What I’m about to say could be taken either as an insult to the genre or the band, depending on what fence you’re on, but I promise it’s neither; Rotting sounds like if Grindcore was regular music.

Fist of all, almost all the songs here are above 2 minutes (with two clocking in over 5!). They all have various sections, with bridges and repeated verses. The drumming has a great amount of variety, rather simple but very effectively utilizing many different beat patterns found in extreme metal. Even the bass is audible! The songs sound like fully constructed and realized passages of music rather than short snippets of maniacal, unrelenting aggression.

Even the tempo is all over the place, with plenty of stereotypical Deathgrind pummeling, but also slow and heavy grooves. This thing has a ton of crushing weight at all times, and that helps it stand out. The bassiness and emphasis on the rhythm section are combined with a dense production job to make this thing feel like an aural slab of concrete. Whereas most Grindcore is manic and fleeting, these songs are a lasting assault, like slowly being beaten to death via a crude battering weapon.

The biggest weakness here is in the guitar riffs. With so much emphasis on the low end of the sound, individual notes can be difficult to discern, and higher notes are pushed way under the wall of sludgy sound. Most of the riffs stick exclusively to a few very low notes, and that makes them quite monotonous. Better lead guitar work would make this a masterpiece in the genre, but unfortunately they fall flat in what is one of the most important aspects of Metal music.

Quite plainly, one of my personal favorite albums ever released. Despite that, I have trouble finding the right words to paint such a picture. If you’ve heard the album, it speaks for itself. If you haven’t yet heard it…

Imagine your world has just been shattered. Not in any vague sense, no – the person you care about and trust most in the whole world has just betrayed you. Initially you feel intense, stabbing pain; the world as you knew it is no more. Your vulnerable, unguarded heart takes the full brunt of the blow from the one you least expected to ever hurt you. Or, maybe you always knew. The pain sets, stays, and eats away at all you are.

Then the implications set in. If the person you cared about most in the whole world betrayed you, how can you trust anyone? How can you trust yourself? It was you who let your guard down around them, after all. Anxiety. Pain. Insanity. Pain. Paranoia. Pain. A desire to escape, by any means necessary…

Then comes the anger, the hate. They did this to you. They should be the one suffering for this. You’d love a chance to pay that back. You dare, you hope for them to make another mistake and give you any excuse.

But as time passes, memories remain. And there were so many good memories. There was love, once. Flashes of passion and genuine feeling come back, and once more the unavoidable pain starts again. It hurts because you loved them. It still hurts because a part of you still loves a part of them.

Regret. Genuine, existential regret. One of the worst feelings a human can feel. What have you lost? What have you become? Could things have gone differently? Is it your fault? Can you have one more chance?

Eventually, there is acceptance. It is the only way to carry on. But this isn’t exactly a happy ending. It’s simply s transition that allows time to keep moving. Flashes of everything still hit. The toll of the experience still weighs heavy. An unfortunate shade of misanthropy might persist. But one must keep living, and moving forward. An “It is what it is” and a carrying on towards destiny.

Breaking from that, the only weakness here is the title track, which doesn’t fit with the theme, mood, sound, or anything at all really. It’s fine on its own, but far below the quality and power of the rest of the album.

After the monumental Brave Murder Day, which quickly established itself as the greatest and most depressing Doom Metal release yet, Katatonia decided to follow it up by moving in a slightly different direction. Still insanely doomy, still walling you with the same shoegazy chords, but now the sound is more accessible. Gone are the demonic death growls, the assaulting double bass, and any tie to extreme Metal.

Replacing them are purely clean vocals and a focus on verse-chorus format. Jonas doesn’t push his voice too far here, instead opting for a lethargic, depressive croon. The songs are simple and rhythmic even, adding to the hypnotic nature of the gazy guitars.

The result of this odd direction is… well, just about as depressive and pessimistic as music can possibly get without creeping into extreme territory. All of the ingredients mesh stunningly to craft a much more accessible serving of catatonia. Lethargic apathy is the surface face here, a numb shell of what’s left after one is encased with pessimism. However, the shell is constantly threatening to shatter as it struggles to hold back the outpour of emotions underneath. Jonas very perfectly treads the fine line between total apathy and intense pain, letting inflections slip through his voice to indicate the intense amount of emotion being restrained by the defense mechanism of not caring.

Another masterpiece from the band that still shakes me and never fails to put a frown on my face.

And Death’s nearly flawless discography comes to a close. The band had been advancing in progressive technicality with each album, and it culminates in their most complicated and impressive album yet.

The Sound of Perseverance, like the album cover portrays, was a monumental mountain of insane musicianship and songwriting. The guitar leads are neoclassical at times, weaving up and down scales of melodies, while the rhythm guitar is more rhythmic than before, opting for a more progressive chug. The rhythm section itself is slightly less aggressive, focusing on complicated polyrhythms even more than before. And of course, Chuck changes his vocal approach to a more high-pitched shriek, switching distinctly from a type 2 to a type 3 metal scream. It’s definitely the most difference in sound found on a new Death album.

For the most part, the album is the same incredible quality, and again, the musicianship here is just mind-bendingly good. However, this is the first Death album where I feel the band falls a bit into the “too-progressive metal” style. Songs still feature incredible, memorable riffing, but I do feel a little is lost by focusing on technicality a bit too much. Still, Death is less guilty of this than most Tech Death acts, and the album remains a fantastic swansong for the band.

Blind Guardian’s first full on epic concept album exclusively focused on Middle-Earth lore, and this one seemed to be a breakthrough for them. Overall, the style is a bit softer, focusing more on varied instrumentation (folk and classical acoustics, as well as some keys) and hyper anthemic gang vocal choruses. Power Metal is still the core here, but it’s more progressive and less aggressive, and plenty of songs stray from the genre entirely.

The meat of the album is very strong, compelling, passionate and catchy. The concept story is an added bonus, but the music is plenty entertaining without it, and the tracks totally stand on their own. Despite this, I will say it’s decidedly less to my taste than their more aggressive fare.

In order to make the album flow more like a story, Blind Guardian added short spoken word interludes between almost every track, and I gotta say… I do not think that was the play. The 11 regular tracks are great, but the TWENTY TWO total tracks just makes this ridiculously hard to listen to front to back. It also makes the album very difficult to rate. The main tracks are top quality as usual, but the segues are boring and ruin the flow. Unfortunately I cannot simply ignore them, and they make this probably my least favorite release they had done at the time.