by Sebastian Kluth
Don't worry, Japanese Folk Metal isn't as unimaginative as its genre specification, band name and album title might suggest. The sextet from Tokyo and Yokohama plays an entertaining mixture of folk metal and melodic death metal that recalls European bands...
Only a few months after the release of the cover album Schicksalsmelodien, German Neue Deutsche Härte band Eisbrecher is back with its ninth studio album Liebe Macht Monster. The record includes fourteen brand-new tracks with a generous running time of...
Quebec's cult quartet Les Cowboys Fringants has just released a surprise record in form of Les nuits de Repentigny, honouring the group's musical, geographical and cultural origins. The generous album includes twenty-three songs with a total running time...
Gretel & Hansel is loosely based upon the German folk tale Hänsel & Grethel by the Brothers Grimm. It tells the story of an independent sister and her childish brother who leave their hometown behind to join a group of woodcutters to get some work and...
April Rain is a post-rock quartet from Saint Petersburg that has just released its eighth release in only five years with the stunning Mirror of Ether. The album includes ten songs with a total running time of fifty-nine minutes. Right from the start,...
When I first listened to this album I thought that it was a good album but the more I listened to it, the more I took the time to discover it attentively, the more I realized that this is somewhat the underrated gem in the discography of the most important...
Silver Talon is a young heavy metal sextet whose members have already played in quite a few bands such as speed metal group Spellcaster, power metal outfit Sanctifyre, thrash metal band Sabateur and gothic metal group Idle Hands. The sextet's first extended...
The album cover of Mystic Prophecy's Monuments Uncovered clearly shows that this cover album was all about having fun. It can't be compared to the band's regular outputs. As a cover album, it is overall average as it has as many weaknesses as strengths....
Fake Island is a Japanese metalcore quartet founded three years ago in Tokyo. The group released its self-entitled extended play that very same year. This release included five tracks with a total running time of eighteen minutes. This year, the group...
Perennial Quest is a power metal band from Boston that is clearly influenced by European bands and most obviously by DragonForce and its first four studio albums. Seven musicians were involved in the release of this ambitious demo that includes six songs...
Outside the Coma, formerly known as Outpatients is a British-Japanese electronic rock quintet around singers Mikee W. Goodman and Yuuri B Joux. The former is known for his work in progressive metal band SikTh while the latter is now the singer of metalcore...
The Makarrata Project is the first studio album with new material released by Australian alternative rock band Midnight Oil. It's also the last release involving bassist and backing singer Bones Hillman who died a week after the album's official release....
I was surprised to read many negative things about this live album even before it was released and when people could only listen to two singles. Some people claimed that no one needs yet another Iron Maiden live record. Others mentioned that the band...
Releasing a live album without an actual audience is a rather strange idea but then again, it fits with Katatonia's elegiac rock sounds. The Swedish quintet offers twenty songs with a total running time of just below one hour and a half. It focuses on...
Partially based upon historical events, Bernard Rose's Samurai Marathon portrays how a Japanese lord sends his men on an exhausting run to get them prepared for a potential attack by Western forces after centuries of isolation. The movie follows different...
From a House on Willow Street is a supernatural horror movie that oozes with atmosphere but comes around with a very exchangeable plot that has been used over and over again in similar ways in the horror movie genre. The film revolves around four young...
Resident Evil: The Final Chapter is the sixth and last entry in the live action franchise based upon the famous Japanese video games. To be honest, the plug should have been pulled much earlier. While the first movie has been excellent, the four sequels...
Assassination Classroom: The Graduation is the second and final part of the science-fiction live action duology that had started with Assassination Classroom one year earlier. The transition between the two movies is very fluid and it's mandatory to watch...
The Invisible Man is a psycho thriller that imagines a new version of the famous horror film character. Written and directed by Australian genre specialist Leigh Whannell who has brought us genre masterpieces such as Saw and Insidious as well as the science-fiction...
The Universal Migrator I: The Dream Sequencer Floating in Space When I bought Ayreon's double-album The Universal Migrator Part I: The Dream Sequencer and The Universal Migrator Part II: Flight of the Migrator as a teenager one and a half decades ago,...
Shinjuku Outlaw is a direct-to-video gangster movie directed by legendary Takashi Miike. This is only his eighth movie early in his career and the film doesn't have the content, effects and flow of later Yakuza masterpieces such as Shinjuku Triad Society...
Eyecatch Junction is the first official movie made by famous director Miike Takashi. Just like many of his later works, this obscure V-cinema flick from the early nineties vividly combines genres that seem to be incompatible for Western audiences. This...
Random Acts of Violence is a highly experimental low budget pseudo-documentary satire that I've picked up for three bucks some time ago. The story revolves a young adult of British origin living in New York City who is getting tired of gentrification....
Nine Inch Nails' second Ghosts record, released simultaneously with the first, third and fourth parts, looks quite similar to its predecessor on paper. Once again, we get to listen to nine tracks. The track lengths vary between one minute and a half and...
Battle of Jangsari is the second part in a loose trilogy about the Korean War that started with the brilliant Operation Chromite three years before this film. It tells the story of a group of students who only had a few days of military training that...
