This is the second album from Vein.fm, a metal band from the US.
Vein.fm are clearly a band with a lot of influences, and across the 32 minutes of material on This World Is Going to Ruin You, they wield these influences like weapons. Flourishing elements of hardcore, mathcore, metalcore, industrial, and nu-metal into a Continue reading “Vein.fm – This World Is Going to Ruin You (Review)”
Yüth Forever are a metal band from the US and this is their second album.
And now for something a little different…as they say…
Described in the promotional blurb as “13 songs of groove-laden, dark electronic, angst filled mood metal”, it’s hard to come up with a better description than that really, so we’ll go with it.
The singer’s harsh screams have a rhythmic quality to them which Continue reading “Yüth Forever – Skeleton Youth Forever (Review)”
Intensive Square are a Technical Metal band from the UK. This is their début album.
This is Technical Metal played with a love of both complexity and crushing rhythms. There’s a Hardcore side to the band that’s combined with a firm Metal base, resulting an album that combines elements of such diverse bands as Botch, Converge, Johnny Truant, Meshuggah, Circle Takes the Square, Pyrrhon, Today Is the Day, Scarlet, Frontierer, Sikth, Periphery and many others.
Featuring a splenetic vocalist who has a vicious screamed shout, these songs provide a satisfying ear-bashing while also catering to those who like a bit of technicality and complexity with their beatings. It doesn’t go too far down the complexity route though, as there’s plenty of big rhythms and grooves provided to get the listener moving and jerking around the place in strange movements.
The album lasts 45 minutes and provides a meaty feast for anyone into this kind of thing.
Give them a listen.
Wells Valley are a Portuguese Post-Metal band. This is their début album.
Blending the claustrophobic swirl of Neurosis with the exploratory mindset of Tool and a touch of the Avant-Garde, Wells Valley have created an album that plays by its own rules and lives by its own aesthetics. I think the closest comparison would kind of be a cross between Rabies Caste and Scarlet.
This is not a normal album, and I mean that in an entirely good way. The band have chosen to take a sub-genre that has pretty lax rules at the best of times and experiment with it to create something that may not be entirely new but it’s as close as we can reasonably expect these days.
The band play around with the Post-Metal formula just enough so that Matter as Regent sounds innovative and fresh, but not so much that it strays to far from what makes Post-Metal such a compelling and interesting listen.
The music is involving and engages the brain as it twists and turns through its various incarnations. The band write songs that seem to be mutations of the standard template; it’s as if the music has been stripped back to the bare bones of the style and then rebuilt in Wells Valley’s vision of what this kind of music should sound like.
The emphasis on the diversity, dynamics and pacing of the songs on Matter as Regent is noticeable, both in the music and the vocals. They don’t seem to like to repeat themselves too often.
The guitars are set to a level where they’re intense and emotive without being overly heavy. Expansive riffs and atypical rhythms run the gamut from expressive to functional to esoteric; there’s enough instant appeal to be endearing but enough depth of composition to keep you returning for more.
Wells Valley have released an intriguing and ambitious album that not only largely succeeds in being greater than the sum of its parts, but also achieves the even greater accolade of sounding mainly like itself.
Quality.
Wonderbox Metal 