Godhunter - City of Dust

"We live now in a nation where doctors destroy health, lawyers destroy justice, universities destroy knowledge, government destroys freedom, press destroys information, religion destroys morals, and our banks destroy the economy."  This is the soundbite that opens City of Dust, the second full-length album from Arizona's Godhunter.  Before the band plays a single note, they let you know this is going to be a heavy album topically; when the distorted, fuzzed-out riff kicks in immediately after the audio sample, they show you it's going to be a heavy album period.

Sunn O))) & Ulver - Terrestrials

Full-on band collaborations seem to be a rarity in extreme music these days.  Splits don't count, as typically those aren't collaborations but merely each band releasing their material on one side of an album.  Sometimes you'll see lone musicians combine talents, like Steven Wilson and Mikael Akerfeldt's Storm Corrosion, or a vocalist will embark upon a different project with other musicians, like Chino Moreno of Deftones joining Isis (R.I.P.) for Palms, but rarely do you see the full creative process of two bands working together to create something unique.  So it was definitely exciting when late last year I caught word of a long-gestating project between mysterious drone titans Sunn O))) and chameleonic metal band Ulver.  Sunn O))) has long been a favorite of mine for their intense, suffocatingly oppresive ambience, and while I'm not as familiar with Ulver, I knew that they were a band that began with a black metal album before moving through genres and mixing things up, never content to stagnate.  Two bands that place full emphasis on creating music that appeals to them, with seemingly little to no regard for commercial or critical success, working together... why yes please, I WOULD like to listen to that!  Terrestrials, the album that resulted from the bands' collaboration, is a breathtakingly dense album that is content to move glacially for most of it's thirty-five minute runtime, but when it opens up, it rewards the listeners who traversed the audio fog.

Behemoth - The Satanist

I've been trying to complete this review for the better part of a week, and it's really not going so hot.  I keep trying to figure out and rationalize why that is, whether it's been my work schedule, the Super Bowl, whatever number Polar Vortex this is, sheer laziness... nothing is off the table.  Well, that's not quite true.  The one thing I haven't considered is that maybe I'm just not into this record, and I really try hard to only review records about which I have something to say.