Dantesco at myspace

Dantesco, Puerto Rico’s premier metal band play a form of epic doom metal not a million miles from Doomsword, Solstice and Solitude Aeturnus. The first thing you will notice is they are all in Spanish and that vocalist Erico La Bestia sings for a good portion of the time in a cod-operatic style that somewhat distracts from the music. It’s hard to get into any sort of metal with someone sounding like Pavarotti singing over the top of it. The performance and composing of the music is top notch, but it’s impossible to get past a vocalist who by rights should be singing in an Andrew Lloyd Webber musical and it’s not coincidence that the bonus track on this album is actually taken from one!

The guitarwork is immensely soulful and provocative and with another vocalist I could probably get into this a lot more, but La Bestia’s vocals which when they aren’t operatic, sound like a parrot attempting falsetto, simply don’t work in Metal. Operatic vocals are for opera and nothing else really by the evidence of this record.

Cephalectomy at Myspace

Cephalectomy hail from Nova Scotia, and they play a heavily Kataklysm-influenced style of deathgrind which they have dubbed “mystigrind”. Their latest release, The Dream Cycle Mythos, consists of just one 23-minute long song, which goes through multiple segments, including both growling and screeching vocals. Typically fast and brutal grindcore segments are punctuated by creepy synthesizer interludes reminiscent of Morbid Angel’s Formulas Fatal to the Flesh, with a little bit of mid-tempo metal thrown in near the end.

I personally greatly preferred the bear-grunting to the shrieking, but that’s just personal taste. I also didn’t like the use of a drum machine, as Cephalectomy had employed an actual drummer on previous albums, but some of the drum parts are so insanely fast that it’s understandable that they made that choice. One part near the end of the song stuck out to me as being extremely fast and noisy just for the hell of it, but most of the rest of the EP is strong. This release is definitely worth picking up for fans of grindcore and brutal death metal.

Rosetta at Myspace

Rosetta’s particular strand of Post Metal takes the ethereal melodies present within Katatonia’s “Brave Murder Days” and The Angelic Process’s “Weighing souls with Sand” and merges them with the that staple of the Genre, the mid period Isis sound. The quiet/loud/quiet/loud dynamics are infused with a gradually increasing sense of urgency that many post metal bands try and fail to achieve. There is a sense of nearly but not quite linear progression in the song writing which adds a progressive and epic feel to the compositions.

“Wake/Lift” is a hauntingly beautiful yet exquisitely savage record and one that proves that Rosetta might be able to one day make the leap and join Isis, Pelican, Cult of Luna, and Neurosis as the accepted leaders of the genre. It is a measured and expertly crafted release which throws up new discoveries with each listen. If you like Post Metal you will probably like this!

Bongripper at Myspace

Bongripper is a stoner/doom/post-metal outfit from Chicago. All of the members are just in it for the love of music and don’t care about money; from what I read in another review of this album, one of them even leaked it onto the internet. The brand of sludgy psychedelia on Hippie Killer is excellent; it is almost entirely instrumental (with the exception of the track “Terrible Bear Attack”) I do have to admit that I didn’t enjoy the drumless, dronier tracks as much as the doomier ones, but the latter type tend to be much longer so it’s okay. I also thought the album went on a bit too long; at just under the maximum 80 minutes for a CD, it felt like the band was just trying too hard to fill out the entire thing. Also, I felt the vocals on “Terrible Bear Attack” were really annoying, and I was glad that track was just 3 minutes long.

Those are my only real quibbles with the album, though; it’s wonderfully atmospheric with crushing riffs, and I totally would’ve gotten high to this if my social skills were good enough to obtain weed. My personal favorite track was the 16-minute “Reefer Sutherland,” although most of the album was strong. Fans of this style of metal will love Hippie Killer.

Runemagick at myspace

“Dawn of the End” known as “Voyage of Desolation/Dawn of the end” by some is just one in a long line of stellar releases from the Swedish underground veterans. Runemagick’s approach on this album like on all their releases differ from other Doom/Death bands such as Coffins and Disembowelment in that there are no fast Death Metal segments. Every minute of music on this album is at a snails pace yet still retains a definite death metal sound. “Dawn of the End” evokes a sense of hopeless and endless depression. It is a musical mire of brutal despair and unrelenting ugliness.

The first Paradise Lost album, Autopsy, Dream Death, Hellhammer, Eyehategod and Immolation are all certifiable influences on this dark and soul sapping piece of downbeat metal. Whilst the popularity of traditional doom/death in the underground metal scene has fallen and risen over the years, Runemagick have been creating masterpieces in the sub-genre no matter what. This is yet another one of those masterpieces.