Extreme metal desperately needs bands like Blackbraid. There are so many bands starting out or stumbling out of their infancy that all end up sounding, if not the same, pretty damn close to it. There are only so many new ways you can do brutal death metal until it gets repetitive, for instance. That’s not…
Plenty of toxins have done plenty of damage to the world but, for my money, no toxin has been more damaging to the face of the Earth and the cause of humanity than the toxin of organized religion. If you’re a thinking adult, you really shouldn’t need too many examples to back this up but…
While 2022 has seen the start of a lot of promising metal careers, it also comes with the end of one. Root, the legendary black metal band from the Czech Republic, announced this year that they would be retiring from live performance and studio recordings after the release of their 11th and final LP due to…
Phil Hall is not a man given to downtime. Whether it’s putting together thrash classics (thrashics, if you will) with Municipal Waste, weed hazed death metal with Cannabis Corpse, or political-tinged crossover with Iron Reagan, Landphil can usually be found working on something music related. With so many albums across so many genres, you could be…
Goatwhore is a band that cares as much about what the mainstream thinks as can be expected from a band that named itself Goatwhore. For the past 25 years, vocalist L. Ben Falgoust II and guitarist/vocalist Sammy Duet, along with a variety of skilled drummers and bass players, have been making their own unique brand…
To say that life is hard for most people is a bit of an understatement. One obvious tool people use to help cope with their problems is art, whether as an artist or a devotee. Art in its various forms such as music, movies, or books can help people get through life. As far as…
There doesn’t seem to be a more readymade target or subject of discussion for metal musicians than religion. By their very nature, our religious institutions seek to control individuals and get them to conform to their way of thinking and their beliefs. If you know anything north of nothing about metalheads, conformity really isn’t our…
Combining great things can, when done right, lead to a wholly new experience out of the synthesis of multiple elements. Deathgrind, blackened thrash, slam…these all take pieces of different genres’ identities and meld them together to create something that is, hopefully, the best of both worlds. When everything has been done before, mashing your favorites up…
There’s something to be said for music that reflects the time it was recorded in. It’s more than readily apparent that, unfortunately, the current epoch isn’t the most optimistic of eras. Between the degradation of the natural world and the constant state of war the world of mankind feels compelled to never leave, chipper tunes…
Atmospheric black metal bands tend to be a dime a dozen. For every genuinely exciting release, there are five or six more littering release days that sound frustratingly similar. I’ve heard a couple this year already that just didn’t excite me in the least or do enough to differentiate themselves from other bands out there…