Here’s my take on the new releases for this week…

Astra
The Weirding
Metal Blade
78:41 – 8 Tracks
This is kinda psychedelic rock, spacey stuff.   A little bit like Porcupine Tree, some lighter King’s X and the like.  It’s really just melodic rock… not really even hard rock… but it does add something unique to the Metal Blade lineup… just not for metal shows in my opinion.

Ern Non Dae
Hydra Lernaia
Metal Blade
55:05 – 9 Tracks
This one is kind of on the darker gloomy doomy thrash side of things.  To me I feel Tool meets Meshuggah.   It has “extreme” moments, but is for the most part, pretty sludgey.

Firebird
Grand Union
Metal Blade
34:19 – 12 Tracks
An interesting week from Metal Blade… prog rock, slugey metal and stoner metal… Firebird of course being the latter.   Good classic and catchy sounding stoner rock/metal.  And I mentioned King’s X above… this is more like the cool jammy King’s X but, the songs are nice and short and not long boring “jammy”… you know what I mean?  Good stuff…

Poison the Well
The Tropic Rot
Ferret
47:20 – 12 Tracks
Huh… Not sure what to say about this… just plain old Metal-Core?  It’s not too heavy, not brutal, fairly melodic… for the most part, hard rock/metalcore light.   In my opinion, this is ripe for the commercial radio pickin’!

Maylene & The Sons of Disaster
III
Ferret
38:51 – 11 Tracks
This is a lil bit hard rock, some southern friend sounding hard rock and some stoner metal and a little metal core all rolled into one.   There is some really cool jammin’ music on here, great guitar solos.  Just fun lovin’ hard rock, but catchy and decent to listen to.

Jorn
Spirit Black
Frontiers
46:51 – 10 Tracks
Good ol’ Jorn.  Mike and I always like to make fun of his name… and better yet, to name your own band after yourself… even better.  He’s a great Singer (Jorn Lande)… albums are pretty much standard classic metal sounding stuff.  He’s got one of the most distinctive prog metal voices out there, and the music goes along with it…nothing really standout, nothing bad.

Trail of Tears
Bloodstained Endurance
Napalm
42:48 – 11 Tracks
These guys have been around a little while, but for some reason we never really got our hands on their albums… this is some pretty cool melodic black/symphonic metal.  It’s a bit euro-metal sounding, some female vox, but mixed in with cool death/black metal vocals.   It’s the real deal… lots of cool stuff going on and definitely worthy of Mosh Pit airplay.

Voivod
Infini
Relapse
50:41 – 13 Tracks
Well, this is the long awaited album that Piggy started and pretty much finished most of his parts on… and it sounds pretty good… classic Voivod sounding actually… And you can’t go wrong with that!

Madder Mortem
Eight Ways
Peaceville
64:22 – 12 Tracks
Female Fronted proggy rock stuff.  Mostly almost operattic vocals, with mostly just slow rock music, which then will build up to a moment or two of metal, then back to chillin’ rockin’ stuff.  Not really Mosh Pit material.

Internal Divine
2 Song Sampler
Echo Entertainment
9:05 – 2 Tracks
First listen… standard textbook metalcore.  Vocal style, breakdowns, you got it.  Not much more can be said!

Dream Theater
Black Clouds and Silver Linings
Roadrunner
75:25 – 6 Tracks
Well, as a long time DT fan, it’s always exciting to get a new album to see what they’ll do next… This time around, they opted for 6 epic tracks.   Musicianship is top notch once again, not so many totally wanky solos, everything seems to fit just right.  Some parts of some songs are just hokey and don’t seem to belong.. namely the “rap/growl”in “A Nightmare to Remember”   other parts could probably use some trimming up, but eh… it’s still all good… I’m just nitpicking.  I like this album a lot, it has a little feeling of Metropolis 2 and Awake, but with the newer modern influence from their last two albums.   Great stuff, and I’m sure I’ll have to make some radio edits to get some of these tracks on the air!