It's a Monday. I'm listening to metal. It's a Metal Monday. I've put together another smorgasbord of short reviews covering some metal I've been listening to lately. There is no unifying theme, these are just albums I've been listening to and felt like writing about... Alright, I lied. There is a theme. All the cover art prominently features skulls and/or skeletons. A very rare motif when it comes to heavy metal visuals. You're very unlikely to see this many skulls/skeletons anywhere again, so count yourself lucky.
Nothing helps take the edge off a long day like some spacy stoner metal, and Looprider's Ouroboros is spacier than most. Think Kyuss on an international space mission with Boris on the ground in Houston, guiding their atmospheric trajectory. You almost need to take the "stone" out of the word "stoner" to properly describe how much altitude the band is getting on this album. I mean, they are getting high as fuck and these songs seem almost weightless as a result! As lofty as the Japanese group's melodies and post-structural writing style get though, Ouroboros is still a rock album at heart. QED: super hot cruisers like "Reactor" and "NWOBHM" that get a boost from borrowed Queens of the Stone Age riffs in order to tear up the desert and turn it into a field of glass shards. Of course, if you want to feel the burn at a lower RPM there is always the ashy blues of "Heavenless" and the title track. Whatever your speed and preferred burn-rate, Ouroboros will meet you there.
If Ruthless is best known for anything it's their 1984 EP Metal Without Mercy. This is totally legitimate. That album is a classic slab of American heavy metal. They aren't resting on their laurels through and are constantly demonstrating their willingness to grow and expand on their past successes. The Ruthless released their comeback album They Rise back in 2015 and then followed it up in 2019 with Evil Within- the latter of which is by far my favorite of their catalog. Like Satan with 2018's Cruel Magic, Ruthless have managed to give an old-school heavy metal formula a facelift, making it sharper and deadlier than ever. I really love the locked groove thrash, duel guitar harmonies, and ground-quaking thump of "Atrocities" and really get a jolt from "In Blood," which exudes a shaggy kind of speed metal stoicism with their reliance on steely melodies and marching progressions. Most impressive of all is how physical and restive Ruthless sounds, almost like they were storing their energy in a battery pack during their hiatus and are now releasing it in controlled bursts of ultra-focused artistic aggression. If I didn't know any better, I'd think Evil Within was made by a bunch of dudes in their '20s. One thing is clear though, Ruthless still knows no mercy.
Drawn and Quartered - Congregation Pestilence (Krucyator Productions)
Ok, here is another blast from the past for you. Drawn and Quartered have hailed from Seattle since 1994 (and even earlier under the name Plague Bearer). Their latest album Congregation Pestilence is their eighth overall and represents the mindset of a band that is used to ruining people's days with ugly, dissident sounds and couldn't think of anything they'd rather do, even if the opportunity presented itself. This album is all about grim, deliberate death metal, played with painful clarity in a soup of misery. They can build cavernous spaces of deathly atmosphere like Hypocrisy while painting articulate pictures with elaborate, gory riffs like Autopsy. The core of the songs are simple but are layered with complexity to provide a sense of retrograde in action- like your mind is slipping backward into a primordial, cro-magnon state. If you are looking to rally around a death metal record today to introduce some steady mayhem into your life, make it Congregation Pestilence.
