Browsing Tag

Guitar-Driven

‘Beneath a Burning Sky’ cracks open crystalline catharsis and visceral vindication in Course of Ruin’s raw melodic punk return

Posted on 19 December 2025

After a quarter of a century hiatus, the Cali-based catalysts of alt-punk melodicism, Course of Ruin, return with Beneath a Burning Sky, the opening track of their new EP, The Stonington Project. It lands like a time capsule breaking open through your speakers, flinging you straight back into the visceralism of emotion-driven rhythmic tension.

The production lets the angular high guitar notes ring out as crystalline catharsis while the gnarled momentum of the rhythm section pummels its way through the distortion. Beneath a Burning Sky becomes an expansively gratifying release, the kind that hits the right spot as the scoured-with-vindication vocals chameleonically shift through aggression and harmony, stitching their own volatile sermon into the mix.

Formed in California in the mid-90s, the band has spun through several incarnations before finding its final line-up with Joey Adkins, Dave Mraz, Jacob Masciave and Chris Jones, a set of players who built their name on fast tempos, tasty riffs and songs written at the brink of combustion. Their twenty-five-year break has not blunted their instinct for intricacy; Beneath a Burning Sky holds some of the most arresting instrumental hooks I have heard this year.

The savant-esque atmosphere, the euphoria, and the sheer furore coursing through the release all serve as a reminder of why so many people gravitated towards this corner of punk and hard post-rock. The high-octane catharsis of their synthesis carries the weight of history without leaning on it; Course of Ruin sounds as authentic as it gets while burning at the emotional temperatures that defined their early years. If NOFX, The Flatliners and Rise Against are still on your playlists, Course of Ruin should be too.

Beneath a Burning Sky is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Avantide – Sleep It Off: oceanically woozy indie art rock

Posted on 16 December 2025

Avantide deliver the rare capacity to melodically unfray your nerves while sating even the most voracious appetite for indie art rock aesthetics in Sleep It Off, a track that moves as the mellifluous, oceanically woozy equivalent to hitting the ground running with their LP Keep Running. Formed in Bismarck by down-to-earth music fans who met in a record shop and built a band from shared obsessions, they turned their rise into a slow-burn trail of shows, collaborations and studio hours that shaped the sonic tides they steer through now. Sleep It Off embodies that rhythmic sublimity; the Strokes-y twitch of nostalgia dissolves into cascades of timbre carved from artsy garage rock licks that gently warp the air around them.

The semi-lucid sentimentality of the definitively indie vocals hushes reverie into the kind of recognition you yearn for, a tender understanding and carressive caring that sits beside your idiosyncrasies and self-destructive tendencies without flinching. It is a track for the lovers who wear their hearts on their sleeves next to the culture that keeps them stitched together. Their record shop spawning starts to make all the sense here. To boot, few bands that take influence from the likes of Pavement reach this affectingly experimental place, affirming Avantide as a dying breed that I am going to be inseparable from this LP until the summer.

For this LP, Avantide shaped their material through a process rooted in friendship and persistence, from acoustic skeletons in Mandan rehearsal rooms to full-band arrangements refined alongside engineer Tyler Pilot at Red Dot Recording. Their LP Keep Running has so far earned praise from The Pentatonic and Obscure Sound while landing them shows with Dakotah Faye, The MoonCats and Stephen Steinbrink.

Sleep It Off is now available on all major streaming platforms, including Spotify. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Black Halo carried ancient-weighted progressive folk pop rock into ‘In Death I Linger On’

Posted on 11 December 2025
Black Halo

Black Halo’s moniker instantly leaves you with the impression that you’re about to be greeted by an artist who thrives on the uncharted intersections of emotive duality, and In Death I Linger On proves that impression right from the first chilling breath of sound.

Through the torrid yet calming arrangement, urgent yet measured in its pacing, Black Halo folded a meditation on mortality into a lattice of intricate fingerpicked notes that wrap themselves around stormy tension. The track sits comfortably in progressive folk pop rock, although it also touches the spiritual post-rock sphere with a natural ease, carrying a timeless sense of ancient wisdom as it moves. With quasi-operatic vocals reminiscent of the theatricality found in Nightwish and Within Temptation, fused with Euro folk motifs and Latin guitars, Black Halo showed a steady hand in pulling visceralism to the surface through confessional performance rather than forceful theatrics. It’s the kind of sound that sinks its teeth in slowly, then refuses to loosen its hold.

Behind that intensity sits a duo who have weathered enough turbulence to pour lived truth into their work without posturing. The themes they explore in their wider discography echo the same emotional excavation that shaped their debut album, Utopia, a concept-driven piece built around troubled characters and the demons that chase them.

Years ago, guitarist Randy Ellefson stepped away entirely after a long cycle of vocalists dropping out and delaying the record. Time passed before he picked it back up, reconnecting with Chase Breedlove, whose recovery paved the way for the album’s completion. The partnership returned renewed, shaped by perseverance, and that persistence hums beneath the surface of In Death I Linger On, where mortality, reflection and the need for release meet in a single strike.

In Death I Linger On is now available on all major streaming platforms via this link.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Bleak resurrected 31-year-old riffs with unholy volition in ‘The Wave’

Posted on 18 August 2025

After incubating their sonic brainchild for 31 years, Bleak exhibited themselves as the true tempests of hard-hitting, straight-cut rock with The Wave. There’s no desperation for reinvention, no cloying clinging to past epochs, only the timeless resolve of tumultuous rhythmic augmentation and precision.

With brief echoes of Foo Fighters in the anthemics, Guns N’ Roses in the magnetism of the atmospheric production, and the volition of Metallica, The Wave carries influence like flotsam while crashing onto the shores of your speakers with unfeigned originality. It is easily the most pit-worthy rock single of 2025 so far.

The chord progressions surge instead of flow, each strike loaded with an urgency sharpened over decades. Vocals reach the epitome of hell-bent, yet paradoxically keep command of restraint with an unholy precision by any pious figure’s measure. This is the sound of a band that has been through dissolution, resurrection, and the kind of slow-burning evolution that scorches off all pretence.

Written in 1994 and released in 2025, The Wave was forged from a vault of riffs cracked open by frontman Caleb Daniel Lit and original guitarist Warden after 16 years away from the spotlight. Now rebuilt from the bones with a sharpened lineup, Bleak channel their history into a sonic collision of ’90s grit, Middle Eastern colour, and Seattle-born intensity, proving that time can deepen impact rather than dilute it.

The Wave is now available on all major streaming platforms, including YouTube.


Review by Amelia Vandergast

WD-HAN Shattered Monochromatic Monotony with Riotous Alt-Rock in ‘Technicolour’

Posted on 31 July 2025

With WD-HAN’s latest single, Technicolour, a riot of riff-painted colour is poured into the dreary monotony of monochromatic minds. The track rips through the constraints of black and white thinking, compelling the world to swap their dim views for the blaze of high-octane alt-rock is charting its own path through the annals of rock history (in the making).

While critics love to hold up names like Joan Jett as the pinnacle of female-fronted rock, the delivery in Technicolour is atomic enough that heads will want to turn away from immortalising perennial icons and towards new names tearing through the scene. It’s enough to make you consider that perhaps the saying ought to be edited to hell hath no fury like a woman sick of achromatic mediocrity, because honestly, it makes RATM sound weak.

In this release, the Tampa-based trailblazers, who have never been shy of pouring their soul into each performance, bring together the slithering guitar work of rock legends and fuse it with the immediacy of modern alt-pioneers. The single is driven by bluesy guitar lines, thunderous drums, and gritty vocals, proving that WD-HAN’s sonic signature is made for blasting through speakers and feeling life rush back in vivid colour.

Technicolour is now available on all major streaming platforms. Find your preferred way to listen via this link. 

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Ryan Snyder – Some Things Never Change: A Super-Charged Blast of High-Octane Rock

Posted on 18 January 2020

Whatever your sexual orientation, I can guarantee that you’re going to find the riffs in Nashville-based artist Ryan Snyder’s latest single “Some Things Never Change” more than a little bit sexy.

The feisty ode to Rock is a high-octane blast of pure rhythmic wonder. But it isn’t through intensity or speed where Ryan Snyder sets themselves apart (although there’s a lot of that too). It’s how their eclectic array of influences find their way into their sound.  Within Some Things Never Change, you’ll find the mesmerism of Blues along with combined with reminiscences of the likes of Guns n’ Roses, Buckcherry, and Led Zeppelin.

Even if you’ve been plugged into a constant stream of Rock music since the 70s, Ryan Snyder will still give you plenty to get excited about. It’s discovering artists like this that makes you realise just how skewed lists of ‘top guitarists’ truly must be.

You can check out Ryan Snyder’s single Some Things Never Change for yourselves by heading over to YouTube now.

Review by Amelia Vandergast

Christine XP – Memory Jeans: Guitar-Driven Teen-Pop

Posted on 29 December 2019

Christine XP is drifting through the difficulties of a modern-day teenager with her new song “Memory Jeans”.

Christine XP seems like a pretty likable presence. From her photo shoots in which she always showcases her warm smile to her bio on her Spotify page , everything about her is charged with a genuinely positive load. She plays the guitar; she gracefully turns her wishes, thoughts, and demons into lyrics. And she sings about those things, in a way that you can almost picture her not losing her smile while recording them, which is a precious thought.

“Memory Jeans” is a song the spine of which is some plain guitar chords, enriched by various pop music sounds. Overall the production is simple and down to earth. Perhaps Christine’s aim here is to introduce herself to the world, in a not so splurging way.

A somewhat large number of psychologists and behavioral scholars agree on the notion that being a teenager is the toughest period in a person’s life. Christine XP is a teenager singing about all kinds of hardship that a fair portion of her contemporaries can find themselves fluently relating to. Listen to her sing about these things here

Review by Nektarios Oikonomakis