Metal Storm's outlet for nonmetal album reviews
The place where we'll talk about music without growls or blast beats
unless they still have those but still aren't metal
unless they still have those but still aren't metal
We here at Metal Storm pride ourselves on our thousands of metal reviews and interviews and article; metal is our collective soul and passion, which is why we bother with this junk. That being said, we'd be lying if we stuck to our trve-kvlt guns and claimed that metal is the only thing we ever listen to. Whether we want to admit it or not, we do check out some other stuff from time to time; some of us are more poptimistic than others, but there's a whole world out there aside from Satan-worshiping black metal and dragon-slaying power metal. We do already feature some nonmetal artists on our website and have a few reviews to back them up, but we prefer to limit that aspect of the site to those artists who have been a strong influence on the metal scene or who are in some way connected to it. This article series is the place for those artists who don't matter to metal in the slightest but still warrant some conversation - after all, good music, is good music, and we all know metal isn't the only thing on this planet for any of us.
Down below, you might find some obscure Bandcamp bedroom projects or some Billboard-topping superstar; as long as it ain't metal and the album itself isn't a best-of compilation, it fits. Obviously, we're certain that not everything will be for everybody (you guys can be viciously territorial even when metal is the only thing on the menu, and we're all supposed to like the same things), but we do hope you find at least one thing that you can enjoy, instead of just pointing and screaming in horror "Not metal!" as if that would be an insult.
Here are our previous features:
September 2025
August 2025
July 2025
And now to the music...
AFI - Silver Bleeds The Black Sun...
[Gothic Rock | Post-Punk]
musclassia's pick
Wow, AFI are looking a lot different to how I remembered them. In fairness, when a group of young men spend over a quarter-century making music together, it’s probably not a shock that very young style, both aesthetically and musically, undergo maturation across the decades. I last properly listened to AFI around the time of Decemberunderground, at which point the hardcore punk of their earlier years had evolved into a more accessible pop-punk. Nearly 20 years on, and the band are now post-punk in more ways than one.
Silver Bleeds The Black Sun... opens with outlaw country guitar strumming, but the song “The Bird Of Prey” ultimately reveals itself to have as much in common with the goth rock of The Cure, and the record as a whole mostly aptly fits gothic rock and post-punk labels, as exhibited by “Behind The Clock” and its similarities to The Cult, or the new wave of “Holy Visions”. The album is very nostalgic for the 80s, and the lower register of Davey Havok fits this range of sounds nicely, although some higher-pitched cleans in the likes of “The Spear” are delivered similarly adeptly. I can’t say I expected AFI to sound quite this retro after such a delayed reacquaintance with them, but while they’re not necessarily doing anything new or essential within this sound, it’s a far more successful and interesting route that they’ve gone down than I might otherwise have expected, and the album is pretty consistently enjoyable throughout for anyone with an insatiable taste for 80s goth rock/post-punk/new wave.\
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Pain Magazine - Violent God
[Post-Punk | Electro-Industrial]
Pain Magazine’s debut album, Violent God, comes from an unexpected and unplanned collaboration of two bands originating from different musical backgrounds. French post-hardcore act Birds In Row, including singer-songwriter Quentin Sauvé, have joined forces with Franco-American industrial techno duo Maelstrom & Louisahhh to create a post-punk/electro-industrial hybrid that hits hard, both emotionally and sonically. What began as a simple, one-off meeting, turned into a 16-day studio session, and a full-length album that sounds less as a meeting of genres, and more as a demonstration of human fragility clashing with mechanical pulse.
Apart from the recognizable sounds of the other projects that the members of Pain Magazine are part of, Violent God is influenced by the likes of Low, Nine Inch Nails, Portishead, and Sonic Youth. The album was written in two adjacent rooms, with ideas being transferred via a thumb drive from the duo in one room to Birds In Row who were in the other, and vice-versa. Each side destroyed and rebuilt the other’s contributions until something entirely new emerged. As a result, the songs feel vulnerable and machine-made or improvised and meticulously crafted at the same time. Male and female vocals, mournful melodies, and cold beats coexist in a creative process that sounds both personal and cathartic. The best description of this band and album was given by Louisahhh in an interview: “Pain Magazine’s a great teacher of jumping into the deep end of the cold pool with both feet and learning that you fucking love to swim.”
Bandcamp
by nikarg
Hail The Sun - Cut.turn.fade.black
[Post-Hardcore | Math Rock]
musclassia's pick
I very much hailed the sun in both 2021 and 2023, as Donovan Melero’s troupe shot right towards the top of my post-hardcore preferred bands list. The albums keep coming thick and fast from Hail The Sun, with cut.turn.fade.black joining the party. Fitting with the lack of spaces in the album title, opening song “The Drooling Class” launches immediately into a rapid, pounding drive for its verses, before smoothing things out with several anthemic clean-sung moments.
Still, this is the band’s longest album in a decade (at a still very reasonable 43 minutes), and both individual songs and the full record cram plenty of content into every second, twisting and turning between aggression and hooks. “There’s No Place In Heaven For Fakes” offers plenty of both, serving as an instant earworm along with the bitey “Blight” (both give me stronger Protest The Hero vibes than I can remember from the previous albums). The softer tracks such as “Consumed With You” and “Building Code” don’t quite hit the same mark, but others, like “I Can Tell By The Scars” and “Rightless Destiny”, hit a sweeter spot. Overall, I feel less likely to return to this record than its immediate predecessors, but it has more than its share of standout moments stored within.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Alpha Male Tea Party - Reptilian Brain
[Math Rock]
Alpha Male Tea Party (AMTP) are a name I know of because of ArcTanGent festival, but even though they’ve played the festival 6 times (twice since I started attending), I have not only never seen them live, but had never heard them on record before now. I have no particular reason for it, although the combination of their recurring appearances there since the early days and their music never naturally crossing my radar did leave me suspecting that they played some form of math rock, a style I don’t instinctively seek out. Their fifth album Reptilian Brain, their first in five years, seemed as good an opportunity to rectify this omission on my part and put that theory to the test, and as it turns out, the music is rather mathy, but not in the twee form that so often comes to be with this genre.
I had also seen AMTP categorized as an instrumental rock band, and although I read that they’d introduced vocals in recent years, I was surprised for the record to open with angry yells combined with a rather meaty guitar riff. AMTP have a bite that is almost metallic at times, and “Hostess Imperial” demonstrates them at their heaviest from the off, throwing thick distortion around with bouncy, rhythmically complex riffs. Lighter, cleaner sounds are subsequently explored on both the song and album, with a retro-psychedelic feel to the end of the track and quirky indie twang to “Solidarity Disco Banquet”, but Reptilian Brain shows its claws frequently, whether with the lurching aggression of “Battle Crab” or grungy chugging kicking off “A Terrible Day To Have Eyes”.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
The Norwegian progressive/art rock group Gazpacho return from a 5-year break just a year off their 30th anniversary to present their 12th full-length album Magic 8 Ball. The album title obviously had me intrigued as I've never once come across a progressive rock album that's theme is centered around the game of pool before, and I wouldn't have expected anything less from a band such as Gazpacho, who are known for delving into an odd variety of conceptual themes through intriguingly complex music. However, the theme is far more complex than a simple game of pool, instead it's concept is rooted in the Ship of Theseus. It's centred around the idea of fate, and how it shifts without warning, slowly stripping away the thought of who we are by the choices we make. With the theme in mind, the band explores various philosophical avenues including time, regret, memory, and one's own identity, and this results in their most structurally multilayered and emotion-filled release to date, and arguably, most ambitious too.
The title Magic 8 Ball wrestles with the idea of infinity being paramount, as we become trapped in a rotating cycle of unpredictability and inevitability, and the band describes the theme in more immaculate detail through their music. The band's atmospheric core still remains, and it's through the immersive atmosphere that each song tells its own story, but all connect together in some form or another. Reoccurring patterns can emerge at any time, which gives you the feeling of being trapped in an infinite loop of musical and self-discovery, here you can get lost in time only re-emerge under a new identity.
Bandcamp
by AndyMetalFreak
Cardiacs - LSD
[Progressive Rock | Zolo | Art Punk | Neo-Psychedelia]
Cardiacs made eight albums in their first 20 years of activity, but 26 years have come and gone before their ninth album, LSD, finally released. The making of LSD was filled with many delays and misadventures, with the band’s main songwriter Tim Smith going through a heart attack and eventually passing away in 2020. But LSD is now here, and it’s quite an interesting piece! Cardiacs have, from the beginning, been a weird band, and that’s what made them really stand out even within the more experimental side of rock. LSD does not deviate from this as it is an 80 minutes long maximalist epic with all kinds of weird instrumentation sprinkled in for good measure.
This both plays in favor of and against LSD, as individually, every song is really fun and engaging. Across my multiple listens, I haven’t found any track to be particularly worse than the others, and this level of consistency is impressive. I’ve instead found several standouts, like “Woodeneye”, “By Numbers”, “Skating”, or “Lovely Eyes”. The issue, however, comes with the album’s run time. The sound developed on LSD is engaging but also very dense, and this maximalist approach gets really draining after a good 40 minutes. There is also a major lack in variation, and all the tracks start blending together past a certain point. Given the band’s history, it’s still a miracle that this album was made in the first place, and I can understand wanting to put out as much material as possible, but as it stands, LSD is a very bloated album with plenty of good ideas that only really stand out when listening to isolated tracks.
Bandcamp
by Roman Doez
Guerilla Toss - You're Weird Now
[Zolo | Neo-Psychedelia]
RaduP's pick
If you're baffled by the term "zolo", don't worry, it's another one of those very specific terms for very specific movements in prog, kinda like "zeuhl", but this time referring to a specific kind of new wave / punk merge, with the most famous example being fellow article entry Cardiacs. Guerilla Toss have been around for quite a while, having released their debut 15 years ago, and in the meantime they've played around with a lot of sounds, including this "zolo" one, but this is the first one that seems to rely on it so strongly, uniting those nuances into something that more closely resembles the original sound.
Of course, this is passed through a neo-psych filter that's quite in line with what they did on the previous record, which does result in some trippy and quirky pop songs, with just the right amount of experimentation in its quirkiness to feel interesting while still being direct. The way they're able to make the mix of sounds and the transitions between them work so well makes this a pretty thrilling listen, and that dash of maximalism in its sound. Having Pavement's Stephen Malkmus producing and Phish's Trey Anastasio guesting is just the icing on the cake.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
The Black Cat’s Eye - Decrypting Dreams Of Weird Animals And Strange Objects
[Psychedelic Rock]
Despite its verbose title, The Black Cat’s Eye fully won me over in 2023 with The Empty Space Between A Seamount And Shock-Headed Julia, particularly with the sumptuous 20-minute Floydian epic “Kill The Sun And The Moon And The Stars”. The rest of that record couldn’t quite live up to such an incredible benchmark, and neither really can their similarly longwinded new record Decrypting Dreams Of Weird Animals And Strange Objects, but that’s not to say that it’s not another thoroughly likeable slab of psychedelic rock.
With a maximum song length of 10 minutes, nothing here has quite the space to explore that “Kill The Sun And The Moon And The Stars” was granted, so said 10-minute opener “Hell Bent For Sæther” instantly gets into a krautrock groove, one that it takes its sweet time before eventually shifting slightly away from near the track end for a lushly layered climax with delightful guitar synergy. The shorter songs stick more to one particular vibe, whether the 70s acoustic prog rock of “The Walls Of Crystal Keep” or the noisier energy of “Unicorn”. The other longest song, “Everywhere I Rest My Head The Ground Is Shifting”, is about the closest the record gets to the dynamism of its predecessor; the lack of peak emotionality in comparison is a slight shame, but The Black Cat’s Eye are nonetheless a solid outfit within this niche.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Giöbia - X-Æon
[Psychedelic Rock | Space Rock]
With a ‘new kid on the block’ Italian psych rock band covered this month in the form of Basaltic Plateau, there’s also a more veteran act from the country in Giöbia, who started out over 20 years ago. With their eighth album here, the Milanese group aren’t throwing up any grand surprises, but X-Æon sounds like the output of a band that have refined their craft over decades. Featuring tasty stoner-laced riffs, galactic synths, lush guitar leads and hazy occasional vocal contributions, X-Æon is effortlessly enjoyable.
The record’s tone is set nicely by opener “Voodoo Experience”, a slightly doomy and crunchy effort with plenty of accoutrements enhancing the experience, from guitar melodies to trippy sound effects. Right afterwards, “Fractal Haze” goes in a faster krautrock direction, bouncing along to its constant, unrelenting rhythm. There’s further whiplash shifts from track to track, as “The Death Of The Crows” is an understated, almost balladic desert rocker with the first significant vocal appearance on X-Æon. The record is a solid venture across the expanses of psychedelic rock, although some might wish for a bit more tonal stability, which comes from “1976” onwards with a stretch of spacey psychedelic jams.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Basaltic Plateau - Dead Dinosaur Echoes
[Psychedelic Rock | Post-Rock]
A new instrumental psychedelic/stoner rock band in 2025 isn’t inherently the easiest thing to come up with plenty of words about, but sometimes a record comes along that has some character to it, and Dead Dinosaur Echoes very much falls into that category. Built around guitars and synths, Basaltic Plateau explore the mellow psychedelia of acts such as Yawning Man, but also venture over into other genres, such as post-rock and indie rock. The former comes through quite heavily on opener “Mystic Flow”, which has warming moments of uplifting euphoria alongside its desert grooves and trippy soundscaping that really add to its charm.
The lively bass lick and tender guitar textures opening up “Sleep Paralysis” maintain that alternative vibe, and while the track eventually works its way towards a frantic, fuzzy groove, it offers further surprises along the way. “Summer Dream” and closing title track are more typical psych-rock jams, but Basaltic Plateau solidly deliver the fundamentals alongside the surprises, getting stuck into the fretboard with a noisy, wild solo in the latter. In between, the band flex their Earthless influences during frenetic moments of “Peyote Rising” and “Cuttlefish Galaxy”, but there’s also both languid and surprisingly heavy passages to appreciate in the latter.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Snõõper - Worldwide
[Garage Rock]
Snõõper is the kind of band I'm glad I got to discover with their debut full length, the aptly titled Super Snõõper, an album I liked so much I picked it in the edition I covered it in, and I especially liked it for its fast silly energy, full of short jovial songs and a vocal style that doesn't scream "punk" but felt way more tongue-in-cheek. In the meantime I've seen this style described as "egg punk", which is as head-scratching and as hilarious as Snõõper sounds, so it's strangely fitting. Since Super Snõõper was barely 22 minutes, there has been an appetite for more of what it did.
Worldwide does not really reinvent anything that Super Snõõper didn't already do, but it does add up to its runtime making it 28 minutes, so still not going over the usual 30 minutes mark. Aside from adding to its runtime, Worldwide feels like it takes its goofball energy to a slightly more dance-punk direction, just enough to keep it from feeling too same-y, while the biggest left field turn is the cover of Beatles "Come Together" that completely shifts the original's energy. If the album feels diminished in impact in any way it's only because Super Snõõper already slapped me in the face with this sound.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
Moreru - ぼぼくくととききみみだだけけののせせかかいい
[Noise Rock | Experimental Rock]
Every now and then, I come across music that feels like it was made specifically for me. Moreru was one of those discoveries, and their sound can easily be described as ultra chaotic and noisy screamo. It’s a sonic aggression the likes of which I rarely encounter, and I absolutely love it. At least, that’s how it was before ぼぼくくととききみみだだけけののせせかかいい, since this new album surprisingly switches things up and goes in a softer direction.
Now, rest assured, the core of Moreru’s sound is still there. If, like me, you just want to hear someone screaming over ultra-aggressive noise, you’ll still find some of that in here. But the ear-shattering production of the previous albums has been replaced with something much cleaner (by Moreru standards) and a lot of the raw brutality of the project has been converted into a much more diverse sound, borrowing from new influences like shimokita-kei or even heavy metal (just listen to “ROCKSTAR”). Several tracks here pretty much don’t have any noise or screamo elements, like “討死!”. This added diversity definitely makes the album a lot more approachable, and it also manages to remain engaging for its full 37 minutes, while previous Moreru projects barely reached 25 minutes and wouldn’t have benefitted from a longer runtime. Ultimately, I do feel like this more diverse approach makes for a release that is “objectively” more interesting, but it unfortunately doesn’t resonate with me quite as much as the previous two. It’s still great, mind you, and a serious contender for my album of the year, but I do miss the rawness of 山田花子 and 呪詛告白初恋そして世界, and the way each listen completely shattered my eardrums.
Bandcamp
by Roman Doez
Geese - Getting Killed
[Art Rock | Indie Rock]
I first discovered Geese through 3D Country, an album I appreciated a lot for how its indie rock mixed country / southern rock sensibilities through a punk filter, while also having an ironic detachment, mostly in the vocals. That ironic folkier side was even more developed on the vocalist's solo album, even if his solo album was false advertising. Now with Getting Killed, though the cover art has some of that same silliness that previous album had, I can't help but mistake it for an Eidola cover every time I see it.
Given the trajectory of band album with mix of sounds, and solo album focusing on one side of that sound, I was expecting the band follow-up to swing harder in the other side, but it seems like Heavy Metal did end up making Getting Killed an somewhat less punky record, more focused on art rock grooves and a touch of psychedelia to go along with the ironic affectations of Winter's vocals, which are still very much an aquired taste. It seems like the folk/country side takes a larger chunk, but it is supplemented by a bigger emphasis on some 70s sounding experimentation in its rockier side, which does make for a pretty unique nuance for a band to have.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
The Last Dinner Party - From The Pyre
[Glam Rock | Indie Rock]
RaduP's pick
Prelude To Ecstasy is a top contender for my favorite album of 2024, certainly one of my most listened to. Forming such a strong connection to an album, let alone a debut, is a very dangerous game of setting expectations. That was especially true when getting to see The Last Dinner Party live this year, not only because the performance itself felt a bit too restrained to my liking, but every time a new song was played it felt less exciting and more like something I'd have to wait through until more songs I already had a connection to would be played. Having that be my first taste of From The Pyre did leave it having to fight an uphill battle.
My first playthrough did bear the biggest burden of expectations, but made it through alright. Having spent more time with it, I'm still not at the point where there's any emotional connection to the songs here to match the one with songs on Prelude To Ecstasy, but the quick growth of familiarity with them does give me hope that it's just a matter of time, the same way it happened to me with the new Deftones. What From The Pyre certainly proves though is that The Last Dinner Party landed on a winning formula where their songwriting is so great that they don't need to change much about the formula in order to still make songs that feel unique.
by RaduP
Florence + The Machine - Everybody Scream
[Art Pop | Art Rock]
RaduP's pick
One of the art pop acts of the past couple of decades that received the most outward adoration has to be Florence + The Machine, and while there's a lot of praise to be given to the rest of the band, a lot of it does come down to just how imposing and hypnotizing of a presence Florence Welch is. While most of their music has been introspective in some way in regards to Florence's perspective, 2022's Dance Fever channeled that in a more post-pandemic feelings, which did give the feeling of their most personal album to date. Somehow that feeling happens with every new album, as that's the case with Everybody Scream too.
On one hand Everybody Scream is more thematically focused on Florence's musing on her as a musician, while also being more deliberately mystical and witchy, somehow finding ways to tie these two threads together. While that does lead to some lyrical moments that feel a bit head-scratching (see "Music By Men") it also leads to songs and moments that feel like they would be even more monstrously captivating in a live setting, like the meta-scream in the title track, the ethereal backing choir in "Witch Dance", the Jefferson Airplane-ish "Perfume and Milk", or the almost ritualistic "Drink Deep". If only Florence shows didn't sell out so quickly.
by RaduP
Wednesday - Bleeds
[Slacker Rock | Alt-Country]
When I first covered Wednesday's music a couple of years ago, I opened up my writeup with the question "Just how noisy do you want your indie rock?", which seems to still be applicable to this new release, a pretty good indication of the band having found their own sound, with its origins as a solo project becoming less and less relevant. Still, that is a trajectory that did take them through a fluctuation of styles rather than a mere direct evolution, hence why all the sounds on Bleeds have been at some point used before in a smaller or larger capacity on previous albums.
What does seem to be the nuance of the record is a somewhat larger share of alt-country, with "Townies" and "Elderberry Wine" and "Phish Pepsi" making a pretty strong impression even if this isn't the first time the band went in that direction. This is supplemented by a lot of the grungy slacker rock reminiscent of Sonic Youth and Dinosaur Jr, occasionally bordering on either noise rock or slowcore, with the interplay between the thick guitar tones and the dejected yet passionate vocals of Karly Hartzman feeling more compelling with each release, and with less of that lack of cohesion that irked me about Rat Saw God.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
Cate Le Bon - Michelangelo Dying
[Neo-Psychedelia | Art Pop]
I found out about Cate Le Bon through her previous album, Pompeii, which I've covered afterwards even if at the time it felt like music that needed to be untangled because of how "cerebral" it was. Three years later I've had a bit of time to dive into the psychedelic pop of her decade and a half long career and its folkier beginnings to kinda get how this very dreamlike sound operates. It's still something that I can describe as "to appreciate rather than enjoy" in the same cerebral way, but there is something that is at least slightly more approachable about Michelangelo Dying.
See, Michelangelo Dying is overtly an album about love. Yes, that's a theme that's done to the death, and Cate Le Bon was herself reluctant to make an album about such an overdone theme, but you don't get to decide when life throws those intense feelings your way, so feeling like she had to make a snapshot of how love felt at the time did result in an album that is similar in sound in that very psychedelic but nonetheless calculated art pop style of Pompeii and previous albums, but without it feeling as impersonal and detached. It is, dare I say, quite charming at times.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
I discover a lot of stuff that I end up covering here, but sometimes the direction of discovery is opposite and I discover something because it gets covered here. It is a pretty common occurrence, but one that stayed with me the longest is due to Starvynth's writeup of The Line exactly five years ago. In the meantime I've gotten to experience some of my favorite songs from that record live, and Kalandra is a band I revisit again and again, and judging by how other people also covered them, I wasn't the only one who felt that impact.
My first attempt at properly covering the band comes with a lower stakes release: an EP in which one of the songs, "Ghosts", has been released one year ago. The band created Mørketid specifically as a challenge that followed from that single, in which they tried to make winter-like music during summer. Half covers, half original compositions, half Norwegian, half English, Mørketid focuses more on the quieter and more stripped back dark folk / ethereal wave side of the band's sound, with Katrine Stenbekk's vocals having the biggest presence, and as weird as it it to release these when we're more than one month away from winter, I can see why these songs were written for winter.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
Danheim - Heimferd
[Nordic Folk | Dark Folk]
Starting off as an electronic musician, Reidar Schæfer Olsen pivoted a decade ago towards the increasing popularity of Norse mythology and Nordic folk in popular culture, establishing himself with multiple albums per year from 2017 onwards under the Danheim name. This creative surge came in time to earn inclusion on the Vikings soundtrack, but Covid seems to have slightly curtailed Olsen’s momentum; while a stream of singles have continued to appear on his Bandcamp page, the last full-length record was 2021’s Domadagr, at least until this year. After 4 years, Danheim is partnered with Season Of Mist for the release of Heimferd.
This is my first time listening to Danheim, and it is broadly in line with what listeners already acquainted with the likes of Wardruna, Forndom and their ilk will expect: acoustic instrumental ensembles, reverbing drums, and vocal choirs. That said, the wind melodies on opener “Agermark” are surprisingly folksy and delicate, in contrast with the ominous chanting in “Brenhin Llwyd”. It’s an album that’s easy to get lost in the atmosphere of, particularly when it gets into the hypnotic marching repetition of the title track or casts a spell with the charming strings melodies of “Stormdans”. With time to gather ideas, Olsen has assembled an album worth adding to the rapidly accumulating pile of Nordic neofolk.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Sopor Aeternus And The Ensemble Of Shadows, a name I have multiple times misspelled as "Sopor Aeturnus" due to similarities to Solitude Aeturnus, is the kind of artist I have only tangentially been aware of until recently, the kind I've been promising to eventually explore without getting to it, and this Halloween the opportunity appeared for that in a pretty unconventional way: a soundtrack for a movie that doesn't exist. Though one that thematically in its imagined plot (elaborated here) weirdly does resonate with Sopor's dark and challenging work of rejecting heteronormativity.
So how does an album from an artist fair when stripped of that artist's most recognizable quality: her voice. The neoclassical darkwave catalogue was mostly built on the unique eeriness of Anna-Varney's delivery, so The Dead Have Come gets to focus on her strengths as a composer, and the soundtrack form, even with a non existing referent, feels like a lower stakes attempt at putting the instrumental side to the forefront. The imagined movie being a late 70s horror does make the music take a lot from John Carpenter's brand of horror synth, with just a bit of a Goblin-esque giallo touch, but that specific orchestral darkness, aided by the ensemble of brass and strings performing guests, fitting in the darkwave lineage of the act.
Bandcamp
by RaduP
Grafix - Don’t Slow Down
[Drum & Bass]
Back in 2022, I complimented Grafix’s debut Half-Life as a very pleasant recapitulation of the specific style of drum & bass popularized by Pendulum, particularly in the latter’s thin trickle of new material. However, sophomore release Don’t Slow Down comes but a month after Pendulum’s own long-awaited comeback (albeit itself partially a compilation of already released tracks), pitting the Bristolian producer directly against the artist whose fingerprints are all over his own album.
The question now is whether Don’t Slow Down is a good enough imitation of Pendulum to warrant listening to when you can just to new Pendulum. For me, the instrumentals on the surface very much nail particularly the Immersion sound, or further back towards In Silico/Hold Your Colour when it comes to the title track. However, a track like “Drift Away” falls short on two fronts, namely the guest vocalist doesn’t inspire excitement, and the beats are a bit too basic and mid-tempo compared to something like “Watercolour” (slightly ironic, given the album title). In spite of this, Don’t Slow Down is still broadly enjoyable, and while the more hardcore electronic songs were often where Pendulum lost me, the brashness of “Let Me Down” and “Final Cut” offer a welcome rush of energy.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
In times gone past, Neurotech was the vehicle for all of Wulf’s output, resulting in releases such as Evasive, but at some point he came to recognize the benefits of specialization, and as such created NeuroWulf and NeuroAxis for his trance and ambient endeavours, respectively, allowing Neurotech to focus on metallic material. Wulf has been mighty busy across the three outlets, as Bunker is both the eighth NeuroWulf release and the 25th album in the self-described NeuroVerse.
Listening to Bunker, having heard nearly all of Neurotech’s output to date, it’s quite clear to me that there’s no radical reinvention going on across the NeuroVerse, which probably isn’t too surprising given the prolific nature of the output. Still, for fans of Wulf’s signature blend of electronica, Bunker hits the mark pretty consistently. The first main track, “Deterrence”, is an up-tempo romp of pounding beats, with Wulf’s typical vocals contrasted with others laden with heavy distortion effects. There is variety to be encountered as well; the synths on the gnarly “Clickbait” take my mind to Justice’s classic “Stress”, while “The Fading Choir” offers moments of ethereal euphoria in between its groovy beats. I’m not as taken with the somewhat soporific synthwave cut “Vast Recoil”, but faster efforts like “Corroded Grid” and “Combatant” offer moments to savour.
Bandcamp
by musclassia
Perturbator - Age Of Aquarius
[Synthwave]
musclassia's pick
Age Of Aquarius finds Perturbator in an interesting place. After albums such as Dangerous Days and The Uncanny Valley played a major role in the current popularity of synthwave and darksynth, James Kent went in an altogether different direction in 2021 with Lustful Sacraments, a more gothic and atmospheric release. With Age Of Aquarius, Perturbator feels like it is drifting back towards its former domain, while also venturing somewhere quite different.
As with Lustful Sacraments, there are several guest vocal appearances here, although arguably with bigger names this time. Opening track “Apocalypse Now” features Kristoffer Rygg, and sounds very much like a latter-day Ulver, while later on, the likes of Tristan Shone (Author & Punisher), Greta Link and Neige (Alcest) respectively leave their own fingerprints on “Venus”, “Lady Moon” and the closing title track. That said, the essence of Perturbator is present in each of these songs, whether it be increasing synth presence taking over the ethereal industrial vibe of Shone or increasingly busy and pounding rhythms contrasting Neige’s airy vocals. In between are songs that offer the rampant darksynth drive of The Uncanny Valley (“Lunacy”), as well as new sounds, such as the ambience of “Hangover Square” and “The Swimming Pool”, or the aggressive techno heard in “The Art Of War”. Overall, I do find that Age Of Aquarius lies in a bit of a no man’s land that has it falling beneath the previous records from the project that I’ve heard, but it’s still an enjoyable addition to the Perturbator catalogue.
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by musclassia
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