If there's anything movies have taught us, it's that sequels almost always suck in comparison to the original. While there aren't nearly as many sequels in the musical world, occasionally an artist will go back and revisit one of the ideas that made them famous in the first place. In almost all of these cases, such as with Mike Oldfield's endless Tubular Bells reinterpretations, the final product winds up, for lack of a better term, blowing. It languishes as a pale imitation of the original, merely a failed attempt to recapture one's own past greatness. But then, on that rare…read more

Spain's Looking For An Answer have been around long enough that to play grind is generally to be compared to those who have come before you and possibly just be forgotten by all but the people who are devout listeners. What tends to set the band apart is a defined addition of more tempo changes and death metal related parts. That is not to forget their primary purpose: fury and speed, which the band has in spades.So this, their 3rd full length and first for Relapse, comes with some anticipation as this is probably the first look most of the…read more

“THEY PLAYED ‘ZOZOBRA’! THEY PLAYED ‘ZOZOBRA’!” Thank you for allowing me to get that out of my system as the shock of seeing Old Man Gloom resume the gloom only just recently is still fresh and firmly entrenched in my mind, and seeing as my wait to see the Old Man Gloom Institute for Simian Research has been much more than a decade in the making, reveling in the moment is something that I am still savoring with each memory (and the show was chock full of great moments such as their playing “Rape Athena” and the aforementioned “Zozobra”); while…read more