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[ Review ] DOCTOR LIVINGSTONE - TRIUMPHUS HAERETICI (2017)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 8/10
I was overcome with great stress on giving this album a rating, especially when a high rating has to be given to an album that was mulling over by a small brand tag - Doctor Livingstone. I believe any band name comes with “Doctor” could be a turn-off to metalheads, moreover, my first impression to this album had been cheapened by the low-budget album cover graphically. These substaintial negative elements were hovering on my mind before delving further in this album.

Another thing came to my mind…, it could be a totally mission impossible to persuade metalheads to spend their time listening or buying this album. It’s very risky for me to praise this album due to the reasons above-mentioned. My name could be tarnished and all my customers could be slamming me for supporting an album that doesn’t really “look” great due to “monetary motivation”.

All I had to do was finding as many faults as possible and rated this album lower than my first listen/ rating (I rated this album 7/10 on my first listen), actually I didn’t really trust my ears and considered it an aftermath of lacking in sleep recently. “Unfortunately” I didn’t find any faults on this album up to 5 listens and I’ve to add this album to my list of Best Black Metal Album Of All-Time !

16 minutes of uniquely long bass-drumming on the first track is guiding you slowly “floating” in the mystical tunnel heading towards the deepest part of hell. Surprisingly, the bass-drumming sounds ultra-warm and spiritually attentive. The catchy and focused rhythmic composition made this track their best to date.

From the 2^nd track onwards Doctor Livingstone starts bringing you to the black journey of a rarity – Blackcore, a genre that has traditionally been difficult to find. The whole album is filled with tons of sharp pains and screams of mental torment, would also justifiably come to be a deathcore fan favourite.

Abruptly and frequently changes of rhythm is one of the main selling points of this album. The drummer has been showing off his highly well-controlled and consistent skills effortlessly throughout the whole album. Some of the tracks stop abruptly in the ending parts that sound very similar to the technique used in Sektemtum’s latest release, probably it’s meant to create an urge to the listeners I guess but it didn’t bring too many surprises to me.

All in all, this album is musically rich, no repetition, every track sounds unique in their own way, truly a masterpiece for people who expect the unexpected. Buy this ! because it’s pointless for you to buy something which is always under your expectation musically (you know what I mean, monotonous albums are abundant out there). I’m very confident to say that, this album will always remain listenable while liberally pouring out their passionate creativity and emotion, you’re going to play this album over and over again for months.

Frankly speaking, I was bored out of my skull listening to The First Wave Of Black Metal and truly find that The Second Wave Of Black Metal is the real gem. And now I would like to give you all a proposal to start considering The Third Wave Of Black Metal scene has to be located in France as there are too many great black metal albums were all French-made in recent years. They’re absolutely avant-garde and creative, successfully created a totally new experience to the black metal fans.

The Artist Behind INQUISITION's New Cover Arts

Paolo Girardi was born in Ascoli Piceno (middle Italy) in April 23, 1974.

He begun to draw even before being able to talk, but he was forced to classic humanistic studies then. When he was 14 he entered upon an agonistic freestyle wrestling career that he never abandoned til now.

In the same time he was forced by his parents to attend "Liceo Classico", a highschool based mostly on ancient greek, latin and italian languages, literatures, philosophies. There he begun to listen to heavy and epic metal, that he won't never quit.

After this "infernal" school he was 19. He had to go live in Naples for a year where he was regularly called-up in navy seals. At the age of 20 he finally begin to attend the Accademy of Fine Arts. There he understood that institution couldn't give him right notions and motivations to be a real painter. His passion was stronger than that ambient, built mostly for people that wanted to work teaching art in schools, or for "waste of time" people. He never attended the degree then, after 5 years he returned in his town totally disappointed by society and what institutions had chosen for him.

He begun to paint still lives and landscapes in a room, forcing himself all days to make good copies of european 1600-1700 paintings, mostly still lives (from Ruoppolo, Porpora, Melendez to Claesz, Claesz-Heda, De Heem still lives). Landscapes, portraits, and more personal paintings based on wrestling, his other great passion. He sold paintings in his town but he had to do other occasional works to survive, even hard physical works . For some years he also grew plants in his garden to survive. Aside his painting work (that since early 2000's begun to include a first outlay for Blasphemophagher) he used to train hardly everyday in wrestling gym with his club, beginning one of first wrestlers in Italy later.

He decided to use "technology" opening an account on facebook in 2010, putting an end to his primitive , isolate, "out-of-time" life without contacts with people. He shared his numerous paintings on this social network. After 2010/2011 there was a slow crescendo of commissions for labels and metal bands from all over the world, in 2012 he finally was able to live only by painting thanks to bands that noticed his work They commissioned to him their releases' covers, posters, shirts. Now he still lives and works in Ascoli Piceno, more and more busy by painting outlays for metal bands.

[ TOPIC ] Why CDs May Sound Better Than Vinyl

James T. Russell (1931-    ) - Inventor of CD, and invented
the overall concept of optical digital recording and playback.

by Chris Kornelis | LA Weekly

James Russell's mother told him that his first invention was the "automated battleship" he built when he was 6. By the time he was 13, he was fixing toasters, irons and fans at a local appliance store in his hometown outside Seattle. The summer before he left for college, he was hired to set up a radio station — transmitter and all — something he'd never done before. He'd never even seen an antenna that big.

"That's why I am an inventor," says Russell, now 83. "I can envision how it should be." At Portland's Reed College, Russell studied physics and built his first turntable. Unsatisfied with the standard needles of the day, he used cactus needles, which he sharpened with sandpaper, to play the first LP he purchased: Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov's Scheherazade. Even so, with his sharp ears, he could hear the quality of his LPs disintegrate after the 10th or 12th spin.

After he graduated in 1953, Russell took a job in the research laboratories at Washington state's Hanford Works, the nuclear reservation that produced the plutonium used in the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki. Longtime classical music fans, Russell and his wife, Barbara, were subscribers to the Seattle Opera, even though it meant a 400-mile drive round-trip for each performance.

He worked on projects tangentially related to nuclear reactors for several years, then convinced his superiors to let him research ways in which optics — the use of light — could be used to improve the recording and reproduction of music. Russell wasn't trying to make recorded music more convenient or portable. He was trying to make it more accurate, a clearer reflection of the performance. "I wanted the symphony to sound like the symphony," he says.

On a Saturday morning in 1965, Barbara took the kids to buy shoes. Home alone, free to think about his problem, Russell figured out how to bring optics, digital technology and other disciplines together to create the digital optical storage and playback technology that would be used in what is now known as the compact disc.

The CD revolutionized the music industry, but it was never cool. Even as CD sales eclipsed and nearly exterminated vinyl, the format was plagued by accusations that its sound was inferior, that it was merely a convenient alternative to the LP.

As consumers flocked to the convenience and ubiquity of downloadable and streaming music, they unsentimentally abandoned their CD collections. But as CD sales have plummeted, vinyl's sales figures have been moving in the other direction. The CD-versus-vinyl debate — and, by extension, the debate over digital versus analog sound — has only grown.

By 2014, vinyl's resurgence as a marketable product and fetish property appeared to be hastening the CD's obsolescence. While CD album sales in the United States had dropped by 80 percent since their 2001 peak, LP sales hit 9.2 million, up 52 percent from 2013 and nearly 800 percent since 2004. Jack

White's Lazaretto moved 86,700 LPs, the most units in a calendar year since Nielsen SoundScan started keeping track in 1991.

Even purely digital music is now marketed using the trappings of vinyl. When U2 distributed 500 million digital copies of its new album to iTunes users — a reach unimaginable when the band released its debut in 1980 — the artwork depicted a vinyl record inside a sleeve with the initials "LP" scribbled on the exterior. And when Neil Young launched a Kickstarter campaign for PonoMusic, a digital music player and online store, his company's stated mission was to "re-create the vinyl experience in the digital realm." Baked into the vinyl resurgence is the suggestion — fed by analog apostles such as Young and White — that an LP's analog playback produces honest, authentic sound, while digital formats like the CD compromise quality for the sake of portability and convenience. Young articulated this sentiment earlier this month at the International Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, where he told Rolling Stone's Nathan Brackett that the vinyl resurgence is due to the fact that "[vinyl is] the only place people can go where they can really hear." Fathers of the compact disc — and many audio engineers who make a living reproducing what transpires in the recording studio — bristle at this notion.

"As long as you can measure the difference, the CD will be better than the vinyl, absolutely," says Kees A. Schouhamer Immink, a former Philips engineer in the Netherlands, who was a member of the Sony/Philips task force that created the compact disc standards. "But if you say the whole experience — just like smoking cigars with friends — [is better], well, do it. Enjoy smoking cigars with friends, and drink beer and brandy and enjoy listening to an old-fashioned record player. But don't say the sound is better. "You may say it sounds better to you. That's OK. That's a subjective matter."

In 1968, a 23-year-old audio engineer named Bob Ludwig at New York's A&R Recording was asked to create a test pressing of The Band's debut, Music From Big Pink, so that the producers could hear what it would sound like on LP. During the process, he especially tried to preserve as much as possible of the deep low end of the band's sound, which he believed was critical to its music. But when he heard the final LP that was released, he was stunned. "All the low, extreme low bass that I knew was there, was chopped right off." Years later, when Ludwig was hired to provide the final edit (known as mastering) for a greatest-hits package for The Band, he got the album's master tapes back from Capitol Records. On the box was a note from the cutting engineer who'd made the original vinyl master, saying the album's extreme low end had to be cut out.

Of vinyl's inherent deficiencies, reproducing bass is one of its most glaring. The other is that the last track on each side of a record sounds worse than the first, due to the fact that the player's stylus covers fewer inches of grooves per second as it gets closer to the center.

"The vinyl disc is a steadily collapsing medium," says Ludwig, who went on to become a Grammy-winning mastering engineer, with credits on Patti Smith's Horses, Steely Dan's Gaucho and White's Lazaretto, among many others. "The

closer it gets to the label, the more the information is getting compromised, the high frequencies getting lost."

Ludwig's colleague Bob Clearmountain is one of the industry's most respected mixing engineers, responsible for setting the levels of a band's performance before it's sent to the mastering engineer. He has worked with everyone from The Rolling Stones and David Bowie to Ricky Martin and Lenny Kravitz.

When Clearmountain mixed vinyl albums for Columbia Records, he says the label required the test pressing of each LP to play on an old, cheap turntable without skipping, or it would have to be mixed again. Too much bass in one speaker could make the needle skip out of the groove, as would too much sibilance — a harsh "s" — in a singer's voice.

Clearmountain, who now works out of Mix This! in Pacific Palisades, says that when he heard the vinyl test pressings of the albums he'd worked on in the studio, he always felt the same way: depressed. "I'd just listen and go: 'Jesus, after all that work, that's all I get ?' It was sort of a percentage of what we did in the studio," he says. "All that work and trying to make everything sound so good, and the vinyl just wasn't as good."

Not only did records provide only a sliver of what he'd done in the studio but they also came with plenty of sounds that hadn't been there in the first place: ticks and pops. "If you're a musician like Bob and I," Ludwig says, "and you get to do a mix and you listen to it and you love the way it sounds, and then it's transferred to vinyl and suddenly it's got noise and ticks and pops, for me that's an extremely unmusical event."

Unlike Russell, not all of the engineers and scientists whose inventions and developments laid the groundwork for the CD were motivated by the quest for clearer sound. Richard Wilkinson was searching for a better picture.

At MCA Laboratories in Torrance, Wilkinson was charged with developing ways to record television programs and put them on master discs with a laser beam at a time when few commercially available lasers existed. It was an experimental project with slim hope of success. "The director of the lab told me there was no guarantee the job would last more than six months," Wilkinson says.

But he and his colleagues succeeded. In partnership with Immink and his colleagues at Philips, Wilkinson's team helped create the standards for what we now know as the laserdisc. Under an agreement between the two companies, Philips built the players and MCA manufactured the discs at a factory in Carson.

"If you really want to have problems between Dutch people and Americans, then you should do this kind of thing," Immink says. "If a system didn't work, who was to blame, the disc or the player? That was a huge problem."

The bigger problem was that the public was not impressed. Philips' first commercially available laserdisc player — the Magnavox 8000 — was introduced in 1978, but Immink estimates that after half a billion dollars in development resources, only a few hundred players were sold.

But the excursion was not a total loss. While Immink and his colleagues were developing the video disc, management asked them to pursue a sound-only disc as well.

Immink grew up saving his money to buy 45s by American artists such as Elvis Presley. But when his team started testing the digital audio disc, they used recordings of performances such as Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition. Classical music could demonstrate the format's superior dynamic range over the LP better than popular music, which has a comparably smaller range — the distance between soft passages of music and loud ones. "From a record player, it's impossible to have such a dynamic range," Immink says. "You have to suppress the dynamic range, otherwise the grooves will touch or you [have reduced] playing time." 

In 1979, Immink was brought into a joint task force between Philips and Sony to develop standards for the compact disc. In 1982, the new format went on the market. Two years later, the first CD was manufactured in the United States. Fittingly, it was Bruce Springsteen'sBorn in the U.S.A., an album that was mixed by Bob Clearmountain and mastered by Bob Ludwig. Hearing Born in the U.S.A. on CD didn't make either man a digital advocate. 

Clearmountain and Ludwig say that early analog-to-digital converters had an "industrial sound", which made CDs sound brittle. But when Apogee Electronics — a company co-founded by Clearmountain's wife, Betty Bennett — developed the first high-quality converters in 1985, the sound came into focus. "It wasn't until CDs actually started to sound good [that I went]: 'That's what it sounded like. That's what I remember doing in the studio,'" Clearmountain says. "The great thing for me about digital, about CDs, was that I could do things that I could never do for a vinyl record."

Scott Metcalfe, director of recording arts and sciences at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University, says the move to CDs was especially beneficial for reproducing classical recordings.

"Really in every way measurable, the digital formats are going to exceed analog in dynamic range, meaning the distance between how loud and how soft," he says. "In the classical world, [that means] getting really quiet music that isn't obscured by the pops and clicks of vinyl or just the noise floor of the friction of the stylus against the [LP] itself."

That said, every audio engineer L.A. Weekly spoke to said it's also not hard to find LPs that sound better than CDs. Mastering, production and manufacturing variables can drastically tilt the scale either way. The seemingly endless possibilities of the CD also resulted in unexpected consequences. "When the CD came, everybody discovered that they could do everything with the CD — or they believed they could do everything," says Andres Mayo, president of the Audio Engineering Society. "So they started pushing and pushing and pushing the volume up and up and up, and that created a totally different sound."

Even before the advent of the CD, there had been a "loudness war" in the music industry — the desire to make an album louder than its competitors, so it would catch the attention of listeners and radio programmers. But when CDs made it possible to increase the volume exponentially — no more skipping needles — nuance and dynamics often suffered.

Because vinyl's restrictions do not permit the same abuse of audio levels as the CD, Mayo says that listeners might hear a wider dynamic range in an album mixed separately for vinyl over a compact disc version optimized for loudness — even though vinyl, as a format, has a narrower range than CD.

"It's not just the format," Mayo says. "It's what you do with it."

It is a fact that vinyl sounds different from CDs. And many people prefer vinyl's sound. But it's not clean reproduction of a recording that makes vinyl a preferred format; it's the affect the vinyl adds to a recording that people find pleasing. "I think some people interpret the lack of top end [on vinyl] and interpret an analog type of distortion as warmth," says Jim Anderson, a Grammy-winning recording engineer and professor at New York University's Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music. "It's a misinterpretation of it. But if they like it, they like it. That's fine."

It's also clear that the vinyl experience is about more than just sound. Pete Lyman, co-owner and chief mastering technician at Infrasonic Sound, an audio and vinyl mastering studio in Echo Park, says he believes listeners are gravitating toward vinyl for the physical experience of owning, holding and flipping an LP.

"I don't think that sound is really the appeal for people right now," Lyman says. "They like the collectability factor. They like the whole ritual and process of listening to it. They're more engaged with the music that way."

Ben Blackwell, head of vinyl operations at Jack White's Third Man Records in Nashville, says that he thinks some people prefer vinyl because it tells the world something about who they are. "It's like the kid walking around with a copy of The Catcher in the Rye in his back pocket," he says. "Does he really connect with it or does he think it's making a statement?"

In the rush to get into the vinyl game, Lyman — who not only masters recordings but also cuts the master lacquer disc that is sent to the vinyl pressing plant — says a lot of corners are getting cut. In the 1960s and '70s, when artists were recording specifically for vinyl, they recorded and mixed to fit the confines of the medium, he explains. They kept sides below 20 minutes, and put loud songs on the outside tracks and quiet ones toward the center to account for the natural deterioration of sound that occurs when the needle gets closer to the middle of the LP.

These days, Lyman says, vinyl is often the last thing artists and labels think about. Clients who employ Infrasonic's services only for lacquer cutting often hand over albums that are optimized for digital downloads and CD but are too long for vinyl, with track sequencing that fails to account for the medium's natural limitations. To get an album longer than 40 minutes to fit onto one LP, Lyman says, high frequencies and bass are the first things that go. There's also extra distortion because he has to cut the master lacquer at a lower volume to fit all that extra music onto the LP.

"As soon as you have to cut that record at a quieter volume, you're going to hear more kicks and pops, you're going to hear more surface noise," he says, "because you're going to have to turn your stereo up to accommodate the lower level on the disc." As labels seek to capitalize on a physical medium that is gaining momentum, some marketing efforts offering superior sound are downright misleading. Most notable among these is "audiophile-quality 180-gram vinyl," which consumers assume is superior because it is heavier. Lyman, however, says the added weight offers no musical benefit at all.

"It increases shipping costs and sales cost of the record. That's about it," he says. "It's the Super Big Gulp of vinyl, but you're not getting more [sound quality], really, you're just getting more vinyl."

With PonoMusic, Neil Young is leading fans down the digital version of a similar "bigger is better" sonic trail. It has long been believed that the human ear cannot hear frequencies above 22 kHz. This is why CDs sample sound at 44.1 kHz and 16 bits of information per sample. According to a theorem called Nyquist-Shannon, in order to reach a desired range, sound must be sampled at twice that range. Half of 44, obviously, is 22. Pono — along with some other digital retailers such as HDtracks.com — sells some tracks that sample music as high as 192 kHz, with 24 bits per sample. Pono also offers a PonoPlayer (retail price: $399), which the company says is optimized to play those tracks. 

Pedram Abrari, Pono's executive vice president of technology and engineering, says the idea behind the player and the store is to sell and play back tracks at the rate at which artists record them. Since artists typically record at rates much higher than 44.1 kHz for editing purposes — such as 96 and 192 kHz — the company believes that offering recordings at their original rates drastically improves the sound. This, however, is a matter of intense debate.

"There is no evidence that humans can perceive frequencies above 22 kHz," says Dr. Daniel Levitin, a neuroscientist and author of the best-selling book This Is Your Brain on Music. "There is nothing in the auditory system or brain that processes sounds this high, as far as we know." In double-blind tests conducted by Levitin and others — some results of which were published in the Journal of the Audio Engineering Society — listeners cannot tell the difference between high-resolution audio and CD-quality audio.

But many audio professionals, including Bob Ludwig and NYU's Jim Anderson, say they can hear an improvement over CD quality, and they prefer the higher frequencies and sample rates. Anderson even teaches a class at NYU in which he instructs students on how to listen for the differences. "I think if people can't hear it, they probably didn't know what they were listening for," Anderson says. "Someone has to say to you: Listen for this, listen for this, listen for this. And when you start to home in on those details, it starts to become very clear."

Abrari says Pono doesn't like to get into the science. And he says it's not just about what a person can hear but what they feel. But even if humans can hear or "feel" above 22 kHz, the experience of listening to high-resolution digital tracks is very different from listening to vinyl. If anything, it's closer to that of the CD. The ticks and pops are gone. There is no disc to ritually flip. The tracks sound closer to what the artist laid down in the studio, but that's only because the distortion and limitations present in the vinyl pressing are no longer part of the experience.

It's not as cheap an obsession, either. You can buy an armload of used LPs for the $21.79 it costs to buy a 192 kHz version of Young's Harvest at the Pono store. As he's been pitching Pono, Young has continued to promote the idea that analog formats and recording gear offer the authentic sound, and digital is a compromise. "I don't think [Pono] can sound better than vinyl," he said earlier this month at the Consumer Electronics Show. "Because vinyl is a reflection and any digital is a reconstitution; it's not the same thing."

Many audio engineers disagree. Scott Metcalfe, for example, says that recording to analog tape isn't any purer than recording music digitally. But the distortion and pitch variation that analog tape adds to the recording are preferred by some artists and audiences. "I think there are few people who would tell you that recording classical music to analog tape has any benefit at all," Metcalfe says. But for some artists, he says — particularly in rock — those layers of distortion are preferable.

Ludwig says he mastered White's Lazaretto on analog tape not because it's a better way to master but because "it's what [White] wanted." "For many world-class mixers," Ludwig says, "mixing to analog tape has no advantages if what comes out of the console is exactly what you want." However, for a less skilled mixing engineer, mixing to analog tape can "'glue' the music together in the most wonderful way," he says.

Whether it's analog tape versus digital recordings, or vinyl versus CDs, objective quality is not the conversation: It's about which one the artist and listener prefer. "Every way you can measure it, digital is going to be superior," Metcalfe says. "It really does come down to the preference of the end user."

Or, as Kees Immink says: "Some people like marmalade and some people like mustard. If people like to listen to vinyl, do so, enjoy life. But don't say that the sound is better." 

[ Review ] SEKTEMTUM - PANACEA (2016)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 8/10 [ Masterpiece ]

I’ve been quite careful and usually need to spin a few times before judging any albums. The main reason was due to the creativity and originality presented in any musical works shouldn’t be taken lightly.

Sektemtum returned in a solemn way, their second studio album "Panacea" is going to arrive on 26^th May 2016 bearing a lot of surprises. I seriously heard more ambition, seriousness and aggression on this album. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t mean their debut "Aut Caesar, Aut Nihil" (2012) was not good, but in fact it’s a damn good album and this time you can hear more complexity and consistency in their latest release.

The reason that I didn’t bring in "Aut Caesar, Aut Nihil" (2012) was because Malaysian listeners are at least 20 years disconnected from the world of metal, exploring something new is not really the custom in this country. No matter how good an album is, a new band’s debut album usually takes us more than 1-2 years to sell a copy, sounds ridiculous ? Don’t laugh, no joke. Strangely, many customers still blaming records stores for not bringing in new titles…, probably they need to know the bloody scenario before giving such comment.

Now back to 2016, an album like "Panacea" creates a different prospect for us, having its masterpiece-quality from a band now with good track record. Undoubtedly, this album is going to act as a good introducer of the band and their debut album together to the metal fans in 2016. Sektemtum was not in their comfort zone after their debut, the coming release "Panacea" is restlessly good, keeping you tense all the time with the coarse shrieks vocals that are unique, very recognizable and aggressive, and also compatibly working well with the guitar works and drummings. All the tracks were carefully constructed, combined with strong industrial metal elements and influences, at the same time laced with the right dosage of alternative metal, a black metal music was immediately transformed and sounds unpredictable. After all, black Industrial metal is not that common in Black Metal scene. Unexpected lengthy tracks are also rare and adding more complexity to this album. Surely, French-bred black metal doesn’t get any better than this.

However, the "minimalism" of the artwork (the wolf) on the cover looks bland, and the 6th track "LeCrepuscule des Idoles" is downright alternative metal, it is placed in the middle of the track-listing which has built a clear divider to cut the album into half, furthermore it doesn't sound in resonance with the whole concept of the album. Making this track as a bonus track, move it to the last position or completely deleting this track would make this album sounds more compact. After all, there are 12 tracks, these two complaints are minor and I don't have other complaints other than these.

[ Review ] DARKESTRAH - TURAN (2016)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 8/10 [ Masterpiece ]

Darkestrah made noticeable numerous and stylistic changes of tempo that created a channel between black metal’s riotous, transcendent musical composition and folk metal’s melodic runs and rapid riffing ! On this latest release “Turan”, Darkestrah has successfully combined all the aforementioned essential elements and their great music skills to bring us into unexpected heart-grippings and trilling agitation.

They had made their previous release “Epos (2007)" a masterpiece which rank with Kvist’s “For Kunsten Maa Vi Evig Vike (1996)". And now, Darkestrah is back and they’re presenting us another masterpiece “Turan” in April 2016, which is even more focused on what they’re good at…, this work is totally a mind-catcher ! They’ve taken their ideas going beyond the realm of black metal music to communicate with this celestial language which united with the supernatural.

This album sounds completely radical and stunningly catchy, It’s absolutely a must-collect black folk metal masterpiece. Easily went straight into our Metal Child Media’s “Best 120 Black Masterpieces Of All-Time”.

[ Review ] DREAM THEATER - THE ASTONISHING (2016)

By Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 6/10 [ Good ]

It's easy to be different, but it's not easy to be good. When everybody thought Dream Theater had reached a bottleneck of their creativity, they made a drastic change in their musical style to annoy their ready-customers (metal fans) in a good way. To be honest, they're on the right path now, and it's the right time for Dream Theater to make such a bold move in 2016 regardless of expected criticism from metal purists.

“The Astonishing” is not really that astonishing as titled actually. It’s a concept album that blending ‘70s progressive rock and ‘60s Broadway music elements with Dream Theater’s trademarked style of progressive metal. The piano (keyboards) passages effectively and appropriately linked up everything. Derivative or not is always not an issue to a "safe band" that has been playing “safe music” like Dream Theater, there is no denying that these guys are masters of the genre that they’ve been playing for the past 26 years. You can expect Dream Theater delivering superb sets of  combination aforementioned with less aggression and distortion in guitars, more simple-rhythm drums and abundant in mushy-mushy piano melodies will have no problem fitting in at modern pop radios…“ The Astonishing” is so crafty that, combined with the attitude of pleasing both sides (metal fans and rock fans) might pose to a “fire” risk. This half-progressive metal, half-progressive rock, plus, of course a lot of now and then musical elements mentioned delivers from the start until the end that actually has successfully made this a “different” album, and this is also a “better” album compares to their last album “Dream Theater (2013)”.

This is a good album, big and sweeping melodies with good conceptual arrangement and production, though the commercialism is so infectious that sounds very “radio-ready”. The Broadway melodies actually is a credit to make this album more memorable and avant-garde, so much so that they strengthen the weaker portions of the album, all shortcomings are overshadowed by their musical strengths ! Dream Theater made a remarkably sober comeback with their ambition and successful musical eclecticism.  This is their best album after the loss of  Mike Portnoy, and Jordan Rudess has shown a great potential of leading the band into a new musical direction in the future.

[ Review ] MEGADETH - DYSTOPIA (2016)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 2/10 [ Very Bad ]
Due to the bad reception of Super Collider in 2013, Dave Mustaine was trying hard to get himself back to match fitness. Bringing together Kiko Loureiro (Angra) and Chris Adler (Lamb Of God) to realize his latest musical project - Dystopia. Thus the effort which has all the heaviness one would expect for a promising outcome but things didn't go as planned.

Megadeth has lost the sight of their intensive thrash metal core since the departure of Marty Friedman, without a strong and skillful guitar team mate, Megadeth didn't possess the magical chemistry of their '80s - '90s classiscs. Keep changing band members has been another reason that keep bringing detriment to the quality of their music.

The introduction of Chris Adler in 2016 became another big mistake. Chris Adler didn't play thrash metal drummings for this album, he sticked to his root (may be that was the reason why he was employed), clinging to groove metal drumming tightly, I can even hear metalcore rhythm everywhere. The dexterity or Dave's fast and furious fingerworks are fully engulfed in Adler's pedestrian drums. Groove metal drummings combined with thrash metal's guitars and vocals are clashing each other, totally unmatched and wasted, considered a serious disturbance. Dave's versatile vocals have gone stale and zestless is the third downer.

As far as I know, no thrash metal bands dare to create a fusion genre that combined thrash metal, groove metal and metalcore by far. Probably megadeth was the first metal band to do so in 2016. Tried and failed, Megadeth prove that losing faith in the original root is a bad thing, Groove Metal + Metalcore vs Thrash Metal = Stalemate !

The 1st track "The Threat Is Real", the 2nd track "Dystopia" and the 7th track "Poisonous Shadows" are above average (not even considered very good), the rest are fillers.

[ Review ] HELLOWEEN - MY GOD GIVEN RIGHT (2015)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 4/10 [ Not That Good But Listenable ]

I have to tip my hat to Helloween for keeping their power metal's integrity pure for nearly 30 years (This is their 31th year in metal scene since their first demo, hard to believe isn't it ?). 

To be frank with you,  judging this album isn't an easy task. All tracks sound quite original,  I mean it's a fresh idea on the musical composition, only a few seconds of two tracks sound similar to one or two of their past releases and the rest of them didn't remind me of any works in the past. This is quite an encouraging moment for an old band to project such a high energy to their metal fans.

However, creativity is certainly lacking. Don't expect Helloween to stretch the boundaries anywhere else on this album. Suffocating synthesizer-disco-beats fully tucked inside everywhere in this album have gone ballistic that really turned me off a bit. Overall, this album is passable and serious, a Helloween's landmark to prove that they are still serios musicians, they're still spending a lot of their time on music and they're still working hard for their metal fans. Eventhough not a complete delight but still impressive for its consistency.

[ Review ] SLAYER REPENTLESS (2015)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 1/10 [ Scrap Metal ]
Slayer did it again, successfully created another rip-off of their past releases. Imagine..., three tired and semi-retired musicians (Jeff Hanneman, R.I.P 2013) were trying different ways returning to their ferocious days..., unfortunately, all of their efforts were to no avail. 

Ransacking their secluded basement where all their early masterpiece manuscripts are kept has become their only way out ! Select, cut, paste, mix and match, an immortal open secret to make an instant album. Here we go, a brand-new-heard-before studio album - Repentless is served ! As Thrash metal albums go, Repentless lacks serious attitude, composition and performance. Repentless is going to make you (metal fans) repentful !

No matter how many more bullshit albums Slayer are going to produce in the future, nothing can actually shake their god-liked status in metal scene as their metal monument has been erected deep inside the hearts of all metal fans. Their 3 masterpieces released in the late '80s are still resting safely on my CD rack, they're going to be there forever, no one is going to touch them.

[ Review ] IRON MAIDEN - THE BOOK OF SOULS (2015)

by Metal Child Media

Our Rating : 3/10 [ Bad ]

One of the UK metal bands that epitomized '80s - '90s NWOHM style. NWOHM is a mixture of Heavy Metal and Progressive Metal. How to balance, weight and transform these two styles into an effective formula is extremely crucial. Where most of the Iron Maiden's releases seemed a little overwhelmed by their trademarked repetittive guitar hooks and riffs (sometimes those riffs and hooks can be repeated for more than 10-20 times in a track), is nevertheless considered quite pleasant, neccessary, effective, smooth and well blended during their heyday.

I finally decided to write something here after receiving many negative feedbacks about this album. Yes and No, not to say Book Of Souls is a horrible album by any means. In fact there is a very BIG surprise on this album. The first 30 secs of the intro on the first track was jabbing me hard ! I was telling myself, "Holy shit, this album is not going to be the same anymore, the guitar-trio is giving us a very clear sign that Iron Maiden has changed their musical direction, they're going to be more and more into progressive metal style in the future".

Under my expection, the guitar team of Dave Murray, Adrian Smith and Janick Gers really brought a new dimension to make this band into a New Iron Maiden. They play more complex progressive guitars now, absolutely impeccable, nearly perfect. It really showed their skills could still KILL despite their 4-5 years layoff between studio albums. Better than before, even can be considered having their peak performance in the guitar works in the whole Iron Maiden's career. This album turned out to be the group's most experimental album up to this point. 
(** Be warned, metal newbies might need to take extra time to appreciate the guitar works as said the guitar works are less commercial and simple but more complex and artistic now...).

Now, the problem is... too much revelling in playing progressive guitars (yes, way too much, nearly 80% - 90%) inducing paying very very less attention on the vocal-melodies. Bruce Dickinson's singing becomes redundant, even sounds bland. He is not to blame as all the problems came from the problematic song-writting, all the tracks are extremely boring, totally not melodic and fully unmatched. I really don't understand how could Bruce Dickinson agree and tolerate such a tasteless song writing/ vocal melody (By the way, I haven't checked if Bruce involved in song-writing, if the answer is positive then he is one of the culprits to destroy this album, ha...ha...). Finally, I would like to say I enjoyed the progressive approach very much but the song writing is definitely bad to the core, that is the main reason why I couldn't rate this album high due to the major downfall of the balance of music.