M. Drew's blog

When Audioslave released their first album, comparisons to Rage Against the Machine were inevitable. Unfortunately, they were also unfair. Audioslave had a whole different feel than Rage could have ever conceived, and musically was branching off in a totally different and new direction. The attitude was different, the affect was changed, the music was on a different path. To compare Audioslave and Rage Against the Machine was to compare the proverbial apples and oranges.

Hey, you remember “Repo! The Genetic Opera”? Well, Sean Lacefield, a guitar player who had more than his share of responsibility for the soundtrack, is now working with Los Angeles goth metal band “Ellsbeth.” They self-released their album “Well-Dressed Killing Machine” digitally, in preparation for a summer long tour beginning right about now.

DevilDriver's "Pray for Villains" is a remote control with just one button. And that one button gets mashed over and over again from the word "go." It is brash, loud and substantive, but totally lacking in imagination or variety. The album is one howling metal noisefest after another, with fuzzed-out guitars and so much double-kick drum that I became numb to it. It never relents but also never triggers any adrenaline. "Pray for Villains" is one pace, one sound, one theme, coupled with the usual spate of angry choruses.

Normally, when I hear the words “progressive” and “atmospheric” in front of the word “metal,” I run screaming from the room. So fearful am I of the genre’s technically proficient but terribly brooding boredom that I would rather stick a fork in my own ear. So I don’t know for what reason I took a chance on Madder Mortem’s album “Eight Ways,” but I did. I had heard just enough samples to want to see what it was about.

Been a while since I've managed to compile enough worthwhile news to crush it all together into one of these articles. So here we go!

Coming from the least likely of all heavy metal havens, Scissorfight hails from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, home of....well, I don't really know. Wikipedia suggests that Portsmouth was once the home of naval hero John Paul Jones, lawyer Daniel Webster, and Betty Hill of the Hill UFO Abduction. It is also the birthplace of metal's own Ronnie James Dio.

If the Sick Puppies are a band headed in the right direction, I don’t think Adelitas Way even has a map. Their eponymous first album is exactly what I feared might happen with this entire “light metal” movement. This five-piece from Las Vegas wallows in overwrought emotional choruses, melodramatic guitar hooks, and unimaginative songwriting.

Now we’re getting somewhere. That doesn’t mean we’re there yet, but I think we might be getting closer. Enter Sick Puppies and their album “Tri-Polar.” This band from Australia is giving a good push to wedge their way into the landscape of heavy metal. I remember thinking that this whole “light metal” movement might culminate in something bigger. “Tri-Polar” is, at moments, an example of what this could become.

New Clutch album. The very words strike a certain amount of fear into my heart. They didn’t used to. I used to get excited for new music from one of my all-time favorite bands. Those were good days, when “Pure Rock Fury” and “Blast Tyrant” didn’t leave my CD player for weeks at a time. In what ended up being a very dark period for American heavy metal, Clutch kept the home fires burning with pounding swamp metal albums one after the other.

I was going to give this album the full-on review treatment as I so often do, but I’ll be honest, I just couldn’t come up with that much to say about it. It itself that might be the only thing you need to know.