Lars Gotrich

If wizards, battles and crunchy riffs roll your 20-sided die a critical hit, heed Visigoth's call. On its debut album, the Salt Lake City power-metal band looks to Manowar, Judas Priest and Manilla Road ("Necropolis" gets covered here) for that classic '80s sound, but the production is decidedly heavier, with ...

Phil Elverum has a way of making the universe smaller, our dreams real, our fears empathetic, all without minimizing the gravity of things that often feel intangible. In recent years, his music has expanded with explosive energy, as it constantly threatens to erupt like a balloon filled with knives. "This" ...

If you haven't been following along, know that between making gorgeously seething albums, Thou has a thing for cover songs: Soundgarden, several from Nirvana, Alice In Chains, Black Sabbath and Minor Threat, to name a ...

It's hard to shake the comparison at first: Bandit's "Losing in a Sense" owes its stylistic cues to Control-era Pedro the Lion, when David Bazan's righteous anger fueled some of his most satisfyingly damning work. Here, the ponderously plucked guitar strings form a minor chord progression and ...

I like to look at 2014 in metal through the lens of two very different, very thoughtful covers projects. In one, Brownout's joyous Brownout Presents Brown Sabbath, members of the Austin, Texas-based music collective took the iconic riffs of Ozzy-era Black Sabbath and surrounded them with a ...

"I thought I'd kick you in the pants."

And so begins my fairly annual conversation with All Songs Considered host Bob Boilen about the year in metal and what I sometimes call "outer sound," a nebulous grouping of experimental music. You may may have seen — and perhaps been puzzled ...

You could never fully steal the show when you're followed by the blown-out spectacle of Sun Ra Arkestra's Tiny Desk Concert. But the opening act kept jumping on the piano and nibbling on the set, literally pulling up the carpet and leaving "presents" on the floor. How ...

Rooms Of The House is an album based on what we leave behind, and what it means when new bodies and new emotions inhabit those places. It's a lofty concept executed with care by La Dispute, whose members are no strangers to poetic post-hardcore. It all comes to a ...

We woke up to a world with a new D'Angelo album, his first in almost 15 years. For lovers of R&B and soul — hell, for lovers of music that transcends — this is unreal. Black Messiah was teased on Friday with a 15-second video, the ...

How's this for an opening line? "Gross. They say I ate you in the womb, that Mom had no room." After eight years of other projects, members joining Repulsion on tour, and vocalist/guitarist Marissa Martinez-Hoadley's sex-reassignment process, Cretin has crawled back out of its delightfully gore-obsessed grindcore hole ...

In the noise-improv trio Borbetomagus, Jim Sauter hooks bells with Don Dietrich to obliterate any notion you have of the saxophone (sorry, birthday boy Adolphe Sax). In Oneida and Man Forever, Kid Millions is a psychedelic shaman of the drums. In "Game Jump," Sauter issues a brief warning ...

"Born To Ruin" contains one more letter than Bruce Springsteen's ode to the "runaway American dream." Whether or not the pun is intentional, Damian Master has been steadily ratcheting up the drama in his own riffs, hooks and production over three years of cassette releases under various guises (This ...

When listening to Crying's "War Of Attrition," you might think: Which solo came first, the Game Boy or the guitar? With Ryan Galloway's outrageous, Thin Lizzy-esque power-pop hooks going note-for-note with his own series of ecstatic 8-bit blips — not to mention Nick Corbo's muscular drumming — the New York ...

You have to wonder what synapse fired in comedian David Rees' brain when he heard Taylor Swift's "I Knew You Were Trouble" and thought, "You know what this needs? '4' by Aphex Twin." In the once-omnipresent, Napster-era tradition of mashups that rightly ignore the distinction between high and ...

Scott Walker and the members of Sunn O))) know the depths of darkness, and in their own ways wrest the sublime from it with violence and grace. In 2009, the latter (a drone-doom metal duo of the loudest pedigree) approached the '60s pop icon turned avant composer and ...

Growing up sucks. Growing up is awesome. You trade in the insecurities of one age for another, and yet somehow become wiser in the process — or at least that's the idea. After just a couple of solid EPs, that seems to be the crossroads where the Brooklyn band Chumped ...

If you're like most people, the first time you hear a song might well be through laptop speakers. But if you're listening to an instrumental rock band as mammoth as Black Clouds, those tinny sound holes become pathetic little slaps to the face. The bass frequencies and thundering drums of ...

What happened to your brain the first time you heard the way My Bloody Valentine's seismic guitar crunch seemed to bend space? Did you bend with it? The first 10 seconds of Wildhoney's "Fall In" know that moment, wash it in a mess of crashing cymbals, and pull back ...

For as loud and triumphant a rock 'n' roll band as Restorations is, frontman Jon Loudon sure is beset by insecurities. "I drink too much coffee, I bite my nails, I do a lot of pacing," Loudon recently told Noisey. This anxious state fuels LP3, a rattling, ...

Just when you think you've figured out Giant Claw, its mastermind Keith Rankin pulls a Yellow Wallpaper. To lift a line from Charlotte Perkins Gilman's 1892 short story, his music will suddenly "plunge off at outrageous angles, destroy themselves in unheard of contradictions." Giant Claw follows an unknowable pattern ...