A guilty pleasure if I've ever heard one. I couldn't bring myself to give this bullshit a 70, so take your high 60 and get out of my sight

One of the worst albums I’ve ever heard, but I don’t think I can bring myself to rate it lower than this due solely to the sheer level of entertainment I derived from listening to it. This is a full hour long and I never got sick of it because it’s consistently hilarious

What in the fresh hell is this?
And why do I kind of like it??

EDIT: 42 → 67 Ok this album finally clicked for me. Basically it’s only war metal on a very surface level. More precisely, it’s technically war metal, but offered a way better listening experience when I listened to it like it was a BDM album along the lines of Brodequin’s “Instruments of Torture.” I don’t know if this is the same reason why other people disliked it, but it really does make a big difference for me and I don’t fully understand why. ... read more

Reminds me of Henget's album "Beyond North Star" from last year in that it's doing cool stuff often enough to make me really wonder why I'm not interested in it at all

I’ll preface this review by saying I really wanted to like this album. I told myself that I wouldn’t listen to it until I heard 3 post-metal albums in a row that I liked to prove to myself that I was willing to give the genre a chance. And today that finally happened! I really didn’t know what to expect going into this. I knew it was controversial among metalheads for “not being trve kvlt enough,” and I was guessing that was because it sounded overly happy (like ... read more

Don’t let my yellow score fool you, this is absolutely worth a listen. Why? Well, have you ever heard an album and just had a strong sense that the band is on the verge of a breakthrough? “Your Laughter is an Echo in My Head” is the musical equivalent of that cartoon depicting gambler’s fallacy where the miner is turning back 2 inches from a huge cache of diamonds.
Beryllium is STAGGERINGLY close to making something unbelievable here — they have all the pieces, ... read more

I enjoyed this, it's some pretty solid cybergrind. Where this really shines is when it's either going fast or doing weird electronic shit. "Coward" is easily the biggest highlight here for me because it does an EXCELLENT job of the latter. "oKOKOKOKOKo" is pretty good in that regard too. "Flesh" and especially "Bloody ravaging of a cop's corpse" are the best in terms of going fast, though I wish there were a few more tracks that just straight up blasted ... read more

How is this split considered an EP? Yeah it's only 4 songs, but it's 42 and a half minutes long!
Anyway, this is a fairly even split for the most part until the final track, Hunters by Ruins of Beverast, which definitely stands above the others for me. The variation provided by the split definitely elevates this album above the sum of its parts. If it was a full 40 minutes of either band's style on the split, I'd probably give this a score mid to low 60s. There's a pretty notable sense of ... read more

Given how I’d heard a lot of people talk about this album I expected huge intro and outro tracks with relative filler in between, but no, the middle of this album goes HARD. The blend of thrash and black metal elements is impeccable even by modern standards, and the aggression is turned up well past 11, to about 14. This is a big part of why the middle doesn’t feel “same-y” to me — the full impact of the aural assault doesn’t wear thin at all for me (even on ... read more

The virgin Roblox NSBM vs. the chad Minecraft raw black metal

I think I know exactly why some people love this album and some people don’t get the hype at all. Basically the production here is INCREDIBLE. However, I was wondering how much the album had to offer beyond that, so I listened to it with a single airpod, and any semblance of the excellence of my first listen IMMEDIATELY went out the damn window. The writing and performances are okay to decent, but they’re nothing particularly notable. I can’t overstate the degree to which ... read more

Absolutely horrendous. The vocals sound like the noises my digestive track makes when it's having a bad time. The instrumental sounds like the musical equivalent of that feeling you get right before you vomit. It's just nauseating on every level. Solid 8/10, would listen again.

I don't get the hype around this at all, it's just mediocre deathcore that wishes it was Lorna Shore.
Also why tf is this an EP? The whole point of everything here is to sound grandiose and BIG, but they put it into the small format? To give them credit where it's due, the orchestral elements are done better here than in anything Lorna Shore's made to date, so I ended up liking this more than Pain Remains lmao

Ready for me to make you mad?
Ok, I warned you…

This is the best album Origin have ever made.
Most of the complaints I’ve seen about it are that it’s “too similar to their previous albums,” but in reality the band have made small, incremental improvements over time that ultimately arrived here, and that deserves to be recognized imo. Chaosmos goes almost as hard as Origin’s classic material, but manages to make songs sound more different from each other and ... read more

This album isn’t inherently bad or anything, but it’s just SO damn long and doesn’t have many memorable moments to spice things up in between. My experience here improved significantly by taking a brief intermission in the middle of the album.

Major disappointment after The Brutal Machine. Disfiguring the Goddess significantly strip back everything that was unique and interesting about their sound on the previous album and instead mostly make generic, forgettable death metal (and don’t even do a particularly good job of that). Admittedly I haven’t listened to enough DTG albums to know if this is their normal sound, but yeah this was a pretty big letdown for me after I enjoyed their previous album a lot.

I thought this was ok at first, but it's really grown on me since first hearing it, to the point where I actually like this more than Ugra-Karma. There are two main things I love about it:
1. It adheres to my principle of "if you're gonna try to go over the top, commit to it." Usually being over the top alone isn't a viable strategy for an album to stand out, but that's usually just because there's something out there that comes to mind that goes harder. That's not really the case ... read more

Maurice DeJong may have taken a few too many drugs or something before making this. Ik he isn't exactly known for making normal music, but wow did he go above and beyond with the weirdness here. I can't fully explain why, but I don't dislike this album despite it being an absolute trainwreck in every facet. It's almost like a Kim Dracula-type situation where for every part of this that's just egregiously terrible, it's equal parts entertaining and memorable.

First of all, this may be the first time I've ever agreed with one of pyddl's metal takes! You know you've made something impressive when both pyddl AND I like it.
Secondly, this actually improved on relistens for me (and I liked it the first time). I feel like I picked up on stuff I missed on the first listen, so I definitely recommend listening more than once if you get the chance.
Thirdly, I'm considering the Porcupine Tree cover to be the album closer even though it's not on the AOTY ... read more