Welcome to Patch Notes V.666, your weekly system update straight from the depths of Hell
Every Friday, we wade through the carnage so you don’t have to—separating the world-ending riffs from the glitch-ridden duds, the blast-beat assaults from the uninspired filler. Whether it’s blackened, brutal, or bugged beyond repair, we’ll tell you what’s forged in fire and what deserves a permanent rage-quit.
So equip your best armor, chug a stamina potion, and step into the pit. This week, we preview albums from Allegaeon, Wrath Of Logarius, Fractal Universe, Midnight Vice, Verheerer, and Messiah Paratroops. Let’s see which albums survive the onslaught this week!
ALLEGAEON – THE OSSUARY LENS (METAL BLADE RECORDS)
This Fort Collins, Colorado-based group has never allowed itself to stagnate, preferring to thrive on chaos, change and evolution. Their latest offering, The Ossuary Lens, is their seventh full-length album overall, but it’s the first with original vocalist Ezra Haynes since his departure in 2015, following the release of the Elements Of The Infinite album. He brings with him his signature growls and screams, something missing from the last few albums. This is easily the band’s best effort to date, perfectly balancing melo-death and tech-death into their very own brand of “melotech” (melodic, technical death metal). [8]
WRATH OF LOGARIUS – CROWN OF MORTIS (SEASON OF MIST)
Deep within the redwood forests of Northern California comes a band whose name is inspired by a notoriously shifty dungeon lord named Martyr Logarius from the video game Bloodborne. This latest album expands upon the Bloodborne lore teased by their 2023 Necrotic Assimilation EP. Each song twists into a uniquely horrifying tale that serves the larger plot of its accursed king. Dubbing themselves ‘formless black metal,’ the guys unleash an unpredictable onslaught of merciless death metal chugs and tremolo-picked riffs, pierced with gloom. This Souls-like journey is not one to be missed for lovers of From Software games and black metal alike. [9]
FRACTAL UNIVERSE – THE GREAT FILTERS (M-THEORY)
This is gonna be a tough one to sum up in a paragraph or two. The best I can describe this is to imagine Opeth’s lush, melodic storytelling colliding head-on with Meshuggah’s bone-crushing, polyrhythmic madness while the sounds of a saxophone pour from a smoke-filled jazz club on a dreary, rainy evening. At every turn, The Great Filters throws out jazz-infused interludes that are immediately ambushed by mechanized grooves, and somehow, amidst the chaos, it all makes perfect sense. A virtuosic, brain-melting fusion of intricate melodies, blistering fretwork, and time signatures so convoluted they require a PhD in astrophysics to comprehend. [7.5]
MIDNIGHT VICE – DEBUT EP (REIGNING PHOENIX MUSIC)
When you think of Tampa, Florida, the first thing that comes to mind is NOT spandex (unless, of course, you were hanging out with Morbid Angel back in the late 80s). Of course, Tampa in the late 80s and early 90s was a mecca for death metal. These days, it’s also become somewhat of a hotbed for NWOTHM. Of these bands, the barely twenty-something four-piece of Midnight Vice has risen to the top with their brand of traditional metal, featuring touches of power metal and speed metal. Their debut EP is rife with old school riffing that recalls the contemporary stylings of Enforcer and Skull Fist. The real winner here is Tyler Gray’s vocals, which sound like a blend of Rob Halford and King Diamond.[7.5]
VERHEERER – URGEWALT (VENDETTA RECORDS)
Urgewalt sees the band fully entrenched in the bunker warfare of the second-wave kind, emerging occasionally to lob grenades packed with 80s Teutonic thrash and Venom-esque extremity. Harmonies are used sparingly, mainly employed to accentuate some rather eerie moments, particularly when they slow things down from an all-out Marduk-like blitzkrieg. There is an almost mind-fucking, psychedelia that permeates the album’s nine tracks, due to both the sheer ferocity of the compositions, and the shrill production that drills into your skull like a swarm of microscopic knives, each one slicing away at the thin veneer of your sanity. [8]
MESSIAH PARATROOPS – LEGIONS OF TOMORROW (INVERSE RECORDS)
Sometimes, just sometimes, you come across an absolute gem of an album that changes everything. Forming in 1989, this Finnish band has been inactive since 1994, having released only one EP in ’93 before disappearing. Legions Of Tomorrow is nine tracks of perfect old-school death metal that recalls the swampy, mid-paced murk of early Obituary and the 90s Florida scene, as well as the chainsaw buzz of early Swedish death metal. The overall vibe I get from this album is not dissimilar to Disincarnate‘s Dreams Of The Carrion Kind, particularly the cranium-gouging, memorable riffage found on the track ‘Bloodlust’. This is a must for old-school DM lovers. [9.5]