A lot of stuff on Frontiers Records wants to sound like Ronnie James Dio and doesn’t, especially since his death in 2010. In particular, Jørn Lande is constantly labelled “The New Dio” by fans and critics despite never really sounding like him at all. Even all of Dio’s original solo bandmates got their geriatric asses up long enough to form Last in Line, releasing a lame album last month. It all comes off as bogus. Frontiers might think these artists are all paying homage, but really they’re a gratuitous attempt to capitalize on the absence of a metal luminary.

Lords of the Black is not one of those bands. They’re a pitch perfect replication of Dio, with mammoth riffs, catchy choruses, and a perfect balance of fast and mid-tempo sections. Singer Ronnie Romero is probably the best Ronnie James rip-off in the business. A cover of the Dio-sung Rainbow classic “Lady of the Lake” was probably added to the album for comparison’s sake: the world’s greatest vocal forensic scientists could spend decades trying to uncover how Romero managed to steal Dio’s vocal cords and implant them into his own throat.

One’s the illusion of mimicry wears off, the tracks start blending together and many tracks go on far past the six minute mark. Unlike Dio, Lords of the Black has no idea how to make an awesomely absurd metal ballad, forcing them to all-out rock for the full hour run-time. It wears thin quickly, but in short one or two track spurts, they keep the blood pumping and your devil horns growing.

B-

Amon Amarth wages an endless crusade against everything that sucks. Constantly touring and grinding out those catchy riffs, they’re as mainstream as extreme metal gets. Albums like Versus the World and Twilight of the Thunder Gods are the apex of melodic death, with bleeding guitars of tunefully wanton destruction.

Now, after decades of sticking to their guns, the band says they’re switching things up. They’re making a concept album about vikings.

Vikings.

For those of you not in the loop, literally all of Amon Amarth’s songs are about vikings. Being vikings, praising vikings, killing other vikings, you name it, they’ve already wrote forty songs about it.

Then it hit me once I put Jomsviking on. Concept album is another term for taking crappy risks that won’t pay off.

Thankfully, the risks are all slight changes in vocal presentation, mostly involving random spoken monologues. “Wanderer” ends with a voice-over wrenched straight from the Grinch cartoon. The diatribe at the beginning of “Vengeance Is My Name” sounds like GWAR-style self-parody. Even worse is a much bigger change: the awful vibrato-inflected female vocals in “A Dream That Cannot Be”. This woman sounds better suited for back-up vocals on a jock jam compilation that comes with your paid six month subscription to Entertainment Weekly.

Slight vocal missteps aside, Amon Amarth remains Amon Amarth. This is their best set in almost a decade, and even though there are no stand out tracks, I still felt like I was on a grand quest to desecrate my foes’ lands, smite them all, and collect their skulls in offering to Odin. Once Amon Amarth and I pass through the gates of Asgard’s golden hall, we will drink and toast to this album, shrugging off the stupid female vocals with a laugh and boasting about all the muscular melodies.

B

Breaking news: Chris Cornell of Soundgarden/Audioslave fame has taken early NWOBHM band Diamond Head hostage in his underground has-been lair. He tricked the band into a forced recording session with the promise of something called grunge money.

Grunge money is a proper noun, meaning that sounding like shitty bands from the ’90s is somehow going to make you money in 2016. Songs like “Set My Soul on Fire”, “See You Rise”, and “Blood on My Hands” are all grunge-riff relics, complete with new singer Rasmus Bom Anderson imitating Cornell throughout. Stockholm syndrome at its worst.

The band eventually figured out that much bamboozling was going on. After recording ten crummy tracks, they bound and gagged Cornell long enough to record “Shout at the Devil”, an ode to Diamond Head’s three good songs from the NWOBHM era. Cornell, an esteemed necromancer, managed to call upon a horde of grunge zombies, flannel coat wearing fleshbags of men. They ate Diamond Head right as they finished mixing their one enjoyable creation.

So yeah, I’m going to change the headline: Diamond Head are effin’ dead.

D+

Is music really underground if it reflects popular tastes of twenty years prior? Post-grunge only kinda-sorta died anyway, as most of the Foo Fighters and the Offsprings continue to have high-charting albums every few years. Here’s a brash and heavy-handed generalization for everyone: I’d say underground music is defined as experimental stuff that totally goes against all popular tastes from the dawn of rock ‘n’ roll to now. I’m leaving a big gaping hole where all that adored artsy-fartsy “modern classical music” sits, but whatever. All I mean is, anyone who thinks ska-punk or post-grunge is underground music is only fooling themselves.

I’m guessing Basement probably doesn’t think about stuff like that, but honestly, this would have been commercially viable twenty years ago. The cover screams ’90s hipness, and with a single word band name like Basement, it’s clear that these guys would need a time machine to make any money.

So they play poppy grunge music. It’s very polished and clean, and they only use screechy tones in a couple songs. If you like this, you’ll also probably like those Better Than Ezra and Semisonic CDs that are collecting dust at the thrift store. Basement’s a little louder than them, but not enough for me.

C+

English is the universal language of metal. Even the most anti-establishment bands will pander to Anglo audiences, which makes this album peculiar. While the band name and album title are both clearly English, all the song titles and lyrics are in Spanish. Are they selling out, or are they keeping it real in Argentina? Are they incapable of pronouncing words correctly? Either way, something’s a little off about the whole thing.

Music alone, Against sounds a lot like Metallica. The singer has a Hetfield growl most of the time, and as in Justice, songs are six minute plus epics with complex compositions. Most of the time they keep the thrash torch burning in songs like “Canibal” and “Voluntad”, but there’s occasionally a dull alt-metal radio slow whiny part feel, specifically on “Sucubo”. It’s a dead ringer for Faith No More and it’s a little too jarring of a switch.

That’s Against’s problem: they flip-flop just enough to be annoying. English presentation with fully Spanish everything else? Metallica clonery with a hint of shitty System of a Down wankery? Pick one and stop surprising me so damn much.

C

Boring garbage. This album wants to be post-punk goodness, and instead it’s putting me to sleep. It’s one in the afternoon, I’m drinking my tea, feeling great, then I put this crap on.

Seventeen songs, all exactly the same. Inoffensive steady rock beats, guitar parts taken directly from The Cure, and dull girly-man vocals for over an hour. Evidently the recording of this album was plagued with drug abuse and run ins with the law, which unfortunately didn’t help to make their music any more interesting. Also, a lot of the Wikipedia article on the album is spent discussing the band’s Krautrock influence, but if they actually ever heard a Brainticket, Can, or Amon Duul record, they might have been inclined to be remotely creative.

Honestly, the entire wiki must have been written and sourced by the lead singer, Zachary Cole Smith. He spends so much time dick sucking his own creative vision that Zach might as well pull out his spine and pelvis and do the actual deed himself. I won’t ever service him like that. All Mr. Smith makes me want to do is put my jammies on, cuddle with my favorite stuffed animal, and pass out.

D+

Ambient and black metal have had a long and storied relationship. Both are at their best when they’re largely repetitive, taking a good sound and letting it dig into your soul. Burzum’s Filosofem stretched the combination to the breaking point, making oppresive nine-minute tracks that repeated the same guitar riff and synth line throughout. It was ugly music.

In the past twenty years, some band’s like Eldamar have tried to take this ambient/black metal approach in a much more listenable direction. That isn’t to say the music isn’t challenging; fifteen minutes of the same bubbly synth line and three blistering guitar chords will ruin any bands chances of a conventional fanbase. It’s really more for the people who wish Music for Airports had a guy growling faintly in the background.

With that in mind, I recommend playing it while you do some other activity. By the time the album’s 80 minute run-time is up, you might be able to do an oil painting. Or write a novella.

B