Nick Douglas – Through The Pane

September 2nd, 2007

Artist: Nick Douglas

Album: Through The Pane

Media: CD

Genre: Rock/Pop

Year: 2006

Label: Painkiller Records

From the first glance at the cover featuring a man in a white shirt standing against a brick wall I thought this was some random CD that had got lost in the post and ended up with us. However, a look at the back revealed it to be from Painkiller Records. Strange. Further digging showed that Nick Douglas in fact plays bass for legendary metal babe Doro Pesch. That would explain it then. So is it pure heavy metal bass solos? Far from it. It’s actually radio friendly pop rock with a plethora of acoustic guitar ballads. Nick can sing reasonably well and the production is good but it won’t appeal to any metal fans or even to any indie fans. It’s just too soft and unexciting so I can’t recommend it unless you really have a thing for soft rock ballads.

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Horrid – Rising From The Hidden Spheres

September 1st, 2007

Artist: Horrid

Album: Rising From The Hidden Spheres

Media: CD

Genre: Swedish Death Metal

Year: 2006

Label: Xtreem Music

Swedish death metal worship from Italy. Now usually I don’t like to put “sounds like …” type statements in reviews but in the case of a band purposely trying to emulate a style that has been created and honed by other bands for over ten years then its unavoidable. Think Indecent and Obscene era Dismember or early Entombed only not as good and you won’t be far off the mark. The clicky kick drums, over-distorted production and fat guitar sound with all the middle stripped out is faithfully reproduced and as such is good. Unfortunately, the same quality of heavy riffs and melodic leads is not, leaving this record fairly unremarkable.

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Tales of Blood – Horrors of the Flesh

August 30th, 2007

Artist: Tales of Blood

Album: Horrors of the Flesh

Media: CD

Genre: Gore Metal

Year: 2006

Label: Painkiller Records

A five track MCD of fast-paced and crunchy gore-splashed death metal. It won’t win any points on originality and there’s no leads or melody but it motors along nicely and old school gore metal fans will appreciate it. The production is nice and clear, laden with heavily distorted guitar, lashings of double-kick and oodles of monosyllabic grunting. It clocks in at 20 minutes and as such is just a taster of things to come from this band. There’s potential here but if you already have a load of gore metal albums these guys will have pull something more out of the bag on subsequent releases to attract interest.

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Denial of God – The Horrors of Satan

August 28th, 2007

Artist: Denial of God

Album: The Horrors of Satan

Media: CD

Genre: Black Metal

Year: 2006

Label: Painkiller Records

Old School melodic black metal of the corpse paint variety. Trem picked guitars drive the songs with mid-paced melodies with keyboards only occurring for the creepy intros and occasional interlude. The vocals are a throaty snarl but its fairly easy to make out the lyrics. Topics covered include witches and lycantrophy. Tracks tend to start with an acoustic intro with a spooky whisper overlayed and this technique gets overused. Otherwise the dynamics aren’t bad with pace changes occurring fairly frequently. The album clocks in at just under an hour with 6 full length songs so some could definitely be trimmed down a bit. The production is quite trebly but not hissy and is mixed quite well although the bass and kick drums are fairly low in the mix. Despite this, the sound is good and not harsh on the ear. Overall, its not bad but I can think of a good few other albums that it sounds like and it could do with something to make it a little more different.

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Karseron – Krux Krucis

August 23rd, 2007

Artist: Karseron

Album: Krux Krucis

Media: CD

Genre: Black Metal

Year: 2005

Label: Demo

These Portuguese metallers have been around a long time (since ’93) but have only produced self-released demos so far. This is a five track demo with a nicely put together booklet and the whole package is available for download from their official site. Four of the tracks are fast-paced, guitar-driven black metal although with more deathish vocals interspersed with occasional spoken sound clips (Stephen Hawking at one point) covering standard black metal topics of war, dark enchantresses etc. There are subtle keyboard layers on most parts. The other track is old-school death metal with lots of blast beats. Its all competently played and the production mix is pretty good but it doesn’t really stand out from the crowd and could do with more tempo variation.

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Live and on air!

August 5th, 2007

Right, we are live and on air! A few days late - unexpected house move, holiday and lack of internet are deemed reasonable excuses for 3 days delay.

Now we just have to sit back and wait for the reviews to start flowing. Check back in two weeks for that.

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The Old Reviews

July 23rd, 2007

Back in the days of yore we accumulated a great number of reviews. Rather than import then into the new site, we have chosen to make a clean break, and provide you with new reviews, all of which we can guarantee are up to our current standard of writing.

Should any of these old review take your fancy, drop us a line, and we’ll do our best to withdraw it from the archives, dust it down and present it in these pages.
Read the rest of this entry »

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Lykoszine 3.0

July 23rd, 2007

This is the latest incarnation of Lykoszine. This third incarnation comes after a long long period of inaction and slumber.

The current aim is to return to basics, concentrate on writing regular reviews, with incremental improvements to the site as time permits.

Our planned release date on 1st August, 2007 was slight skewed by a somewhat traumatic house move, and subsequent lack of broadband internet and even computer access.

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