Misty Grey - The Third Man (2014)

Cost: 99¢

Very Sabbathy doom, with several tracks having quite a lot of Witchfinder General flavor too.  This CD compiles the two original tracks from The Third Man EP, the Demon demo, and some live tracks.  The music is immediately enjoyable, but the female vocals are an oddball style that sounds like a nasally child's voice.  I'm guessing they might have been an ill-conceived attempt at emulating Zeeb Parke.  If vocals like these must exist, I think they'd pair better with a creepier/weirder atmosphere (too bad the band isn't more Italian sounding).  I did get somewhat used to them as the CD went on, but it goes without saying that I would have preferred more conventional vocals.

Unfortunately, the CD omits the two Pentagram covers from the digital version of the EP, but adds unlisted live covers of Witchfinder General "Death Penalty" and Pentagram "All Your Sins" at the end of the last track.  Both live covers are a bit on the untight side and don't end up being all that interesting, although the Witchfinder General cover seems the better of the two based on the strength of the original.

Annulation - Human Creatures (2004)

Cost: $2.00

This certainly looked like it fell somewhere on the death or thrash metal spectrum, but I wasn't expecting such a strong mid-'90s Sepultura influence.  It really does sound like a death/thrash framework with lots of Chaos A.D./Roots-inspired guitarwork and groovy riffs.  Even the main vocals sound like a deathier version of Max from that period (ironically, at times they sound a bit like later Wagner Antichrist).  Admittedly, metal being influenced by anything that comes after Arise sounds like an awful idea in theory, although they avoid many of the worst aspects of '90s groove metal, and the extreme influences make this a lot more tolerable.

Whether it's only through Sepultura or not, I have no idea, but there seems to be a bit of a Brazilian fixation here--there's some limited Portuguese in one lyric, and another song uses a berimbau.  The end of the disc has an unlisted track with two (possibly) live songs, one being a cover of "Roots Bloody Roots" (of course).   The cover isn't very compelling and the original song (the title track from their first CD) leans more towards typical groove metal,  so these are the least interesting parts of the disc (plus, the crowd noise is quite obviously a looped sample, although at least they tried to be clever about it by dubbing in the band's name being chanted at one point).

So yeah, listenable stuff, although there's nothing particularly inspired or great here.

Keymaster - The Lords of Everything (2005)

Cost: $2.00

The album name and several of the songtitles here are clearly meant to be facetious (the band name is kind of corny too, although I could totally see a band using it unironically).  I picked this up not quite knowing if this was a case of a band not taking themselves too seriously, or whether it was just complete parody stuff.  I was kind of expecting super-technical or avant-garde stuff that just played on metal cliches.

The music is straight up, mostly fast-paced power/heavy metal, but the opening song uses goofy high vocals, peppered with even more ridiculously exaggerated falsettos that are obviously a send-up of high-pitched metal singers. The vocals seem to be less irritating in general after that first track and the vocalist is actually decent when he chooses to be, although unnecessarily silly high parts are never that far away.

Due to the generally faster tempos, shredding/soloing styles, and general feel of the music, I wonder if some of the material was less influenced directly from power and heavy metal, and more from deconstructing those influences in melodic death metal.  There are definitely times where the music has a strong melodic death metal vibe...But, well...Without the death.

Even with better/serious vocals, I doubt this would rate anything beyond "just OK" for me.  But hey, it's way better than KeyDragon at least...

Grandexit - The Dead Justifies the Means (2013)

Cost: 99¢

I wish bands/labels would realize that yes, aesthetics mean nothing if your music is crap, but they can mean everything if I've never heard of your band.  Initially I was going to skip over this because it was on Lifeforce and just looked like generic metalcore/HC.  I looked up the band on metal-archives at the store and they were listed as death/thrash, so I went ahead and bought it.  Further online info was very conflicted and made me pessimistic.  I saw it described as both deathcore and death metal in various reviews, with The Black Dahlia Murder mentioned a lot.  The label itself touted it as a blend of progressive rock and death metal, unfortunately mentioning System of a Down and Mastodon--way to make me enthusiastic about this, eh?  The emphasis on the progressiveness had me somewhat expecting something Disillusion-like.

Of course, all of that turned out to be typical exaggerated advertising hype nonsense.  There's nothing remotely progressive about the music.  The only real odd/weird elements are the beginning of the album, where there are a couple more bouncy/spastic riffs (which I think is where the SOAD comparison comes in), and a few scattered sections with clean backing vocals.  As nitpicky as I am about such things (as evidenced by this blog), I considered it no big deal.  I don't even know if I would have taken any notice of it had I not been pre-conditioned by the promotional descriptions and reviews.

The Black Dahlia Murder comparison fits decently for some faster parts, but overall there's a far stronger The Haunted-style modern melodic death/thrash vibe.  The vocals are a tad on the forced side at times, but thankfully they're still not typical HC vox.  This isn't a type of metal that I particularly need to hear more of, but since they lean more towards the DM side of things and there are no super aggro vox, it's done well enough for what it is. As this blog attests to, I've done far worse in the bargain bin.