As ever, frontman niVek ohGr manages to make his vocals just as laceratingly intense as the saturated distortion of the electronics, while the lyrics are as angry as they are eloquent.

In the end, Ultraviolet’s finest moments occur when Kylesa venture farthest from their proven strengths and step into the unknown.

Josh Homme and fellow Queens Troy Van Leeuwen, Dean Fertita, and Michael Shuman have gotten back on beam for the band’s first album in six years, apparently rediscovering the joys of creating robotic, riff-oriented hard-rock songs.

Suffice it to say, Tears on Tape is a sentimentally sweet, sonically stunning, and beautifully packaged album.

[Drowning Pool have] managed to produce consistently killer albums with an unmistakable sound. This continues with album No. 5.... The weakest songs here are the singles.

Ultimately these well-place segues are but a welcome respite from the pummeling power of the riff.

The Color Morale never strays too far from the tried-and-true tropes of their subgenre on full-length No. 3, but still manages to craft tunes that are passionate and memorable.

The band’s primary objective is to lift listeners off their feet and keep them floating, with only occasional handholds for stability.

It’s weird, it’s creepy, it’s unstable, but man, there’s art here, something that few bands can boast.

OWTH aren’t covering ground that Against Me! or the Bouncing Souls haven’t already tread in the past, but there’s a palpable passion in frontman Ryan Young’s voice that keeps these songs sounding inspired for the duration of the record.

With this latest (featuring the return of New Found Glory’s Chad Gilbert on vocals), they prove it all still works in a big way, a sign that they’ve been doing it right all along.

While spirited in their performance, this brutal quartet lack the dynamism and versatility of label-mates Dying Fetus.

[The album] is their best in years, hitting upon just the right combination of melody, thrash, and hooks.

They sound utterly repellant, and it suits them perfectly.

Warbeast impresses with their modern thrash aesthetics, but Anselmo's contribution is the selling point to War of the Gargantuas.

This is music at a slow simmer, not a fast boil, and as such, takes time and patience to absorb. But the passion and intensity is undeniable.

It's a surprising, thoroughly consistent return-to-form, and it makes Oddfellows the first contender for hard-rock album of the year.

Tightly coiled shredfests like "Cognitive Suicide" and "Devil's Creek" demonstrate how much they've grown up (without mellowing out) since their early-'90s skate-rat days.

The result: a crushing musical experience easily among the year's best extreme-metal records.

While the record packs the occasional wallop, it loses steam in quieter moments ("Saving Grace") that sacrifice depth and density for pop hooks, due in part to predictable song structures.

The best odds and sods collected here are those on which they stray from relentless shouting.

Although none of its 13 tracks hit as hard as the early '80s, "mash"-pit ragers that made them famous, they still sound vital on the Rasta-praising punk pummeler "Popcorn" and the 88-second frenzy "Yes I."

Aficionados will love picking out the differences between these early takes and the final album mixes.

Too bad that, even at its best, this Atlas maps well-trodden ground.

What drives the music is the tightly synched interplay between drums and guitars, and that, particularly as sharpened by Wes Hauch's surgically precise lead work.

Frontman Scott Lucas tackles the polarized political scene in crunchy riff-rock jams full of Windy City references; in "Blue Line," a ride on public transit inspires thoughts on how "it's getting hard to realize a sense of self in other eyes." Heaviness (in both senses) abounds.

British Lion might surprise longtime Ed Heads in that it's more redolent of the sort of '80s hard-rock bands who dominated the radio waves when Maiden couldn't, like Dokken and even Whitesnake.

Unfortunately, every song ends up sounding too similar, even as the band breaks, as always, from black metal's norms.