Avantasia - Here Be Dragons
Review by ScreamingSteelUS

6.8

The phrase “here be dragons”, in the imaginative traditions of medieval cartography, denotes the perils of unexplored realms, warning of mysterious frontiers fraught with fantastical dangers. It’s an enchanting term of art, not incongruous with Avantasia’s mythic aesthetic, but the album it describes is, to the contrary, a familiar lap around the homestead.

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Year Of The Cobra - Year Of The Cobra
Review by Doc G.

8.1

It’s kind of wild to think about how much stuff that sucks shares origins with stuff that rules. Like how Terry Pratchett and Adolf Hitler technically came from the same species. Or how the musical scene that gifted us with Badmotorfinger is the same scene that is largely responsible for the musical diarrhea that was the post-grunge movement.

Luckily, Year of the Cobra are here to remind us of the good times.

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Tower - Let There Be Dark
Review by AndyMetalFreak

8.4

From the Tower, a voice shouted down: Let There Be Dark! Suddenly, a dark heavy metal album of the highest quality was unleashed.

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SpiritWorld - Helldorado
Review by AndyMetalFreak

7.8

What lies in Helldorado certainly isn't treasure, it's a SpiritWorld south of heaven and west of hell, full of zombified cowboys who unleash some of the most exhilarating hardcore/crossover thrash you'll hear.

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Katla - Scandinavian Pain
Review by RaduP

 

I started my stint as a Metal Storm reviewer with a review of Katla. Shortly afterwards another band by the same name popped up, but it was only now that the second Katla made it to the full length stage to make me be able to cover both bands on the main page.

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Amenra - With Fang And Claw [EP]
Review by musclassia

 

When a band releases two records simultaneously instead of a combined album, it’s safe to assume that there’s a conceptual divide being explored across the two releases. In the case of Amenra, the band attempt to bring together the start and end of their journey to date, while setting a platform for the next era of their career.

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Amenra - De Toorn [EP]
Review by musclassia

 

When a band releases two records simultaneously instead of a combined album, it’s safe to assume that there’s a conceptual divide being explored across the two releases. In the case of Amenra, the band attempt to bring together the start and end of their journey to date, while setting a platform for the next era of their career.

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Effluence - Pianistic Dismemberment
Review by Roman Doez

 

Brutal death metal is often seen as a formulaic and repetitive genre, with every band doing the same thing since the 1990s. While there is some amount of truth to that, there lies a fringe within it that creates some of the wildest and most interesting, chaotic, and experimental metal one could find these days. The likes of Dripping and Encenathrakh make some of the most unique-sounding music you will ever hear. Effluence have for five years now been following in the footsteps of Encenathrakh and delivering some of the best material this sub-sub-subgenre has to offer. And on Pianistic Dismemberment, they decided to change the formula and go even further into the bizarre.

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