Tag Archives: new album

I have to admit it – I’m a child of the Eighties. I mean that in that is when I got into metal: it was the formative years of that historic decade in rock history that, as a lanky-haired rebellious private school-attending teenager that I first discovered bands such as …

This Sicilian combo have been hanging around the edges (sic) of the European power/symphonic metal scene for a little over a decade now, occasionally threatening to move further into the spotlight dominated especially some of their countrymen through offerings such as their two under-rated concept albums to date, ‘Hastings 1066’ …

Your humble PM scribe feels like he has been living in the brilliantly named Voodoo for the best part of a week, as this is my third gig in as many days in the Belfast city centre venue. Industrial thrashers The Obscene Machine must feel the same way, as it …

Following their dalliance in the unplugged arena, with the highly imaginatively named ‘The Acoustic’ project earlier this year, Hungarian neo-thrashers Ektomorf have plugged their funny shaped geetars back into their Marshall stacks and turned the volume back up to 11 for this, their ninth studio album. Having built a reputation …

When power metal is done well, it is done bloody well. When it’s done badly, it’s done bloody atrociously. The second album by re-united Sicilian trio Holy Knights falls somewhere between these two extremes. Way back at the turn of the 21st century, Holy Knights could have been, in words …

Symbiosis is generally described in the dictionary as “the living together of two dissimilar organisms in more or less intimate association” – which, one has to assume is the effect this Portuguese five piece were trying to achieve when they merged crust, punk and metal nigh on two decades ago. …

In olden days of yore – before even most of the Planet Mosh crew was born (and that’s saying something) – grog was (often cheap) watered-down rum served to sailors to keep them reasonably intoxicated enough to fool them into thinking they were happy with their lot and therefore less …

Third albums are notoriously difficult for bands, but Swedish death metallers Zonaria have spent a good 13 years perfecting their craft – even if wholesale line-up changes made preparations for the recording process somewhat more difficult than they ideally should have been. In this case, any worries are quickly cast …

Typical, isn’t it? You complain about the apparent lack of decent French metal bands and then, like buses to the mysterious ‘Not In Service’, a whole bunch come along at once. ‘A Perfect Absolution’ is the third full-lengther – and the second on Listenable – from this Bordeaux five-piece and, …

The French heavy metal scene isn’t known for its international impact – personally, and without the aid of Google or Wikipedia, I can count less than a handful bands who have made any sort of significant impact outside their homeland: Trust, of course, who in turn give us the living …

In times of desperation and trouble, people often look to their history and heritage for inspiration, recalling past glories to give them a positive outlook on the travails currently facing them, drawing upon that which has gone before to drive them forward to face up to the challenges before them. …