PlanetMosh Keeping it Metal
2015 is fun. Here are some ‘Twitter’ Reviews by Iris North
The gist: Very freely associate words and phrases with whatever comes to mind first, based on the prompts.
Adrenaline Mob – Dearly Departed EP: They’re cursed. Aptly named!
Karyn Crisis’ Gospel Of The Witches – Salem’s Wounds: Gospel?! *gasp* Metal is now mixing gospel music into it’s tentacles? This might actually be good. Only if she sings like Aretha though, or maybe Amy Winehouse. I’ve seen her live, singing as Karyn Crisis in Crisis… it sounded like cat torture.
Smash Into Pieces – The Apocalypse DJ: Please, no more remixes and EDM stuff… I don’t get it.
Undersmile – Anhedonia: When you just don’t have any feeling left. Kinda like psychological numbness; nothing moves you in either a positive or negative direction.
Steak Number Eight – The Hutch: Steak. Mmmmm. But… hutch, like a rabbit hutch? Not so mmm. Too small to live in. Prefer the edible steak.
Motor Sister – Ride: Ride what, the lightning? A motorcycle? One of the four horses? A wild ass? A winning streak? A sunflower-bedecked two headed lion?
Moonspell – Extinct: Too bad. Bring back this species, as they are funny! When I saw these guys live (they were support for Dimmu Borgir), the hardcore Dimmu fans were calling them “Poonsmell”. The name stuck. Every time I’ve seen the band’s name since then, I’ve thought “Poonsmell” and chuckled.
Enslaved – In Times: In times I might think about listening to your album. I might think about listening to Michael Jackson‘s Thriller, too. We’ll see which one wins.
Soilwork – Live In The Heart Of Helsinki: Because YouTube doesn’t have enough footage of Soilwork from Helsinki, the band decided to release a live album to counteract this imbalance of nature. Maybe it’ll work… the only thing I know is, that given enough time, it’ll end up on YouTube, along with all the other potato-filmed stuff from every other band on Earth.
Blues Pills – Live: Blues guitar, live. Totally not metal. I don’t know how we end up with this non-metal stuff, but we get so much of it that I actually go and seek out non-metal releases to counteract all the weird stuff the suits throw at us. It sort-of works, but it means that I have to listen to a lot of silly pop music.
Windsor Drive – Windsor Drive: Name your band AND album after a street… this is one of the most original, inspired things I’ve seen in the past picosecond.
Funerary Bell – Graveyard Seance (EP): You sound scary.
Arvas – Black Satanic Mysticism: You sound mysteriously scary.
Zoner – Euharmonic Elevation: Music theory buffs rejoice.
De La Muerte – De La Muerte: Of the death, of the death. You sound mildly scary. Maybe Hot Topic level spookiness.
Tristana – Virtual Crime: My doctor wanted to know if I smoked “e-cigarettes”. I don’t smoke. I had to look it up because I thought it was like “e-mail”. Like accidentally looking at a photo of a cigarette could count against me. I told him no… Perhaps this virtual crime thing is sort of like that? You hear about a crime on the ‘Net, then bang, you’re guilty! If so, avoid this record. You don’t want a virtual criminal record.
Frosthelm – The Endless Winter: We Earthlings actually had an endless winter, about 550 million years ago. Look up Snowball Earth.
Unrest – Grindcore: If this album was anything but grindcore, I’d have these guys tarred and feathered for their audacity.
Fathoms – Lives Lived: I am having trouble fathoming this. Versus… deaths lived? Deaths died? Lives died?
Killer Refrigerator – The Fridge and the Power it Holds: Seriously? These guys are signed?! It’s like falling up the stairs. You wonder how this happens…
Arsenic Unbirthday – Ravens And Writing Desks (EP): More thinly veiled Edgar Allan Poe (or at least gothic) references, please.
Where Evil Follows – Portable Darkness: And then there’s the desktop version of darkness. It stays in one place, and doesn’t come with WiFi. This band reminds me that perhaps we need to upgrade to the laptop or smartphone version of darkness.
Abhor – Rituale Stramonium: You sound a little risky, a little spooky…
Lethal Saint – WWIII: This ain’t lethal. Which is good, because we sort-of have to stay alive to review more albums. Hopefully from bands with a glimmer of hope.
Grenouer – Unwanted Today: Or tomorrow, or the next day, or the next day… maybe we can pencil you into the schedule sometime in 2016. Only the Magic 8 Ball seer knows for sure, though.
NitroVolt – Dirty Wings: Give the poor bird a birdbath and let it cleanse itself a while.
Immortal Souls – Wintermetal: I’m beginning to wonder why summer, spring, and autumn get the shaft when it comes to metal. It’s always winter, ice, cold, winter, storms, winter, frozen grimness and pallor… You know, half the globe doesn’t see snow or have a true “winter”. It might be beneficial to acknowledge that segment of humanity, or the other three poor, left-out seasons.
Terveet Kadet – Lapin helvetti: Nice to see that there’s a French hellish rabbit on the loose in Finland somewhere…
Annisokay – Enigmatic Smile: Glad you’re okay, Ann. Nice “Mona Lisa” esque grin, too.
Plus! These guys are all utter crap and a bunch of twats. You should not listen to them under any circumstances. I’ve provided the list for you, just so you know who to avoid. I’ve also included brief notes so you also know why they must be shunned. List courtesy the “top 150 most influential metal bands” on MetalStorm:
Black Sabbath – Cack Blabbath?
Judas Priest – Black leather, whips, chains, motorcycles, and happy hills & valleys galore. Fun times. Can’t hate on the Judas Prius at any time. They have Scott Travis.
Iron Maiden – They don’t actually suck. I’m just trying to see if you’re reading this.
Motorhead – Too bad that vocally, Lemmy sounds like an old guy now. At least the band still rocks.
Metallica – Anything after Master of Puppets, utter rubbish.
Slayer – Killer formulaic thrash / speed metal. Nice guys too.
Celtic Frost – The first 2 discs were godly, everything after that sort of went, not downhill, but somewhat skeedaddled sideways. Say that three times fast! Far too tangential for a metalhead who wants it heavy 100% of the time.
Death – The great equalizer.
Pantera – Panera? We have a bread chain around here too…
Morbid Angel – Morbid Angle. Lord of all Fractions and Pi.
Napalm Death – Well-fed vegan grindcore guys.
Sepultura – After Beneath The Remains, they disappeared (at least from the Great Thrash Radar), so, they suck for doing that.
Dream Theater – Great, if you like esoteric virtuosity. I haven’t heard them, so, they suck. I just heard James LaBrie a couple weeks ago for the first time, and was impressed by his delivery and timbre.
Mayhem – Disguising sociopathology and psychopathology as art since the mid 1980s.
Yngwie Malmsteen – How did this guy end up in a heavy metal list? He’s a guitar shredder… no slouch at that. His ego has it’s own fury to unleash, though.
Manowar – Sunshine happy power metal. But they drove motorcycles onstage!
Pentagram – “Forever, My Queen”. They suck because they’re unmetal enough that it wasn’t even a metal band that got me into them… it was a rock band’s cover!
Entombed – Swe-death keeps on rottin’ and rollin’ in the free world…
Obituary – They don’t call ’em the Tardy Brothers for nothin’… my interview from November 2014 is still not back. (Hi Pip!)
Suffocation – NYDM for life.
Anthrax – More thrash-tastic goodness, but OMG they suck so much for bringing rap into metal… the bane. I still love “Startin’ Up A Posse” though.
Megadeth – Mosh-tastic, but the crazy political rants are getting WAY old. And Dave’s going to have to start dyeing his hair to keep it that red.
Carcass – Mixing veganism and gory death grind since the late 1980s. I have pictures, analog not digital, of their rehearsals from the late 1980s (88? 89? Long before they were internationally known as Carcass) somewhere.
Exodus – Thrash-tastic. Always killed it. Saw ’em twice with (Paul) Baloff. Haven’t seen them since the new guys joined. So, anything after Fabulous Disaster… le suck.
Saxon – Garbage.
Isis – Poor band, to have named themselves this… My sympathies. You suck for not changing your name to something more puppy and kitten friendly / politically correct!
Cannibal Corpse – Have seen them live at least 5-6 times and can’t remember a single outstanding “OMG these guys are amazing!” moment, but the interview chats were always fantastic. Formulaic and fun – who doesn’t enjoy a little “Hammer Smashed Face” now and then? It’s especially great for torturing the neighbors.
Exhumed – The gross award doesn’t go to those Scandinavian doused-in-3-day-old-swine-blood smelly black metal guys who’s name I forget – it goes to Matt Harvey for his onstage vomiting on cue. One of the rare bands I’ve seen live who actually managed to scar my fragile and tectonic mind for life.
Stormtroopers Of Death – Killer band, but canceled a show last-minute, causing me to drive to the venue in the ‘hood’, paying $5 for parking, and having to leave half an hour later… $5 poorer.
Danzig – Mother…! A dour look, Tidy Cats kitty litter (pail), and a BMW… that’s all I remember…
King Diamond – The falsetto vocals have got to go. I’ve gotten better noise out of cats, after pretending to tie their tails together.
Testament – First 2 discs, killer… after that, they disappeared. So, they suck for disappearing. And canceling a show at the last minute, then not telling the promoter. Because the promoter didn’t know, I (and a few other fans) drove all the way out there and ended up watching a fluffy fill-in hair metal band.
Overkill – Formulaic thrash. Killer live band. Apparently they could be could be douchey to other bands while on tour back in like the 1990s sometime. Gotta lose that attitude, lest ye remain relegated to the “under-appreciated gods of thrash” rung for the rest of your days…
Hammerfall – More cheerful, bright power metal.
Dimmu Borgir – Great live band. Their keyboardist wore a long black leather skirt and more guyliner then Tammy Faye. Which, of course, was incredibly hot.
Cradle Of Filth – Saw these guys in concert in the late 1990s and they killed it. They therefore suck because they’re a tough act to follow.
Mastodon – Favorite of alt rockers and Grammy nominees. That doesn’t mean they suck, it means… I haven’t heard them. By default, they must be too underground. So they suck.
Dismember – Swe-death was the same before and after.
I hope you’ve enjoyed this exhaustively long list of highly embellished album and band reviews, specially written for April Fool’s Day, 2015. I actually like the bands I “band reviewed” which is why they were picked; this is all a bit of fun! :)
