about a hard rock/metal band's debut (with a decent music video)

This band sounds like it will steal your tools

The band photo shows three guys wearing ugly masks, studded arm bracers, and chain mail as they pose, let's say, in the side yard of someone’s wood-shingled duplex in Nassau County, New York. With those costumes, you’d be forgiven for lowering your expectations. But Rotgut’s debut, “24 oz Cantrip,” features five songs of excellent, heavy rock n’ roll amped up with death metal, black metal, and thrash influences.

Opening song “Bonemelter” is fine—thick guitars with hot leads, bass and drums tight as hell, and good momentum.

But I took interest in the EP when I heard “The Hunger.” Rollicking from the first, the song’s fast thrash riffs burn amphetamine energy. This sounds like driving with your eyes closed, racing down the freeway shoulder, sending cars spinning in all directions.

“24 oz Cantrip” isn’t beer-bash partier thrash. Rotgut trends darker. The single, posted below, is “Return of the Dead Without Eyes.” Just get passed the group-shout chorus and focus instead on the splashy cymbals after 1:25 and thereafter as the song revels in black-metal-influenced passages. It wraps with beautiful patience at about 3:20 with an inspired payoff led by the vocals, “Blood of the maiden, blood of the priest, blood of the mason, blood of the thief / A beggar to Caesar, a flame to the cloth, sixes in triplicate, salt to the north / A clarion call to the dead without eyes to lead us to darkness and swallow the skies!”

I love the agile bass on this album. It's always on the offensive. It looms and lifts the whole composition.

The album goes by fast. The songs, each 3 or 4 minutes long, make for a loud and enjoyably intense listen. The music sounds a little like The Crown, Midnight, and, at a vast distance, Converge. The Seattle-based band self-released “24 oz Cantrip” on streaming platforms June 20th, 2025.

Those costumes are a fun, cheap way to get your attention. But this band’s sound deserves to hold it.

 

 

a quick review of a crossover punk band from Salt Lake City

Deathblow’s new EP offers more tall-guzzling thrash metal

I reviewed Deathblow’s three-song EP “Rotten Trajectory” in 2023. Those denim-and-high-tops songs sounded mosh-ready. The new EP, “Open Season,” tries to pick up where they left off.

The title track starts with some head-nodding hardcore, then steps into a fast punk-rock chord progression 40 seconds in. A textbook sound.

My favorite song is “Tormentor.” It attacks from the get-go with a rapid-picking riff. The song has a little of the old, nourishing energy heard in much of their 2023 release. And thrown in for the bargain is a hot little lead after the first verse.

But, man, the singer falls on his face trying to hit a high note at 50 seconds. I’d hate to hear the vocal tracks that didn’t make the cut.

The good news is “Open Season” includes some tidy thrash and punk compositions.

But the effort overall lacks inspiration. The music too often sounds rote.

The Salt Lake City band released the EP June 16, 2025, on Sewer Mouth Records.

a poem about making music

Mid-40s, playing guitar

 

Dissonance and distortion hid subtlety
And, subtly, dissonance and distortion hid
I got old, and I believed I would
But did not feel it until it happened
Music roams

  home roams never to mine
Now I have no sound other than
  what the sound is
    of passing time

 

a review of some other dumb band

Wild Beyond bargains with a lying, writhing serpent of thrashy black metal. The band pursues chaos and finds itself in a lovely mess on its self-titled debut.

The opener, “In the Footsteps of Mars,” is exemplary: the guitar crashes ahead and the cymbal stands teeter as the bass shakes the burning ground under your feet. Everything in a frenzy, everything in constant motion.

The Goddamn thing is reckless.

“Detonation of Secret Works” shows the same disregard for safety. I found its manic, climbing riffs inventive and colorful. The vocal crawls between growls, snarls, and wretches, leaning more toward black metal than death.

Songs do relent, but only between all the dungeon-defiling cutting and squealing.

And the band will explore. “Frenzied at the Skull” almost recalls classic British metal. On "Antichrist Coronation," the maniacal drumming momentarily loses touch with the guitars, losing each other in the dark they create.

The album remains dynamic through its eight songs. Some moments lack inspiration, and some songs perhaps go too long. But what beeswax can long withstand the heat of the sun?

This Philadelphia trio took shape amid peak 2020 covid. "Wild Beyond" was released April 14, 2023, on Gates of Hell Records.

 

another overly generous review—this time of an Italian death metal band's debut

The influences are classic, but new life runs through these veins

 

Miscreance debut a heavily and colorfully barbed wire of sound on Convergence. The opener “Flame of Consciousness” represents the album well—pointy riffs, deft musicianship, roaring vocals, impatient songwriting, slips of atmospheric interludes, and wildly smooth guitar solos.

 

Forty-two seconds into the second song, “Fall Apart,” a studded few moments of rapid double-bass drumming carry a ready-fire riff. Ten seconds later, the riff changes, and the throat opens up, roaring verbal warfare. And at 3 minutes the mood falls into the young dawn with a guitar solo rising in gorgeous tone.

 

“My Internment” opens with a staircase-climbing dual-guitar riff over a hokey and fun deep voice-over, but from atop the stairs come some of the album’s best vocals—raw, animalistic—enough to terrorize the neighborhood. And at 3:00, Miscreance finally finds a riff that can move you, and the band plays out the song.

 

The young Italians' white-high-top metal recalls genre pioneers Death. Miscreance also cites Atheist and Sadus as influences. But this young band is fresh. The only issue with Convergence is that, over and again on the album, the fun stops as quickly as it starts, and at times it seems no riff is too small.

 

The band issued a demo called From Awareness to Creation in 2018 and put three tracks on a split with Australia’s Vile Creation last November. Convergence was released September 19, 2022, in three formats via Unspeakable Axe Records, Danex Records, and Desert Wastelands Productions. The band plans to tour Europe with Chilean band Ripper in 2023.

 

some "content" about an album from a Canadian death and thrash band

Besieged returns twelve years later

The engine is flooded with death metal and thrash, and because of that you can smell Violence Beyond All Reason. The new album from Besieged burns from track one with blink-and-you-miss-it atonal solos, spitfire chord changes, barking vocals and guitars, and hyper-driven drums.

“Paragons Of Brutality” opens with drum fills that fall into a groove before slam-dancing from riff to riff. This sound is part of the legacy of the classic Florida-based band, Death. The old way’s piss-stain spread shows darker on “Path to Defy,” where the band tries to piece together pit-bull bites. And drums first lead the attack and then hold back on “Descent into Despotism.”

Powder-flecked riffs spill from pockets and socks, and left turns blur into oncoming traffic.

Besieged started around 2010 in Winnipeg, Manitoba. Twelve years somehow passed between the band’s debut, Victims Beyond All Help, and now. The sound is a mix of progenitor Death and Bay-area thrash. The songs sometimes lack flow, and the drums can sound canned as the mix buries the bass and cymbals, but the guitar is a self-cutter and this album is wild.

Unspeakable Axe Records releases Violence Beyond All Reason June 6, 2022.

 

something about another metal album

Progressive death and thrash band Cathartic Demise burn like a welding torch on the calculating new album, In Absence. But the band’s sound is not especially violent. Cathartic Demise are builders, not warriors.

The album sounds more like death metal than thrash—and more like death metal than prog, even though many songs top seven minutes. Like “Pale Imitations,” which goes almost eight. It opens with a poured-syrup guitar riff. That riff gets double-guitared for the harmony. The band uses dual-guitar harmonies throughout to find center, and these moments root the album in a metal tradition. At one minute into “Pale Imitations,” the drums and bass guitar join in, sound-tracking a death march. Then a counterpoint guitar line threatens the pace, so the tempo picks up until the band is at full blast. Rich, atmospheric, melodic sections with layers of guitars pile into the song’s latter moments. The last two minutes sound almost buoyant, and the song finally passes in the blurred reflection of melody.

Cathartic Demise put out its first release in April 2019, a self-titled EP. Today, this Ontario band releases In Absence independently. I listen to it now and hear all these wonderful metal influences. The musicianship is superior and the production is very good—a compliment to proficiency. And how could you not accept a sound so proficient?