80s Essentials – Volume Seven
Welcome to volume seven of the Most Essential Albums of the Eighties. Previous volumes are available here. This week’s edition is short on big names, highlighting the fact that second-tier and lesser-known bands are still capable …
5Q5A – Slomatics
Belfast’s Slomatics are the Masters & Johnson of the wumgasm. They know this stuff forwards, backwards, slower, and lower. BF-ORs? Uh, yeah dude, BF-ORs. Enormous ones, in fact. The kind forcing you to circle the …
5Q5A – Tengger Cavalry
What do you have in common with a successful Chinese graphic designer and composer for CCTV? You both love metal. If the two of you are wires, metal is the filament. And, the burst of …
80s Essentials – Volume Six
Welcome to part six of The Most Essential Albums of the Eighties. Previous volumes are available here. This week’s edition is another smorgasbord of metal styles, featuring classic doom, ground-breaking death metal, foundational Norwegian black …
The Last Rites’ Podcast – Featuring Mike Scalzi Of Slough Feg
Oh, we knew you missed the sound of writers talking about music. That plucked and flicked eyelash was totally for us. Screaming “POD RITES!” three times into the mirror? That too. How could we not …
5Q5A – Sacrificial Blood
New Jersey’s death/thrash warriors, Sacrificial Blood, are skilled in the martial arts of the elders. It’s grown-people stuff. The trio’s fighting form is a little dustier, a little more Occam’s Razor than wiz-bang modern borkers …
80s Essentials – The Hair Metal Daze: Sleeze N’ Cheez
Hair metal: The most-mocked subset of 80s heaviness. Much of it barely qualifies as metal, occupying space more accurately described as hard rock, but its best records appropriate metallic riffage and attitude enough to warrant …
5Q5A – Mantar – Rawest Display of Power
Mantar. MANTAR. It evokes a VO shout from a B-flick trailer. HE COMES IN THE NIGHT. MANTAR. Wearing a congratulatory smirk, you slide over and hit up “Spit” on the ol’ Bandcamp. Out of nowhere, the German …