Talk to anyone deeply into extreme metal for long enough and you’ll walk away with a list of new bands to check out and a full playlist of stuff you’ve missed or haven’t gotten around to yet. Extreme metal fandom, and music fandom in general, is a mapping diagram of bands leading you to other…
Let’s face it, extreme metal is not a genre for the faint of heart. Between the ravenously hungry living dead, the slaughter of nuns, and the blazing fires of Hell, extreme metal is something that you don’t get into if you’re wired like everyone else. If you want to play it safe with music that…
Sadly, the days of the video store are gone. Picking out a movie for the night doesn’t entail walking through row after row of VHS or DVD cases and picking out not only what appeals the most but what’s actually in stock. Now, rather than the tactile experience of wandering through aisles with other movie fans,…
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…
Chicago has produced so many musical legends in its storied history that just compiling a list of them would end up looking like a phonebook (remember those, kids?). It doesn’t matter if you are talking about hip hop, blues, punk, rock, singer-songwriter, or metal, Chicago has made its mark on the musical landscape of whatever…
A pharmacist, by definition, dispenses medicines that, in theory, are meant to make you feel better. If something is wrong inside you, something that needs medical attention, you’re going to need a pharmacist somewhere along the line to give you some form of medicinal help. But what about those of us who have more of…
When everything has been said and done, by a conservative estimate, around a billion times by now, it truly takes something out of left field to feel original. Combining death metal with thrash and throwing in banjos, saloon piano, and hand drums sounds like a recipe for either disaster or something wholly original. Pairing the…
It’s no surprise that musicians put a ton of themselves into their work. Just the act of creating is, in and of itself, an incredibly intimate process of putting something of yourself into your art that, you hope, will deeply affect its particular audience in some way. How much of yourself you put into that work…
Whether you believe in the divinity of the man that the Romans supposedly nailed to a tree all those years ago or not, there is nothing at Golgotha. The hill where the man Jesus is supposed to have been crucified is, more or less, just a hill. What is left behind is either a testament to…
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…