Tuesday's Metal Releases

3 - Revisions (Metal Blade)
36 Crazyfists - Underneath A Northern Sky DVD (Ferret)
The Abominable Iron Sloth – Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Heaviness (Blackmarket Activities)
Agathodaimon - Phoenix (E1)
Atreyu - Congregation Of The Damned (Hollywood)
Between The Buried And Me - The Great Misdirect (Victory)
Bride - Tsar Bomba (Retroactive)
Dir En Grey - Average Blasphemy DVD (The End)
Graveworm - Diabolical Figures (E1)
Hackneyed - Burn After Reaping (E1)
Halford - III: Winter Songs (Metal God)
Ideamen - May You Live In Interesting Times (Rotten)
Pelican - What We All Come To Need (Southern Lord)
The Red Chord - Fed Through The Teeth Machine (Metal Blade)
The Red Shore - Unconsecrated Special Edition (Rise)
Saviours - Accelerated Living (Kemado)
Suffocation - Live In Quebec City (Relapse)
Theatre Of Tragedy - Forever Is The World (AFM)
Transatlantic - The Whirlwind (Metal Blade)
Vreid - Milorg (Indie)
WASP - Babylon (Demolition)
Winger - Karma (Frontiers)
Whiplash - Unborn Again (Pulverized Records)

THOUGHTS: It may not be the best album of the week, but it is pretty awesome to see Vreid  releasing some new songs. Vreid formed from the remains of the folk-ish black metal band, Windir  (remember them?), after Windir's frontman, Valfar froze to death walking about somewhere in the woods of Norway.   The new stuff sound a bit thrashier than than the old, but it's pretty basic black metal.

Halford's  new album III is interesting purely for the fact that it's an album of classic and uber-traditional
Christmas songs like 'Oh Come Oh Come Emanuel'.  The songs are obviously metal-fied.

Whiplash are legends.... if you are from New Jersey, like local bands, and obsessively listen to thrash.  So far what I have heard from Unborn Again sounds pretty old school.  In fact, I have been seeing a lot of older thrash bands pop up again, and a ton of younger bands with that same old school thrash sound.  It seemed like maybe 5 years ago this rebirth happened with power metal, maybe it's thrashs' turn...?

Other mentions:
WASP - Believe it or not, the new music is good great.  Seriously, even with all of Blackie Lawless's recent vocal problems, WASP seems to be goin' strong.
The Red Chord - Not the best from the Red Chord, but it could be the heaviest and fastest.
Pelican  - Wow....... this is a first for Pelican.  What We All Come To Need actually has vocals on the last track, 'Final Breath'.  In general this whole album seems a lot more palatable to me than their back catalog of albums that are heard to tell apart.  (Hell, it's even hard to tell where one song and and one begins most of the time).