Dan Slessor

Chelsea Grin Evolve EP If there is an original idea on Evolve, Salt Lake City’s Chelsea Grin have done a damn fine job of concealing it. The shades of blackened death metal in their Suicide Silence-esque bludgeon (first seen on 2011’s My Damnation) have grown even more prominent, with gothic flourishes adding a little personality […]

TesseracT Perspective EP Flying the flag for progressive metal in the U.K., TesseracT have garnered a cult following that continues to grow. With Perspective, the five-piece deliver their first acoustic work, having been inspired following the addition of American vocalist Elliot Coleman (Zelliack, ex-Sky Eats Airplane) and an acoustic session they filmed in New York […]

Lostprophets Weapons With Weapons, the fifth full-length of Lostprophets’ 15-year career, the Welsh sextet show glimpses of the anthemic greatness displayed on 2006’s Liberation Transmission and absent from much of 2010’s The Betrayed. This time out, they make an effort to push electronic elements to the foreground of their straight-ahead rock;  in the process, they don't […]

Upon A Burning Body Red. White. Green. Weighing into the deathcore fray, San Antonio, Texas’ Upon A Burning Body are a cut above the soundalike bands glutting up the genre. This isn’t to say they’re a unique entity—they’re definitely not, and there are too many echoes of Whitechapel and Suicide Silence to have the band […]

Black Breath Sentenced To Life Alongside labelmates Nails and All Pigs Must Die, Seattle’s Black Breath have been doing a fine job of keeping the spirit and sound of crust punk alive and well in recent years. With 2010’s Heavy Breathing, they took the fuzzy clamor, sneering obnoxiousness and hardcore attitude of Discharge or Hellbastard […]

Unsane Wreck Unsane have made a career out of making ugly music, and they maintain this tradition with Wreck, their first full-length in five years and a true return to form. The bloodlust displayed on opener “Rat” and “Ghost” recalls 1995’s Scattered, Smothered & Covered (arguably the strongest and most visceral record of the band’s […]

Bleeding Through The Great Fire It isn’t often you come across bands whose sixth album is the hungriest and perhaps most intense of their career, but with The Great Fire, that’s exactly what Bleeding Through have delivered. With shorter, tighter songs (just one breaks the four-minute mark, while four clock in at under two) the […]

Lamb Of God Resolution With 2009’s Wrath, Lamb Of God made a point of moving away from the more polished sounds of their mega-selling predecessor, 2006’s Sacrament. In doing so, the Virginian quintet set out to prove that they were still a metal band through and through, and while the record achieved this, it didn’t […]

Austrian Death Machine Jingle All The Way EP The problem with comedy bands is that the joke is always going to wear thin sooner or later. Having released two albums (the second a double album) and now their second Christmas-themed EP, it’s fair to say Austrian Death Machine have more than outstayed their welcome. The […]