Mickey Spillane was the undisputed master of tough hard-boiled crime fiction with prose as a purple as a strangled child’s face. Oliver Longden pulls on his trenchcoat and steps out in the murky darkness of the midnight city looking for the bastards who gut shot his partner. Along the way he finds time to read Complex 90, the latest posthumous release from Spillane and Max Allan Collins.
Snow White’s Poison Bite have a very silly name, but can they redeem themselves by producing an album of top quality horror rock? No. No they can’t, because they are awful.
Oliver Longden trawls through the darker, danker, more miserable climes of the OneMetal review queue to bring you this round-up of releases by doom metallers A Tree of Signs, Alunah, Clamfight, XII Boar and Pombagira.
Belgian sextet Saille set the standard for black metal in 2013 with their sophomore album ‘Ritu’.
There’s hardly a shortage of black metal bands drawing on Viking and pagan imagery. Can Bornholm do enough to stand out in an increasingly crowded genre? Oliver Longden finds out.
Oliver Longden is a hard man to please but 40 minutes of momumentally pretentious Belgian sludge with transcendent religious overtones could be exactly what the doctor ordered. AMENRA’s ‘Mass V’ is subjected to scrutiny within.
De Magia Veterum specialise in opaque and challenging black metal but does The Deification expand your musical horizons or sit sullenly on the musical naughty step? Oliver Longden tries and fails to find a definitive answer.
With the seventies revival going on everywhere there’s plenty of mileage in a record that blends heavy metal, seventies rock and old school punk. Oliver Longden investigates ‘The Unholy’, the debut album from Doom’s Day in an effort to find out if this is one look backwards too far.
Acid Witch probably hold the record for most witch references on a single album. Witchtanic Hellucinations may be knee-deep in puns, but is their blend of death metal and stoner doom anything more than a novelty? Oliver Longden finds out.
Oliver Longden traverses the ambient climes of ambient/drone act Darsombra’s latest release, ‘Climax Community’.
Sludge/doom/death metallers Dragged Into Sunlight’s debut record managed the Herculean feat of earning Oliver Longden’s approval – can the follow-up repeat the trick? Find out within.
Horror metal maestro Rob Zombie has a new movie out in 2013. It’s called The Lords of Salem and the official trailer has just been released. Will this movie be a return to form for a director who has struggled in recent years?
The Final Destination franchise has raked in millions of dollars over a five-film run by making films in which people die in bizarre accidents at the behest of the grim reaper. It’s been a huge success but are the films themselves any good? Oliver Longden leaves a power tool running in the background as he takes you on a tour of the Final Destination films.
Oliver Longden loses himself in ‘Inhibition’, the debut album by Gallic post-black metal solo artist Decline of the I.
Oliver Longden takes a long hard look at Nazi Death Tales, a new horror anthology film from the makers of Bordello Death Tales, and discovers it contains fewer Nazi zombies than you might have expected. Does this make him throw all his toys out of the pram?
Aside from being the superhero franchise that even snooty movie critics reckon it’s OK to like, Batman has also featured in many videogames including the wildly successful Arkham Asylum series. Oliver Longden wouldn’t know about that because he fears new things. Join him as he takes a look at the very first game to feature the caped crusader, released in 1986 for the ZX Spectrum and simply titled Batman.
Oliver Longden dives into the murk and mire of blackened drone artists Sutekh Hexen’s latest outpouring of bile, Larvae. Naturally, he bloody loves it.
The Other are becoming the elder statesmen of second generation horrorpunk with their fifth album. Oliver Longden paints a skull on his face and tweaks his hair into a quiff before climbing into a coffin to review ‘The Devil You Know’.
Oliver Longden dons his trench coat and fedora and hits the mean streets of the city in search of the answer to a question that burns like a shot of cheap whiskey in his gut: is Lady, Go Die actually any good or was the unfinished Mickey Spillane novel left unfinished for a reason?
Having tackled the horrors of the Leprechaun franchise, Oliver Longden turns his attention to the long-in-the-tooth Child’s Play movies.
Oliver Longden was raised in the deepest wilds of Yorkshire which explains why he hates other humans with every fibre of his being. He has been involved with music, gaming, roleplaying, wrestling, comics, horror movies and the like for twenty years and people have more or less given up on waiting for him to grow up and do something useful with his life. He resides in misanthropic obscurity in Cambridge where he spends most of his time studying psychology and trying to explain to people why they don't in fact like the things that they claim to like. He tried to vote for Skynet at the last General Election. He likes cats.
Joined: May 24th, 2010