Squalus – The Great Fish

Bass, drums, keyboards, and vocals. Those are the building blocks of California experimental death metal band Squalus. Their debut album, The Great Fish, walks the line between death and doom metal, with a lot of atmospheric tendencies, some sludge, and synthwave, I guess, into a somehow cohesive whole. Bass-driven metal acts are not a new thing by any means, but there are many pitfalls on the way to make them interesting and appealing, into which many of the contenders inadvertently get trapped. Two of the most obvious ones are the frequency range and the timbral diversity. Squalus hopefully … Read more

Art the Band – Snacks

I’ve written a line or two about Toronto’s Art the Band, last year, when I found out about their full-length, Boost Unavailable. I was impressed and awed by it, so it’s with great anticipation and matching expectations that I’ve approached their most recent release, the Snacks EP. I wasn’t aware that it was coming, so I was surprised, and, upon listening to it, was once again surprised. I have to say that I didn’t exactly recall what Art the Band was about, but Snacks quickly corrected this. The first and “Big Track” is a pretty standard jazz … Read more

Wobbler – From Silence to Somewhere

Wobbler is a Norwegian progressive rock band that’s younger than it sounds. On October 20, they will release their fourth full-length album, From Silence to Somewhere, and it seems lifted straight out of the golden age of progressive rock. The Canterbury sound is quite apparent in this there eclectic, there symphonic monument of an album. The eponymous megalith opening this four-track record covers a wide range of the progressive rock of the late sixties and seventies. Rarely – if ever – do we smell the faintest fragrance of modernism in this musical anachronism. Organs, flutes, – did I hear … Read more

II II II – Frequency Illusion



Leeds-based mathcore one-man band [reference needed] II II II (read “two two two”) released their debut album, A Conundrum on My Coffee Table, which we adored, back in 2012. Fast forward four or five years, and they share some work-in-progress demos on their facebook page, stating that they were looking for a new vocalist. Without it being announced officially, they found one! The name hasn’t leaked yet, but the voice remains in the same vein as before. Well, here we are now: we received an advanced digital copy of Frequency Illusion, coming out on September 22. What is … Read more