There's something odd about Anneke van Giersbergen. I keep hearing her name tossed around next to acts like Napalm Death, Moonspell and Within Temptaion, and I've heard her collaborations with other artists scores of times. And yet I've never heard what her solo music sounds like. Let me tell you, I wasn't expecting an alternarock album when I first played Everything is Changing, but after hearing Giersbergen strip away her usual aggressive metal backing, I can definitely say the results are far from disappointing.Being a very straightforward album, the melodies are overwhelmingly fun and heavily pop-influenced, yet her music is…read more

Holy shit.Let me put the rest of this review in context. The day I discovered post-metal was the day I was told to listen to Isis' seminal album Oceanic. For an hour I could do nothing but sit still and listen in awe to such beauty. It started my long-standing interest in the genre, though to this day no album has made quite a strong an impact on me as that one.So when I tell you that Omega Massif's album Karpatia is the second most satisfying album I have ever heard in this genre, don't take that as an insult.…read more

Steven Wilson is a man of many talents--and more than three dozen of them are just different ways of making music. Though he's known mostly for his more complex work, his progressive conquests all take a side seat for a moment as he again sits down with Aviv Geffen on the third album from his pop rock project Blackfield, titled Welcome to My DNA.Though Blackfield is, on the surface, dedicated to the art of the perfect 3-minute pop song, all of the songs nonetheless have this floaty, art-rock quality to them that you don't hear particularly often. Sure, with all…read more