Several years in the making, Orphaned Land's The Never Ending Way of OrwarriOR is an ambivalent success. More than anything, the latest albu...

Despite all the intricate arrangements and complicated shifts, Ihsahn's (ex-Emperor) After is a sparse record. It's the kind of sparseness t...

With each record, Ontario's Woods of Ypres become more enigmatic, and Woods 4: The Green Album is the band's most amorphous and powerful cre...

Minneapolis/St. Paul doesn’t seem like a pagan metal Mecca, yet for three years running pilgrims from all over North America have made the t...

After severing music industry chains and laying Ewigkeit to rest, James Fogarty is back with a new assault on ignorance and complacency unde...

Never having been a fan of Tarja Turunen (or really, for that matter, Nightwish), I didn’t approach the debut of new vocalist Anette Olzon w...

Deep vocals and thick guitar riffs make goth rock the dominant flavour as the Vision Bleak’s latest album gets underway. Intensity, speed an...

I wish I liked this record better. Aerolithe has lots to recommend, from goth rock to metal "oomph,” melodic flair and progressive complexit...

Four records into the band’s career, Ave End finds the members of Lacrimas Profundere well settled on the doom rock path begun on their last...

Therion’s latest monster manages to be refreshing as well as unmistakeable, utterly familiar but thoroughly unpredictable. Classic riffs and...

Extreme metal and Middle Eastern melodies are logical companions (as at least two decades of metal history have proven), so it’s not surpris...

Destination: Oblivion have established a pattern of alternating full-length albums and remix CDs over the band’s relatively brief existence...

Cradle of Filth have gone heavy metal, and strangely enough, it works. There are clear glimpses of "the band that were” on Thornography but...

The promo material for Pulse describes SpiRitual as an "ethno metal project” and it’s an appropriate, if inadequate, description. The "easte...

Recorded before Riverside’s most recent album, Second Life Syndrome, this EP is only now seeing official release. Voices in My Head takes th...

Swarming up from a pit of stygian depths, Of Entropy and Life Denial is hypnotically vile, an undeniable testament to Merrimack’s ferocity a...

Ashes Against the Grain begins with a slow progression of piercing sustained tones, but after its first few seconds the album takes a more u...

When Apocalyptica first came out with an album of Metallica songs played on four cellos it seemed unlikely that this was anything but a nove...

Compared to the band that released 2003’s Sufferion — Hamartia of Prudence, Silentium have become masters of their art. Seducia is very much...

Benedictum’s debut record roars like the choppers in the band’s promo shots, a lava-blasting volcano of classic heavy metal with contemporar...