CD

Line up:

Jan Anders “Longbeard” Boen – Lead Vocals, Lars Stian “Too Late” Havraas – Bass, John Petter “No Thanks” Pershaug – Guitars, Geir Arne “The Cannon” Dale – Drums, Vidar “Maniac” Svanheld – Guitars

Carnifex is an American deathcore band from San Diego, California. Formed in 2005, they are currently signed to Nuclear Blast after having been signed to Victory Records and have released four full-length albums and one EP. The name of the band is derived from the Old English Latin word äúexecutioner; literally meaning, "executioner".

Hum...no info supplied with the promo copy we got of this album, so all I got to go on was whatever info I could find on the “net”...which isn't that much either (in fact, much of the info gathered below comes from already published reviews I found)!

Despite a huge variety within the first and last efforts, I have always appreciated The Wounded Kings’ Doom a lot. Both first albums (Embrace Of The Narrow House and The Shadows Over Atlantis), as well as In The Chapel Of The Black Hand, do belong to my favourite Doom albums in the year they had respectively been released (i.e. 2008, 2010 and 2011). When it comes to the latter, it was the first one with a new vocalist, a female one this time.

Dutch horde Sammath was formed about two decades ago by Jan Kruitwagen. After a couple of demonstrational cassettes, Sammath joined forces with Folter Records, which did release four full lengths. I do appreciate every single one of them for its primitivism and nihilism, the underground attitude and the anti-trendy approach.

Kamchatka is from Sweden and their bluesy stoner on The Search Goes On seems like it would transfer very well to a live performance.

Although Kamchatka doesn't add an entirely new flavor to a familiar genre, they do a more than fine job of it. The song writing is sharp and snappy and the performance is spot on.  My only complaint about this CD, their fifth already, is that the vocals are pretty one-dimensional and change very little from track to track. Then again, that's a standard trait of the stoner genre.

The straight in yr face- thrash metal meets hardcore songwriting is very aggressive and the Montreal band focuses entirely on just making hopeless youth music.

Something of a surprise from the Czech scene, Cult of Fire mix some notable ferociousness of their own into the typical black metal formula.

When talking / thinking about the Extreme Metal scene, we’re used to focus on the scenes from Europe, America (both North and South), and ‘modern’ parts of the Pacific (New Zealand, Australia, Japan and Singapore more specifically). However, more than once I got in touch with a release from a band that comes from a mostly ‘unusual’ country. I can enlist an impressive amount of bands, but I will not.

Blaze, not be confused with  the once  Wolfsbane, Iron Maiden,  and  Blaze  main man Blaze Bayley, no sir  no,  these 4 youngsters hail from Japan, and  with the EP  the rock dinosaur  they provide us a really good slab of very old school hard rock/ Metal,  in  this case not so much  influenced by  the known  NWOBHM stars of the early 80 ear like  Maiden,  Saxon or Priest,  but rather   influenced by UFO, old scorpions and MSG.