Roch
Lightweight Bi-Polar Mania
H.Q. The Change Factory
Street: 07.02.2010
Roch = Cee-Lo + Outkast + P.O.S.
In hip hop today, to make a solo album that’s consistently awesome requires something special.  You have to be an amazingly talented producer (RJD2), a soulful vocal virtuoso (Cee-Lo), or one damn fine lyricist  (Jay-Z).  Roch’s first solo effort has some pretty solid beats produced by some talented musicians, and the rest is up to him.  Both the singing and rhyming on this record, while showing great versatility, may have stretched this artist too thin.  The songs are generally dark with trip-hoppy, almost NIN-esque beats and heavy, deep synth and gritty, soulful crooning.  I found myself wishing for more raps rather than more singing, though.  When he really flows like on “Hard Times” and “On Everything Lude,” Roch nails it with nice rhythms and some great punchlines.  Some, like “A Beautiful Curse,” even had me almost humming along.  But overall, the singing and heavy bass cause this record to blend together.  All the choruses seem to have similar melodies and I’d like to see him branch out.  While the whole album did grow on me, nothing ended up addictively listenable.  –Rio Connelly

Satan’s Host
By The Hands of the Devil
Moribund
Street: 05.03
Satan’s Host = Mercyful Fate + Nevermore + Mayhem
Straight-up evil heavy metal – black metal – thrash metal? You want it all? You’ve got it with Satan’s Host’s By The Hands of the Devil, this Denver, Colorado, band’s eighth studio album. The album is a reunion of sorts—Satan’s Host has been trouncing out black/death/thrash albums since 2000, but back in ’86, they released their debut with Leviathan Thirsen, otherwise known as Harry “The Tyrant” Conklin, who went on to see fame in Jag Panzer. Be it known, this album is not all about Conklin returning, no matter how great his vocal feat on this record is, all artists associated in the album propel this album to lofty heights. Picture some raging black metal tune inspiring all the violence and darkness your black heart desires, but instead of a scowl, you have high falsetto vocals—once the first track hits, it makes things deemed “epic” theses days look like a tiny crumb in comparison to the heavy blasting fun this record delivers. It kicks like a mule and fights like a wolverine injected with steroids. This is the epitome of classic heavy metal styles meeting modern production and I can’t stop listening. –Bryer Wharton

Scar Symmetry
The Unseen Empire
Nuclear Blast
Street: 05.17
Scar Symmetry = Soilwork + In Flames + Nightingale
Ah, melo-death metal—a term used to describe modernized melodic death metal, no—not the stuff from the early 90s that At The Gates and In Flames started, which became not only a scene revolution in Gothenburg, Sweden, but all over the world. If you have no taste for melo-death, then you have never listened to bands like Scar Symmetry or the much-touted band they “supposedly” ripped off, Soilwork. There’s something about catchy melodies with just as catchy vocal and guitar hooks that are hard to resist, especially for fans of more accessible, less-raw sounding metal. The production for The Unseen Empire is near pristine and mostly, the album sticks to the meat n’ potatoes of melo-death here; there are some keys and intermitted pop in from time to time, but the guitars crunch as much as they fly into nicely done melodic work. The two vocalists, clean and harsh, work off each other’s strengths. This is a nice return to the sound of Scar Symmetry’s pinnacle album, Holographic Universe: clean, heavy, and melodic, and will stick in your head long after the album’s done. Fans of modern metal, apply to The Unseen Empire. –Bryer Wharton

Screens
Dead House
What Delicate Recordings
Street: 05.17
Screens = Local Natives + Harlem Shakes + early Modest Mouse + Menomena
It’s hard to make general statements about Screens. They have a different sound from song to song, but one thing they have in common is that they’re all pretty strange. Musically, they often resemble modern indie-rock bands like Local Natives and Menomena, only instead of singing over the material, vocalist Breck Brunson usually chooses to scream and holler through a lot of reverb and sometimes fuzzy distortion. When his performance is melodic, it resembles Geoff Rickly of Thursday a little bit. Portions of the album are spent in arrhythmic noise sessions that build tension before the next rambunctious rock song or synth-driven dance track. Their experimentations aren’t self-gratifying nonsense, though. Every second of this album is genuinely enjoyable to listen to, which is rare for bands trying to do something bizarre and loud. –CG