Thornafire - Exacerbated Gnostic Manifestation Audio CD

Initial Pressings of 50,000 Copies Will Contain 2 Bonus Tracks And Sticker. South Carolina's Nile have done a nice job setting themselves apart from the extreme metal pack. For 14 years and counting, the group has carried on its tradition of technical musicianship suited with unique lyrics inspired by an odd obsession with ancient Egyptian culture, history, and mythology. It's an odd combination, but it works. And ITHYPHALLIC (their fifth full-length, and first for Nuclear Blast) is a representative heap of the band's savagely good thinking-man's death metal. Personnel: Chris Lollis (vocals); Dallas Toler-Wade, Karl Sanders (vocals, guitar); George Kollias (drums). Audio Mixer: Neil Kernon.

In the five years between their debut album and Here in After, Immolation refined their creative vision into something more than a blend of their influences. This is an album of pure death metal, while earlier efforts still contained significant components of the thrash metal sound of the 1980s. The bending, winding pinch harmonic riffs that characterized Dawn of Possession are still abundant, but songs are now much more complex and harmonically dense. Rather than defining melody through single-string tremolo-picking, Immolation prefer a more rhythmic sense of composition. Dissonant chords are repeatedly used as emphasis over blastbeats, before everything slows to a gloomy crawl. A ...

Exacerbated Gnostic Manifestation album Norwegian metal icon Tchort has been a fixture on the scene for a while now, but his newest project, Blood Red Throne, may well represent the most fully realized metal of his career. Their new album, COME DEATH, is certainly appropriately named, as the band dishes out a healthy serving of classic death metal and nothing but. Song titles such as "Rebirth in Blood," "Guttural Screams," and "Another Kill" tell the listener exactly what to expect. Bludgeoning riffs combine with drums at once nimble and crushing to deliver a brutal punch to the solar plexus, and surprisingly soulful vocals tell a story of blood and godlessness. ...

Exacerbated Gnostic Manifestation songs The Undercurrent is a thunderous and futuristic set of heavy metal from the (decidedly un-scarily named) French band Scarve, who have been described as "new age" heavy metalists. Despite that description, there is a lot here that is typical of the dark metal genre: growling vocals, martial drum batteries, and storm clouds of guitar. The dark cacophony of "Endangered" is straight-ahead modern death metal, but "The Plundered," with its high-speed expanding and contracting rhythms and wheeling guitar dynamics, hints at something more exciting (and perhaps puts the "new age" into the band's new age metal). Overall, this is a strong collection of versatile metal, and particular ...