes of the day that equated metal with evil and wanting no part of the corpse-paint and hell-fire crowd that their Norwegian brethren in IMMORTAL and DARKTHRONE were busy turning into a kvlt phenomenon, EXTOL took the ‘higher’ road, so to speak. Though the band didn’t possess the sonic attributes to be a part of the "unblack metal" sect that played a yen to black metal’s unholy yang, EXTOL’s remarkable display of forward-thinking melodic death made them one of the most well-known and influential Christian metal bands of the day. Their reach extended well beyond faith-based fan-bases thanks in part to tours with the likes of MASTODON and OPETH. Despite a surge in popularity and the widespread dropping of jaws in response to 2005’s "The Blueprint Dives," personal issues led to EXTOL going on hiatus in 2007. “I wanted to take a break from everything,” said vocalist Peter Espevoll. “It wasn’t an easy decision but a very necessary one for me.”

Time, as they say, heals all wounds and it wasn’t long before the core members of EXTOL began to feel that familiar rumbling in their bellies. In 2012, it was announced that the trio of Espevoll, co-founder and drummer David Husvik and longtime guitarist Ole Børud had reunited and new material was on the way. While Christian, the elder Espevoll and band’s founding guitarist, was part of the initial reformation, outside obligations prevented him from fully committing and the band forged on as a trio with Børud handling all guitar and bass duties. As work began on what would become EXTOL’s self-titled return to glory, the trio realized that their time off had done more than just give them a chance to take shake off the wear and tear of the road. “We´re all older and (hopefully) more mature, so coming together now has been mostly just very fun and the three of us have a better way of understanding each other now,” Espevoll said. “I also think we were really hungry for doing a new EXTOL album, and that resulted in a good creativity boost and a good flow during the whole process.”

That process was unhindered by the outside pressures placed on the band during their first run and the trio was able to focus on what matters most – the music. “Since no one even knew that we were writing new EXTOL material, and we didn’t have any labels on our back with deadlines or pressure of any kind, we could use all the time we needed for a result that the three of us were extremely happy with," Espevoll said. "We basically just wanted to take the time we felt we needed to make a really good and unique death metal album. In some ways we wanted to go little bit back to our roots and find some inspiration in the moods of our previous releases. But also, we wanted the songwriting to be more mature and ‘thought-through’ than earlier [albums] and with a better and more modern sound than we´ve had before.”

           As news does in this era of social media in which we live, word of EXTOL’s return and the summer release of their self-titled masterpiece on Facedown Records soon spread like wildfire among the legions of die-hard fans who had spent the last several years pining for more prog-death majesty. To sweeten the deal, EXTOL is currently at work on a retrospective documentary chronicling the band’s career and comeback. For the time being, however, EXTOL-ites seem perfectly content whipping themselves into frenzy over the new jams. The outpouring of excitement had left quite the impression on the band. “To us the reaction was quite overwhelming," Espevoll said. "We got so many people telling us how much EXTOL has meant to them over the years and how excited they are about us coming back together. When you´ve been away from the scene for many years, it´s really inspiring that people still get excited about what you do and want to hear new music!”

Interview with DEVILDRIVER vocalist Dez Fafara

DEVILDRIVER front-man Dez Fafara has a lot to be excited about this year. Not only has the band breeched the ten-year mark, but they’ve done so with some of the hardest-hitting and intense material they’ve conjured up thus far. Following their trend of not following trends (self-imposed or otherwise), Fafara and guitarists Jeff Kendrick and Mike Spreitzer, drummer John Boecklin and new bassist Chris Towning have assembled collection of frenzied, yet calculated groove worth writing home about. Titled "Winter Kills," the album is a milestone in DEVILDRIVER’s career as it’s the band’s first release on Napalm Records, who they signed with after the mass Roadrunner Records exodus. It’s also among the vocalist’s personal favorites, as he explains during our talk. 

When listening to "Winter Kills," I’m reminded of some of Devildriver’s earliest material. What sort of end result were you looking for when writing and how do you feel about how things turned out.

It’s a very groove-heavy record. We know what we do and we tried to do it well this time. Devildriver is kind of a square peg in a round hole. Nobody can really decide what kind of music we make, so our fans have dubbed us the ‘California Groove Machine.’ That’s a hell of a title to live up and we needed to make sure we did that with "Winter Kills." We went for big grooves, bigger hooks, tight arrangements and the instrumentation is absolutely incredible. The guys really out did themselves this time and we all had a great time making this record. The headspace around the entire process was incredible; very positive all the way around. I’ve never once said this because I feel like it leaves you with nowhere to go, but I honestly feel that this is Devildriver’s best record.

At what point did you start to realize that?

Once I started getting the song demos from the guys, I started to realize that we had something really special; I knew it was going to killer. From there, the writing process really started happening for us. There’s a flow and a magic about that’s just really hard to explain. It felt like I was holding lightning in a bottle. The chemistry with this band has always been there, so nothing much changed in that aspect. We just really got down to business on this record. We knew we had to make the record of our lives, so we got in there and did it. We love to make music and we love to experiment. We experimented with "Pray for Villains," we experimented with "Last Kind Words," we experimented with "Beast," and on this record we experimented again. We sat down and told ourselves, “Look, let’s experiment on every record, but make sure we keep the grooves big and arrangements tight.” The arrangements on "Winter Kills" are much tighter than they were on "Beast" and I think that allowed us to make a better record.

Was part of that extra push to make this the record of your lives, as you put it, related to the fact that this is your first after parting ways with Roadrunner Records?

First of all, I gotta tell you that we do that with every record. We never try to best any previous effort, but we always try to make our best record. When we got to work on "Winter Kills" and started hearing the initial results, we realized that this was looking to be a very special record, so we started paying attention even more and said, “Alright, this is what we need to do.” What we had to do was absolutely groove, make sure the hooks stood out and that they grabbed a hold of people. We had to make sure this was different sounding than the other records, which it is. And that this record kept itself separated from any other album we’ve, which it does. It’s important for us to be different. I think that’s the one word that sums up Devildriver; different. We’re just a different kind of band and every record has a signature sound. 

It does set itself apart from the rest of your work, but it’s still very much a Devildriver record. It’s recognizable, but not recycled; which I assume is the goal.

We do different records and I think that’s important. I don’t think our fans want to hear the same record twice. It’s a compliment when someone tells me it doesn’t sound like Beast or whatever other record of ours. They’re right! That’s a compliment right there. There are too many bands out there that have been around for a long time, especially 10 years like we have, that will make the same record two or more times because they know what their fans want, so they stick to it. We test our fans. We test them each time out. If you liked that record, let’s see how well you like this one. If you didn’t like that other record, then try another on for size. Either way, we’re going to do what we want to do.

Is that level of integrity a challenge to maintain after so many years and albums? Have you ever been tempted by the comfort zone?

No, man, because there are so many different influences that are constantly at work in this band and different players will take the lead from time to time.  With each record, a different guy in the band will step up at different times and sort of lead the march. I think that’s an important thing.

How do you feel about starting a new stage in your career now that you’re with a new label?

I’m happy, man. I’m very excited about things. I’m really happy with Napalm and to be with someone with passion for music. Roadrunner, in the United States, just kind of put us out there for the last couple records. They knew they were selling the label. They did it do a bunch of other bands too. They let a lot of good people go and they let a lot of good bands go, and that was that. It was time to go. I wasn’t experiencing the passion for the music. I don’t want to do business with bean counters, I want to be with passionate people who knew business and aren’t going to mathematically equate me into what I can and can’t do. This band has been on a steady growth since inception, and that’s due to us working our asses off and earning the respect of the bands and fans one person at a time.  None of that came from a massive label presence. In the beginning of my career, with Coal Chamber, that might have been true, but now it’s good to be able to move forward and keep at it.