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Abjvration – The Unquenchable Pyre (Caligari Records, 2015)
Caligari Records has proven itself capable of releasing excellent recordings from just about any metallic subgenre they see fit, but some of their very best stuff of late has come from the realm of...
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Melt-Banana’s joyful noise.
It’s been a few weeks since I saw Melt-Banana at Harlow’s, and for some reason I just can’t get their set out of my mind. Part of this is no doubt due to the fact that I actually got to see...
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Church – Unanswered Hymns (Transylvanian Tapes, 2015)
My first exposure to Sacramento’s Church came back in September of last year, when I witnessed them nearly level the Starlite Lounge while opening for the mighty Dispirit. Like a complete idiot, I...
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Kafirun – Death Worship and Essene – demo (Sol y Nieve, 2014)
Of the handful of cassette-centric labels I’ve developed relationships with over the past few years, Sol y Nieve is surely one of the most exciting. While they aren’t the most prolific, they stress...
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White Spot – Everything Changes, Nothing Disappears (self-released, 2015)
Those of you that read IG on the regular or follow me on social media know that I’m always up for some good noise rock. As such, White Spot’s Father Songs proved to be one of 2015’s most pleasant...
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Cradle of Filth – Hammer of the Witches (Nuclear Blast, 2015)
After years of listening to mainstream metal, Cradle of Filth were one of the first “extreme” bands I latched onto as a wee lad. As such, it has pained me to watch them slowly but surely become a...
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Caligari Records Round-up: Gloam, Hadit and Taphos Nomos
Are you guys getting tired of me gushing about Caligari Records yet? Well if you are, too bad! The Florida-based label continues to put out some of the finest underground metal you’re likely to come...
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Lycia – A Line That Connects (Handmade Birds, 2015)
When darkwave legends Lycia returned from the musical wilderness with Quiet Moments in 2013, it was widely hailed as a stellar comeback for the band. While I certainly enjoyed the album, I couldn’t...
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Nocturnal Blood @ Starlite Lounge, Sacramento, CA 08/08/2015
Sacramento gets a ton of great shows, but we’ve been more than a bit lacking in the black metal department of late. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve enjoyed the shit out of seeing the likes of Melt Banana,...
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Visions from the Fractal Generator
As Isolation Grind continues to evolve and grow, I’m hoping to do more “round-up” style pieces such as the one you’re about to read. The reasons for this are many, but the main ones are as follows: 1....
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Get Hexed
Regular IG readers and especially those that know me outside of music blog land are well aware of my affection for John Carpenter, and a sizable chunk of that affection is based on his soundtrack work....
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Profound Death
2015 has been a damn fine year for death metal so far, and it appears that Profound Lore is looking to up the ante with their most recent salvo of releases. Indeed, the label has in its hot little...
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Dark Realm Records
This past weekend, my wife and I ventured down to Anaheim to get our Disneyland fix. But the magic kingdom wasn’t the only destination on our agenda; Mrs. IG built some time into our busy itinerary to...
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Saturnian Mist – Chaos Magick (Candlelight, 2015)
Every few years, Candlelight Records releases a really cool black metal album and then does jack shit to promote it. Back in 2013, it was Throne of Katarsis’ The Three Transcendental Keys. This year...
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Goat Torment – Sermons to Death (Amor Fati, 2015)
Like any good metalhead, I try to keep track of all the shows happening in my neck of the woods, even though I can only make it to a fraction of them. This is how Belgium’s Goat Torment popped up on...
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Interview: HERCYN
In early 2014, New Jersey-based black metal band Hercyn sent me a copy of their debut release, the excellent Magda. To say that I was blown away by the twenty-four minute, single track demo would be...
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Kriegszittern ist krieg
Kriegszittern are a German duo committed to vomiting up short, sharp shocks of punky, war-obsessed death metal. Their debut demo was recently committed to tape by the ever-reliable and increasingly...
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Hiatus (well, sort of)
It’s been a long time coming. As of October I’ll have been doing the metal blog thang for the better part of six years, with five hundred and eighteen posts published; that averages out to roughly...
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IG’s Top 11 music related things I enjoyed in 2015
I had an intro written and ready to go, reflecting on all the good and bad that heavy music in 2015 had to offer (mostly bad), but then I remembered that no one reads these long-winded, pointless...
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Comecon unearthed…
Hailing from the same fertile scene that produced the likes of Entombed and Dismember, the terrific twosome known as Comecon have somehow been relegated to being little more than a footnote in the...
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Oodles of Brutals IV: Brutal-Fu, da Return
Holy shit you guys, I haven’t done one of these brutal/tech/slam death metal roundup features since 2014! Wasn’t this supposed to be a semi-regular feature?! I guess 2014 was also the year that I...
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New Cystic Dysentery tracks!
Back in 2012, Jacksonville’s Cystic Dysentery released Culture of Death, one of my favorite under-the-radar brutal death metal albums of the last five years. Indeed, the band’s debut displays their...
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Serial Butcher – Brute Force Lobotomy (Unique Leader, 2015)
I damn near passed on checking out Serial Butcher. On the surface, everything about the band’s second album Brute Force Lobotomy, from the title to the cover art, screams run-of-the-mill brutal death...
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Behold Darkness – Unholy Filth (Psalm 88, 2016) & Behold Darkness / IT –...
Early last year, I discovered Psalm 88, an offshoot of Berkeley, CA-based cassette label Acephale Winter Productions. While all of the sub-label’s initial batch of wares were impressive in their own...
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RIP 2009 – 2016
It’s hard to believe I’ve been running this blog for almost seven years. That’s the longest I’ve ever stuck with any of my creative projects. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned, it’s that nothing...
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