Recent Listening: Blood Feud, Cauldron, Horrizon

Three of the albums I've been listening to recently that are good enough to provide entertainment, but which don't really inspire me to sit down and write a full review. I'm toying with making this a regular feature, since it seems that most of the records I've listened to recently have elicited this basic response.

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Blood Feud are an Icelandic band who play a brand of death-infused thrash metal. They've been around for a few years, but it was not until this summer that they released their first full-length album, Hiding Behind the Light.  The music is relatively straight-forward, and I'm not totally sure how I feel about the vocals. But the songs are solidly constructed, and the album provides a fairly enjoyable listening experience.

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Cauldron are a traditional heavy metal outfit based out of Toronto. Last month they released their third full-length, Tomorrow's Lost.  It's relatively mild as modern metal goes, with clean vocals and a sound rooted in the 1970s. Not the strongest example on the market of a new band taking this older approach, but it's a moderately entertaining record.

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Horrizon, a melodic death metal band from Germany, released their debut Time For Revenge  back in April. It's one of those records that I like the most during its mellower moments, since I think they do the soft, beautiful passages much better than they do the intense metal end of things. Part of that is the strange and slightly off-putting vocals, but part of it is that those soft intros and interludes just sound really good.