The Shape of American Metal to Come?

Grayson Currin wrote an interesting review of the Blut Aus Nord album and had this to say about the state of American metal:

"One of the year's biggest threads in heavy music has centered on the loose enclave of American metal bands reshaping black metal and, in turn, introducing it to fresh faces. From Liturgy and Locrian to Horseback and Atlas Moth, they've each manipulated the decades-old, forever-infamous strain in their own identifiable ways. Whatever your views on Hunter Hunt-Hendrix's verbosity or Krallice's kinetic cascades, it's inarguable that they've all passed the sounds of corpsepaint and battle axes to bigger, more generalized crowds not overly concerned with someone's respective KVLT credentials. One reason for this, of course, is that these bands generally look and talk mostly like your average rock dudes; they give interviews, tour, and generally wear band T-shirts and tattered jeans. They're not the first North Americans to mutate black metal, neither by a long shot nor by a decade, but they are distinctly identifiable people manipulating a sound that, compared to the indie mainstream, feels exotic and perhaps a tad dangerous." More here.