Metal Riot

Midnattsol

2018 is proving that each month has had plenty of cool metal and hardcore punk or extreme experimental music to peruse, thus making a choice of just 4 albums rather difficult. Heck, we got a Burn The Priest covers album featuring Melvins, Bad Brains and Cro-Mags covers this month, for pit’s sake. That is ridiculously rad. I decided to focus on original music releases though for my top choices for May. Remember that this is just what I was grooving along with the most. It doesn’t mean I think the new Dimmu sucks or whatever you want to project.

As I turned friggin’ 40 years old in April, I am more and more enticed to talk more about what music I like in my writing than what I don’t. Bands I am not crazy about get algorithm benefit from being discussed that helps them anyway, so I would rather try and put the word out and focus on what I think is actually good in metal rather than shred apart someone else’s gateway band. Unless a group has done something truly horrible and never changed, I am loathe to spend too much time on them when I could be plugging the new Baptists record, for instance.

I think a lot of the time we are so precious about having a better grasp of what music is “supposed to” be that we really wreck the potential for growth. The mainstream to me is like the Democratic party. I would rather participate and improve it with discourse than throw it out entirely and have a Trump style disaster (to use a metaphor) where all mainstream music is divorced from talent because no one stuck up for any real artists once they got famous. It is still a massive tragedy to me that Chester from Linkin Park had to deal with so much initial hate for making the poppier One More Light album that it maybe led to him choosing death. We really need to be more open minded, y’all. Everything has a place in the great wheel, yo.

That said, my list starts out with a lot of melody and ends up with a lot of Savagery, so you just gotta deal with it.

More BELOW.

NY’s Skinless are one of the most brutal bands of their generation and will soon return with their sole offering of new death metal in nearly a decade.  Only The Ruthless Remain includes artwork by Ken Sarafin and will be unleashed on CD, LP and digitally via Relapse Records on June 2nd, 2015 in North America (June 1st in the UK/EU and May 29 in DE/Benelux/Finland). Recorded by Tom Case at Edie Road Studio and Doomsday Bunker Studio, both in upstate New York, with vocals tracked by Dave Otero (Cephalic Carnage, Primitive Man etc.) at Flatline Audio in Denver, Colorado, and mastered by Brad Boatright (Obituary, Nails, Integrity etc.) at Audiosiege in Portland, Oregon, Only The Ruthless Remain is almost certain to remind people of the ascendancy this bloody outfit once held with a firm grim on both 6 stringed axes and dripping axe handles.  Be sure to catch them live 5/21 at Maryland Deathfest!