Mantic Ritual at Myspace

Mantic Ritual’s Executioner is an example of the thrash revival being done right. Although it’s never too original, the riffs, leads and songwriting are strong as hell, resulting in an album that’s strong all the way through, and Mantic Ritual don’t make the same mistake as Blood Tsunami and make sure that the songs are actually heavy; there’s no over-melodic frippery here.

Executioner is a re-recording of an album recorded under the band’s previous name, Meltdown. I haven’t heard the original version, so I can’t comment on it, but the production on this is excellent throughout. Dan Wetmore’s vocals are excellent; at times, he appears to be invoking Kill ‘Em All-era James Hetfield in his delivery, but he mixes it up enough so he doesn’t feel like a total clone. The solos and riffs are also excellent; the album’s only real weakness is the rhythm section. The bass is barely audible and the drumming is especially weak; it just sounds repetitive, dull, and overly mechanical most of the time.

Still, despite that one major fault, this is a fine album and a worthy successor to the original wave of thrash bands. If only the rest of the movement was this strong…

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!

Trephination official website

After looking back at the fifteen reviews I’d written so far for this site, I realized that out of them, only one was fully negative, two were mediocre, two were guilty pleasures, and the rest were positive. I came to a conclusion: I need to review more shit. Some background: I found this 3-song EP in a used bookstore attached to the Free Library in Philadelphia. Most of the CDs there were stuff no one would ever want, but I’d found a few gems there, and I was curious about this, wondering out of sheer morbid curiosity what it would sound like. Well, it was just as bad as I feared.

First of all, the lyrics are terrible. “Cloned Reoccurences” starts with some genetic technobabble, and continues with some horrible lyrics about how someone’s clone is committing atrocities. At one point, the phrase “50,000 less niggers” is mentioned- yes, Trephination is a white power band. “Threading the Twine” is a hackneyed song about suicide by hanging, and “Citadel” is an equally cliched song about the Eastern front in WWII.

But the lyrics wouldn’t matter that much if the music were good. Unfortunately, it completely sucks. The vocalist sounds like he’s hacking up phlegm (in a bad way), the riffing is completely generic, the solos sound out of place, the bassist might as well have stayed home, and the drumming frequently sounds like one of those wind-up monkeys. Trephination don’t have any releases to their name besides this, and it’s not hard to see why; apparently, they weren’t even good enough to hack it in the white power scene. Stay far away from this one.