W.E.B., Darkness Alive (Metal Blade Records)
Oh boy, could there be anything more important than making symphonic metal even more “extreme?” That’s what this Athens, Greece-based fivesome is doing, plastering synth-crafted orchestral maneuverings with Cookie Monster vocals from (apparently) a guy and a girl who’re both equally capable of pulling off an exquisite twin-punch karaoke of Bathory and Cannibal Corpse at a kid’s birthday party. This is a live set, just so you know, and thankfully the synthesizer making all the super-epic symphonic sounds didn’t melt down to ruin everyone’s vibe; essentially it’s a barrage of slightly out-of-date thrash metal ravings with bursts of faux-John Williams soundtracking doing epic things here and there. I was promised that “Into Hell Fire We Burn” has a chorus that “will make you want to sing along,” but there’s no melody to it, just demonic chanting over some bonk-bonk-bonk power chords, occasionally interrupted by [place name of literally any thrash band here] hamster-wheel shredding. And people are worried about AI barfing out hilariously disposable music (eyeroll). C —Eric W. Saeger
genCab, “Open Graves” (Metropolis Records)
I can’t come up with a single reason why any self-respecting goth shouldn’t give this dark-techno trio’s new extended single a listen. The driving force behind it is Bucks County, Pennsylvania’s (fine, he obviously wants me to say he’s a Philadelphia-based act, so whatever) own Dave Dutton, a big Elden Ring player who sure loves him some Trent Reznor, at least the harder, more rock-based, Gravity Kills-type stuff. He’s working his way up the ladder, having spent some time in Los Angeles working on various projects and refining his art, which required getting a new computer when his old one kept running out of memory when he was putting tunes together. With regard to the music, yeah, we’re definitely in Trent territory, but he’s an ’80s kid who’s obviously been exposed to tons of synthpop and has a decent sense of song structure; the tune does slap pretty hard in the manner of KMFDM but with much less sampling. Plus he likes Wumpscut, which earned him my rubber stamp from the jump. A —Eric W. Saeger
PLAYLIST
• OMG no way, it’s a new year, are we even still standing, holy crow. Jan. 2 is the first new-CD-Friday of 2026, so, as we all try to remember to date our work-email messages with 2026 instead of 2025, it’s a good idea to think about what monstrosities are heading music’s way in the coming — you know, year. Most importantly, it will be a year in which music turns to artificial intelligence (AI) to produce new hit songs and full albums, and many are already complaining about the situation, declaring it somehow bad or “wrong.” In an interview with the Jacobin podcast, overexposed nincompoop and registered mediocre bass player Anthony Fantano, aka “Needle Drop,” professed concern that the “owners” (corporations like Disney and such) of machine-generated music will issue licenses to platforms like Spotify so that said platforms will have the right to use computer-generated voices and songwriting styles at will (which I’m sure will lead to a period when people start rejecting anything AI-generated). As well, like most people who don’t get the point of something, Fantano dismissed last year’s AI-generated song “Walk My Walk” (by the fictitious country-rock artist Breaking Rust, the creation of Aubierre Rivaldo Taylor, a semi-anonymous, Burial-like content creator) as having “not actually broken big” because the tune “only” reached No. 1 on Billboard’s Country Digital Song Sales chart, a chart that would be “very easy” for bots to mess with. I’ll let you finish your Fritos while you think about how stupid that is (hint: YouTube used to — and probably still does — count views of commercials for Lady Gaga’s singles as actual listens, and we’ve all seen bot-like behavior in YouTube comments sections for disposable divas like Sabrina Carpenter), but in the meantime, yes, the song was digitally created, which Fantano knew, so he knew automatically to write it off as “terrible” and “the most reductive parody of a popular genre you could imagine.” Personally, I’d say T Bone Burnett had already cornered that particular market (the song has a mud-blues sound a la Howlin’ Wolf), but it’s not any more “reductive” or redundant than Burnett’s depleted soil output, especially when he was trying to barf out as much music as he could to capitalize on his Aughts-era period of popularity. So no, we could argue these points all day, but the fact is that AI is coming to replace a lot of workers, including debatably original artists, but what I’m more concerned about is the fact that established rock stars are definitely going to deploy AI themselves to save time producing albums. But that might actually be good in some ways: Lady Gaga ran out of ideas after The Fame Monster, so why wouldn’t she program a robot to produce “something that Cher would sing but that would appeal to fans of Lorde” instead of stealing directly from Madonna like she did on “Born This Way?” Interesting times, eh?
• Devon Allman is the son of Greg Allman, so he’s automatically relevant and I’ll just leave it at that rather than whine about nepo babies again. His new album, Nightvision, is said to be an “alt-rock” album, but it’s actually a prog-rock album, going by advance single “Dead Sea Scrolls,” which is like boring-era Rush but with better guitar shredding.
• Paleface Swiss is a “beatdown hardcore” band from Switzerland with a new EP titled The Wilted. Basically like Fields Of The Nephilim meets Killing Time, it’s OK.
• We’ll wrap it up with Los Angeles-based indie-folk singer Miya Folick, whose new album Erotica Veronica reminds me of Oceanlab and Lisa Loeb: gentle, waifish singing over ambient niceness and strummy ’90s-pop that don’t mix all that well together. —Eric W. Saeger
Featured Photo: W.E.B., Darkness Alive and genCab, “Open Graves”
