01. Lifetime - IV 02. Birth (Devils Whisper) 03. Hurricanes Of Madness 04. Rebirth 05. Lifetime V-XVIII 06. Dreams Of Reality 07. On My Way 08. Lifetime XIX

ChaosStar are another unsigned band which I scooped off a forum who heil from Slovenia. In their band biography they describe themselves as sounding a lot like Dream Theater with death/thrash elements in it. ‘Well even from first listen of this album, you can definately see why they say that’. Lifetime is an album with 14 minute long tracks that go beyond just basic keyboard solo’s and bland guitar riffs. It’s the kind of album which takes 2 genres of music and crosses it together to turn it into something awsome. ‘Just like mixing chocolate and chips’. So hang on tight folks, because ChaosStar have brought us a full force album.
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01. Stressed Elephant 08:18 02. Fear Cave 06:46 03. Melody, This Is For You 08:37 04. Two-Day Booze 05:07 05. Die of Devotion 05:07 06. Take The Next Exit 05:18 07. Wendigo Pt. 3 (Let Him Burn) 7:34

Bison B.C. are a metal band hailing from British Columbia, Canada. In fact, the B.C. in their name actually stands for British Columbia, added by Metal Blade records in case they get confused with other bands called Bison. It’s a fitting sort of suffix, however; Bison make a noise that’s kind of primeval, cave-man music. In a good way; music to club your enemies to. Well, sort of, anyway…as listening to ‘Dark Ages’, the band’s third album, confirms, putting a neat tag on Bison B.C. is a difficult although fascinating task.

Honestly, it’s bloody hard to pin Bison down; they’re a band that defy pigeonholing. It’s almost tempting to refer to them as being a progressive band; frankly, that’s a tag that’s going to be hard to avoid when you consider that the album features just seven songs, many of which span seven or eight minutes, and which feature a range of instruments including keyboards, piano, and even what sounds like a French horn in the intro to opener “Stressed Elephant”. However, at the same time, there’s something fundamentally unpretentious about Bison’s music - despite the length of the songs and the range of instrumentation, their approach is relatively honest and simple, just balls-to-the-wall, uncompromisingly heavy music.
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01. Holy Smokes 03:42 02. Fast Women 03:21 03. The Long Arm of the Law 02:26 04. Beer Today, Bong Tomorrow 05:03 05. Runnin’ Reds 02:46 06. Medium Rare 02:58 07. Brohemoth 06:28 08. Half Past Haggard 03:10 09. Wizard Island 05:09 10. Tremors 03:54 11. Old Habits 01:43

Barn Burner hail from Montreal, Canada, and the first hint about their music comes from the fact they refer to it as “Bongtreal”. Way to peg yourselves in the stoner metal bracket, guys. The hairy four-piece formed in 2007 and were gigging up a storm all across North America until they caught the attention of Metal Blade records, who signed them up for the release of their debut album ‘Bangers’ in 2009. Well, international re-release, technically, but let’s not get bogged down in semantics…that certainly wouldn’t be the Barn Burner spirit.

Yup, Barn Burner are definitely stoner metal, as is kind of underlined by song titles like “Holy Smoke” and “Beer Today, Bong Tomorrow”, but there’s something a little bit NWOBHM about their high-speed dual-guitar assault. It’s kind of like Fu Manchu meets Iron Maiden, which (for me, at least) is about as tantalising a mix as you could come up with.
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01. Shamayim 01:53 02. Firmament 07:29 03. The First Commandment of the Luminaries 06:47 04. Ptolemy Was Wrong 06:28 05. Metaphysics of the Hangman 05:41 06. Catharsis of a Heretic 02:08 07. Swallowed by the Earth 04:59 08. Epiphany 03:21 09. The Origin of Species 07:23 10. The Origin of God 04:33

I’ve heard a lot of interesting things about The Ocean. Their origins lie in The Ocean Collective, a small army of creative types that founder and guitarist Robin Staps set up in the basement of an old aluminium factory in Berlin. They’ve been through 30-40 members, and have toured all over the world supporting the likes of Opeth and Cult of Luna. Their biography is so complex that you actually have to download it in a Word document from their website…I could go on for hours. The most important fact for right now, though, is that they’ve just released their fourth studio album, ‘Heliocentric’.

Frankly, the only way to “get” what The Ocean are really about, is to take a listen to their music. ‘Heliocentric’ is…well, it’s ambitious. It’s a simply mad album. It’s got a little bit of just about everything, from orchestral-backed jazz piano to double-bass drumming and growled death vocals. It’s sort of like a marriage between Opeth and The Mars Volta, at least in terms of vision and sheer manic ambition. It’s hard to sum up the scope of the album as a whole, really, so let’s go track-by-track…
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01. Farewell, Mona Lisa 05:23 02. Good Neighbor 02:30 03. Gold Teeth on a Bum 05:22 04. Crystal Morning 02:02 05. Endless Endings 02:32 06. Widower 06:23 07. Room Full of Eyes 04:15 08. Chinese Whispers 04:06 09. I Wouldn’t If You Didn’t 04:14 10. Parasitic Twins 04:39

Ah, Dillinger Escape Plan. Even the mere name of the New Jersey mathcore nutcases can inspire fear and awe. ‘Operation Paralysis’, the band’s fourth full-length album, confirms but one thing we had always suspected; if there’s one thing you can expect from Dillinger, it’s the unexpected.

I mean, there are the familiar Dillinger hallmarks in there; the baffling key signatures and utterly insane levels of technicality, the frankly intimidating breakneck thrash-attacks. But ‘Operation Paralysis’ sees Dillinger run much further with the melodic side of their music. Even in opener “Farewell, Mona Lisa”, after a couple of minutes of frankly mad musical terror, Greg Puciato is crooning something halfway comprehensible over a clean, picked guitar line. There’s a clean chorus weaving a lyrical stream through the madness, even when it returns with a vengeance.
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01. Snakes for the Divine 08:23 02. Frost Hammer 06:07 03. Bastard Samurai 06:37 04. Ghost Neck 05:01 05. The Path 01:20 06. Fire, Flood and Plague 06:08 07. How Dark We Pray 08:06 08. Holy Flames of the Fire Spitter 04:13

It’s hard to believe that it’s coming up on three years since the last High on Fire album was released. That founder, guitarist and vocalist Matt Pike takes this long to produce an album is always going to instill a note of fear in his fans, most of whom are still traumatised by the saga of “Dopesmoker”. Pike’s old band, stoner metal legends Sleep, attempted to release “Dopesmoker” in 1995, but it didn’t see the light of day until eight years later, by which time the band had long since broken up. Pike has actually been busy with a Sleep reunion in the last year or so, but fear not, High on Fire devotees: “Snakes for the Divine” has actually been released, at long last!

Notably, “Snakes for the Divine” was produced by Greg Fidelman, famed for his peerless work on Slayer’s “World Painted Blood” and Metallica’s “Death Magnetic”, when he rescued both of those legendary bands from sounding like nu-metal ponces. He’s once again gone for the crisp, precise, dry kind of sound he brought to those albums, so it’s a slight departure from the explosive High on Fire sound we all know and love. However, if you take a moment to get used to it, this new style actually works really very well.
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01. Express Death 06:59 02. Pyramids 06:46 03. Paper Walls 05:48 04. He Dives Down 06:56 05. Terra Incognita 09:04 06. Lucky Me, Lucky You 04:14 07. Super Globe Of Pain 06:27 08. The Electric Hour 05:17

I’ll get it out of the way right from the start - Switch Opens are a Swedish metal band. Yeah, I know, you’re probably scuttling for cover toward the stereotype of all those identical ‘Gothenburg scene’ melodic death metal bands…but fear not. To start with, Switch Opens are from Stockholm, some 300 miles away from Gothenburg. And when it comes to metal, their sound too is a comparable distance away.

No, this isn’t another melodeath screamathon. To be honest, I’m not entirely sure what it is. It’s really quite fascinating to dream up a list of Switch Opens’ probable influences while listening through this album - they create a haze of fuzz that screams Kyuss, but some of their riffs sound more rooted in Southern Metal, with the likes of Down or Corrosion of Conformity. Their down ’n’ dirty groove kind of puts you in mind of Motörhead, albeit a more doomy Motörhead, maybe on Valium…and on top of that, they appear to share a name with a Soundgarden song. Putting all of that together, I suppose, makes this seem like the work of hairy stoners.
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01. Set Guitars To Kill 05:29 02. A Little Bit Of Solidarity Goes A Long Way 03:25 03. Clench Fists, Grit Teeth…Go! 06:19 04. Capture Castles 07:17 05. Start A Band 04:53 06. Tip Of The Hat, Punch In The Face 04:21 07. If It Ain’t Broke…Break It 06:21 08. These Riots Are Just The Beginning 4:48 09. Don’t Waste Time Doing Things You Hate 07:31 10. The Voiceless 6:27 11. Eat The City, Eat It Whole 07:35

Hey, you. Ever heard of a band from Northern Ireland called ‘And So I Watch You From Afar’? I suppose it might be unlikely, but they’ve been making something of a name for themselves with their early releases and various bombastic live performances. Kerrang! actually claimed that “they can do nothing wrong”, and a host of other publications from NME to Metal Hammer have lined up to sing their praises. Not bad, really, for a progressive instrumental outfit from Belfast…and frankly, all of the praise they’ve been attracting is entirely merited.

After recording two EPs, ’This Is Our Machine And Nothing Can Stop It’ and ’Tonight The City Burns’, their self-titled debut was released in April 2009 by Smalltown America Records, the independent label run by fellow Brit post-rock proggers Jetplane Landing. And yet, I’ve only just noticed it. My bad.
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01. White Willow 06:28 02. Down Memory Lane 03:58 03. Lakeside Park 05:36 04. 3rd Type 07:23 05. Near Death Experience 01:46 06. Lost Ghost 06:16 07. Dragged 06:04 08. O.B.E 03:59 09. Tomorrow 08:07

I’m going to have to make clear that right from the start I have something of a bone to pick with Spheric Universe Experience; any astrophysicist worth his salt knows the universe is saddle-shaped. Not spherical. If Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein are down with that, sorry, I’m not letting a French prog band sway me.

Anyway, if we can somehow pretend that wound isn’t fatal, we could move on to the music…”Unreal” is the third album from the Nice-based five-piece, and is every bit as slick, assured and polished as you’d expect from a band who have been honing their craft for a decade. Despite recruiting a new drummer, Christope Briande, since the recording of 2007’s ‘Anima’, they appear as tight and confident as ever.
The band list their greatest influences and Dream Theater and Symphony X, and this is immediately apparent on opening track ‘White Willow’, as guitarist Vince Benaim doing his best to channel John Petrucci and a range of weird keyboard effects are the order of the day. That said, the giants of prog-metal are by no means bad role models, and subsequent tracks show the band breaking out and doing more of their own thing, and doing it well.
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01. Twisted Coil 11:43 02. Leland Street 08:03 03. Green and Cream 10:32 04. Season of Denial 10:22 05. Over 06:11 06. Perfection 10:46

“it won’t be Ayreon, that’s for sure.” - Arjen Lucassen

The above quote was given during our interview with Arjen Lucassen in April 2008 when work had just begun on Guilt Machine. Arjen has proven true to his word.

If you are expecting another Ayreon epic telling the sprawling tale of knights and wizards, space travel and aliens then this album is not for you. This album is a journey through sorrow, despair and guilt; a vast thematic and musical departure from the Ayreon project. This is not to say that if you enjoyed Arjen’s previous works you will not enjoy Guilt Machine, but there will no doubt be a few disappointed Ayreon fans out there.
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