Welcome to the glorious return of Obscure Metal Roundup! It's been almost a year since the last installment, as I realized I was running out of bands to cover – the amount of bands that Spotify recommends because you listen to gobs of Midnight and Hellripper is, after all, finite, and some of them suck … Continue reading (Not So) Obscure Metal Roundup 8: Before They Were Famous Edition
Tag: Obscure Metal Roundup
Obscure Metal Roundup VII
Vulture – Ghastly Waves & Battered Graves (Released 2019) Thrash throwback purveyors Vulture have been around for a few years, and over the course of those years they have both flashed tremendous potential and frustrated me for not fully capitalizing on that potential. Their 2016 EP Victim of the Blade is utterly fantastic; all killer, … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup VII
Obscure Metal Roundup VI
REZN – Calm Black Water (Released 2018) Stoner metal is rather self-evidently concerned with creating huge, monolithic soundscapes, and with nailing the attendant atmospherics. The less immediately obvious but just as salient upshot of this is that sometimes these bands take this commitment a bit too far by dedicating whole entire tracks – long ones, … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup VI
Obscure Metal Roundup V
Gehennah – Too Drunk to Live, Too Drunk to Die (Released 2016) Hat tip to Paul for this one. I have made the conscious decision to eschew lyrical analysis in this column, by and large. There a few reasons for this. I am largely out of my depth in doing so, having not done much … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup V
Obscure Metal Roundup IV
Iron Kobra – Might & Magic (Released 2015) There are bands that, seemingly having taken cues from Dio's whole gestalt, end up with a lot of D&D-adjacent aesthetic trappings. And then there's Iron Kobra, who, perhaps in an effort to tell the rest of the metal world to step up their nerd game, named themselves … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup IV
Obscure Metal Roundup III
Desaster – The Oath of an Iron Ritual (Released 2016) It's always heartwarming when you first hear of a band that's been toiling in obscurity for several decades. Desaster's sound fits right in with that of most modern black metal bands, and according to Metal Archives, they've been together since 1988! Sort of, I guess … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup III
Obscure Metal Roundup II
Booze Control – Forgotten Lands (Released 2019) I don't really know why this is the case, or what is signifies about me as a person, but for some reason I've become more receptive to contemporary metal as I've gotten older. When I was a kid, I thought it was all indistinguishable death growls and never-ending … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup II
Obscure Metal Roundup I
Welcome to the first installment of Obscure Metal Roundup! This semi-recurring feature is meant to be exactly what it sounds like. Each article will feature mini reviews of three metal albums that I have discovered recently from bands that seem like they were made up by a bot designed to invent metal bands, based on … Continue reading Obscure Metal Roundup I
Rob Writes About Whatever 