by Sebastian Kluth
Omertà is inspired by a legendary French Canadian series of the same name and lives some sort of revival this summer with a quite well done feature for the cinemas. The movie convinces with gripping characters that are portrayed by some of Quebec's best...
After the somewhat lovelessly compilated "Home At Last" EP that featured three rehashed live songs, a good title track and two rather generic and powerless songs, I was a little bit secptical concerning the release of this new full length album that mostly...
The Expandables is a action super movie that puts together some of the most famous genre actors of the last decades. The movie exactly delivers what fans might expect. That's why you should not expect profound dialogues, too many romantic moments or a...
This was the record that finally put the Japanese metal pioneers Loudness on the map for the Western metal world thanks to an emblematic cover artwork, a simple but very effective album title and songs that are now entirely performed in English. Thank...
"Already Dead... But Alive!" is the debut EP of the Laval based progressive power metal band Eclipse that is now called Eclipse Prophecy. When I saw the Quebeckers in concert three years ago, they were quite ashamed when I asked them if they had put out...
OSI are an abbreviation for “Office of Strategic Influence” which was also the band’s first release nine years ago. The group is composed of the two famous Progressive Metal musicians Kevin Moore who has been in Dream Theater as well as in Fates Warning...
Artcell is a rather unkown progressive metal band from Bangladesh that has been around for far over one decade by now. Even though they might never get an international breakthrough, the band mostly skips annoying solo passages and concentrates on diversified...
Dead Mariners are a melodic symphonic black metal band with a couple of gothic and progressive influences that comes from Patan which is one of the biggest cities in Nepal. The band is comparable to other amateur bands of the same genre such as Cryptik...
After the highly promising and short appetizer in form of the well entitled “Ignition” EP, the new German Power Metal supergroup with ex-Helloween singer Michael Kiske, ex-Helloween and Gamma Ray mastermind Kai Hansen on the guitars and some background...
In the past years, I have always tried out a couple of Children Of Bodom records and came to the conclusion that the band always quite sounded the same and always included a bunch of predictable but heavily addicting party tracks on their records and...
Pantera's "Vulgar Display Of Power" is one of the most controversial releases in the whole metal genre and recently got some fresh popularity with the release of the track "Piss" that didn't make it on the original album and was released twenty years...
After the release of many legendary progressive heavy metal records with his main band Iron Maiden, Bruce Dickinson decided to stick back to his roots and to release a more grounded and honest hard rock and heavy metal album which would become his first...
The record of the band Onmyo-Za attracted me because of the stylish band photo, the unusual cover artwork and many positive experiences with diversified, stunning and sometimes surreal Japanese metal bands from classic groups such as Loudness or X Japan...
After the stunning first full length record "Shade Of Fate", the Bulgarian progressive metal band Pantommind didn't only try to copy its first album but tried out a couple of new things on this second album. While this progression seems very positive...
This super-band power metal project featuring for the first time in nearly twenty-four years a collaboration of the two Helloween masterminds Kai Hansen and Michael Kiske delivers everything European power metal stands for. This first output features...
Powervice are one of many retro heavy metal bands that are clearly influenced by the hard rock and emerging heavy metal music of the late seventies and the early eighties. They are as solid as genre colleagues such as Bullet, Vanderbuyst, White Wizzard...
During the last years, X Japan have more and more shifted away from their powerful power and speed metal roots and created more and more complex rock opera symphonies that highlighted with the release of the twenty-nine minute masterpiece "Art Of Life"....
I have never been a big fan of Rhapsody Of Fire because I thought that their early works included to many fast and hectic tracks and a lot of useless bombast and silly orchestrations. On "Triumph Or Agony", the Italians reduced their speed and focused...
Only two years after the band's very strong self titled album, the American extreme metal legends come back with a shorter record called "Abzu" that reminds a lot of the previous output. The cover artwork is as great, the album and song title structures...
Seeds Of Iblis play a very interesting kind of raw underground black metal with harsh but also very atmospheric vocals and some dark spiritual chants. The four songs on their most important release to date are all quite short, intense and surprisingly...
I discovered this exotic band from Tunisia with a song from their second album last year on a sampler included in the normally pretty weak British Metal Hammer magazine but I forgot to check them out. With the release of their new third record, I remembered...
Permanent Waves is one of the most accessible and commercial records that Rush ever made and I don't mean that in a negative way. The brilliant opening double pack "The Spirit Of Radio" and "Freewill" are catchy and easy to listen to but contain still...
NewOldLive sounds indeed somewhat old and seems to present some filler material from the early days of the ambitious Senmuth project. Some tracks are reworked versions from previous records, others are mediocre bonus tracks and we don't get the high quality...
Metallica's legendary "Master Of Puppets" is without the glimpse of a doubt a record any true metal maniac should sooner or later have in his or her collection. Without questioning the great status of this record, I must though admit that the record has...
"Le Grand Guignol" is the name of a famous theatre in Paris that is known for its grisly horror shows and also the name of this outstanding avant-garde metal band from the beautiful Luxembourg. In comparison to other avant-garde bands like Adversus, UneXpect...
