By now Killswitch Engage have established who they are—the cliché that doesn’t quite fit into the box—and they’re still not apologetic for it. There’s no extraordinary growth in their sound with their latest release, the self-titled Killswitch Engage, which is their fifth studio release, third with Howard Jones as the singer, and first with a major producer (Brendan O’Brien of Pearl Jam, Bruce Springsteen, Aimee Mann, amongst others fame) at the helm. At their very core Killswitch Engage is a metalcore (whatever that distinction really means anyway) band built on …

What a promising start Lamb of God had, only to arrive here, so noisily uninspired and undeserving: Wrath is a stool sample. To be routinely inspected, and flushed.
This is about as sonically interesting as a firing squad. Drums pummel. Screams erupt. Yeah, yeah. Over-produced guitars buzz deep down in the mix, emerging occasionally to a lockstep chug inside a well-defined comfort zone bookended by pinch harmonics. It’s a thrash album, to be sure, which certainly gives it license to create as much havoc as possible, but it ought to at …

What review of a new Metallica album could be had without first firing a 21-gun salute over the body of St. Anger? So let’s get that out of the way– it certainly had its part to play, but what was it? It was like a vivid nightmare. Did we imagine it? It makes me feel existential and a little pissed off, like how I feel at a funeral; like life is long and mean and disorderly, and when it passes we feel like we barely knew it at all.
But it’s …