Various Artists, 27 Tons of Metal New England (Bluntface Records)
Bluntface Records chef/cook/bottle-washer Otto Kinzel has been a fixture around the local goth/metal landscape for a while now, singlehandedly injecting some actual “business’ into the New Hampshire-and-environs music business. This set of tunes concerns itself mostly with hamster-wheel death metal and pop-grind of the Cannibal Corpse/Bury Your Dead spectrum, but there are a few notable exceptions. Mike Kerr Band’s “The Truth of the Lion” uses a clean-sounding chick singer who could win a Nightwish karaoke contest, this within a Lacuna Coil-like riff-storm. Before the Judge imparts a convincing round of grindcore bellowing in “Bobby D”; My Missing Half combines black metal with drunken-dwarf ren-fair-oi in “The Lives I’ve Ruined”; apocalyptic sludge-core is represented by Cactus Hag (“Grand Lodge of the Mirage”); Maiden-style NWOBHM comes courtesy of Verscythe (“Land of Shells”). Travel Amygdala’s “Died by a Bullet” reminds me of all the old Epitaph Records CDs I used to get in my mailbox, not that that should mean anything to anybody. A — Eric W. Saeger